Cards: serene, smug, warmly coloured, often claiming to have been copied from some New England tombstone, their words of wisdom, whether they deal with growing old, being nice, or just getting the warm glow of being goodthinkful and goodfeelful, make me want to vomit.
"I have only gone into the next room....." Oh, really? Then come back and do some bl**dy work! Nonsense, you're dead.
"May I learn to accept what I cannot change........" Abortion? Euthanasia? Slavery? The Ottoman Empire? The so-called reformation? The destruction of thought by the manipulation of language? Hawker Dawker and Richard Rottenborough? Pass me the kidney basin.
"Give me the wisdom to see that....." Lies are true? God is What I would like to think He is?
"Let me be supine, unthinking, irrationally optimistic, with my head under the carpet, inhaling the dust, mice droppings, and the thoughts of Walt Whitman. Let me be proud owner of a Catholic diary, with its quotations of the week, cataclysmic apercus of such Catholic intellectual luminaries as Anais Nin." No, I think that one has not yet been printed. Give them time!
I have been getting old for quite a long time now. I have pensions, but I refuse to be called a pensioner, or a senior. I am a man and still working, thank God! Sixty years too late I am having weekly violin lessons. Saxophone and flute are too easy, and my blood pressure is too high for the trumpet.
I know, but do not accept, that I am old. I know and accept the fact that I will die relatively soon.
I am not remotely serene about it. Like any sensible man in the condemned cell, I am frantically busy.
Last May, on my birthday, when I was still teaching full-time, a colleague (and friend) walked into my class of 17 year olds, gave me a big hug (no, he is not a homosexual. Hugging between men, between women, and and between men and women is normal in Poland) and announced, "Don't worry Chris! You're not old - you were just born too early." [Collapse of stout party].
As Tennyson's Ulysses has it:
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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