Old Age

I rush by, coffee in one hand, a list of books in the other; a thousand images (people?) whirl past me and my head is heavy with thoughts...why did Odysseus refuse immortality, is this a metropolis of the ethical vacuum, would it have been beter to gamble all and lost, than to have never ventured anything in the first place....

I see an old man walking ...each step an achievement, a huge expending of energy and effort: two steps forward, one step back; the curve of his back a near-perfect semi-circle, as if he were bowing before a king, in absolute isolation, alone in the universe, alone before the Alone. To focus one's attention on a single detail of his being is obscene: I must move to the universal....

I see many such old people, stumbling, shuffling through the streets, caught in their own time, their own familiar pace of things; the world passes them by, the world has passed them by. I wonder if people think the same when they see me. Close to death, they have already disappeared, are in the process of disappearing. Only they know what it is to "die before one dies". We turn our faces, avert our gaze, we must expunge these grim reminders of our mortality from our thoughts. To "think", to approach the calm seas of the universal, is a way of doing so.

Life only seems bearable to me when one succeeds in avoiding it.

But ethics must be more than an attention to particularities and contingency and less than a timeless thought; a spontaneous gesture is neither 'thought' nor 'action'... I slow down, just enough so that he doesn't think that everyone is rushing past him....he looks up and I see the piercing blue of his eyes. He smiles like a child. If old age is the closing of the circle then it meets its origin again, and that is pure innocence. I see that goodness is fragile, like a blue flower, like old age....

Thought: to describe the world from the outside-coldly, factually, mechanically, transcendantally. Or the bare details of a life, the essentials, historical being; the "person" is the cross where these intersect, he is the space and time where "beauty" and "idea" mix...

Not soon, as late as the
Approach of my ninetieth year
I felt a door opening in me
And I entered

the clarity of early morning...

Moments from yesterday
and from centuries ago,
A sword blow, the painting of eyeleashes before a mirror
of polished metal, alethal musket shot, a caravel
Saving its hull against a reef-they dwell in us
Waiting for fulfillment.

We are not angels; this is the blessing and the burden of mortality. And perhaps we should note that it is the immortals who are always "falling" in love with the mortals ( which is to say: the desire to fall into time) while it is we who hold back our hand when the golden cup of immortality is offered to us...

Let me run, let me run, and never find
(Shah Latif)

Acceptance of the ineviability of the cards that fate has dealt one is compatible with the most terrible sense of regret for the fact that things had to be the way they are; in fact, to consider the former is to have only an outward understanding of time; the human angle, which encompasses both, is of a higher order.