'And We Fly Away'

V.S. Pritchett begins his second volume of memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), like this: 

“This is the year of my seventieth birthday, a fact that bewilders me. I find it hard to believe. I understand now the look of affront I often saw in my father’s face after this age and that I see in the faces of my contemporaries. We are affronted because, whatever we may feel, time has turned us into curiosities in some secondhand shop. We are haunted by the suspicion that the prayers we did not know we were making have been only too blatantly answered.”

 

I came of age during the Great Youth Ascendency. To be young was to be righteous. Remember the old saw about not trusting anyone over 30? I had my own variation: I would never live to see 30, so you could trust me. Thank to genes, Quinapril, friends and blind luck, I’m still around. We took so much for granted, our rightness and immortality above all. Now my smug generation routinely embarrasses me. So many have never grown up. We say silly things not out of decrepitude but a desire to sound hip and – what? Young. Of course we’re affronted. At seventy I can honestly say with Joseph Epstein:

 

“That I shall arrive at seventy without ever having golfed is one of the facts of my biography to date of which I am most proud.”

 

Romanticizing age is no better than doing the same with youth. Let’s skip the self-serving sentimentality and deal with human beings, not demographics. As a kid I preferred the company of adults, the smart, funny ones, not the unctuous type who pretended to tolerate us. So many kids seemed, well, childish. Now most of the adults do. A favorite American idiom: When someone asks, “How ya doing?” we reply, “Can’t complain,” and sometimes add, “Nobody listens anyway.” I don’t have a single interesting complaint. I’m fortunate to have a good wife and three sons who seldom bore me, remain as healthy and strong as Brahma bulls, and have never asked for bail money. Suddenly, Psalms 90:10 no longer seems theoretical:

 

 “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”