'The Breezy Wight Who Cannot See'

I often think about the continuity of personality. Not in the abstract sense, as an academic exercise in human psychology. Rather, as an aspect of your life and mine. Are we the same people we were at age twelve or twenty? Is that a metaphysical question? Is it trivial?

At the trivial level of DNA, of course. Our genetic inheritance is always with us. But why is it, when I look back at my younger self, I am puzzled and sometimes ashamed? Why the hell did I do that? What did I hope to accomplish? How could I be so thoughtless? At the time, I would have congratulated myself on making enlightened decisions. I read Freud and Proust. I knew something about people and their behavior. That twenty-year-old kid seems foreign to me, and yet I recognize him. I hurt people and congratulated myself on my precious moral principles. 

In 1914, the year he turned seventy-four, Thomas Hardy published Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces. Among the poems collected in the volume is “Seventy-Four and Twenty”:

 

“Here goes a man of seventy-four,

Who sees not what life means for him,

And here another in years a score

Who reads its very figure and trim.

 

“The one who shall walk to-day with me

Is not the youth who gazes far,

But the breezy wight who cannot see

What Earth's ingrained conditions are.”

 

I turn seventy-four today and feel like an unlikely mashup of Hardy’s two subjects. I’m often as blind and oblivious as the old man and occasionally able to “read” life’s “very figure and trim.” I can soothe myself with words like this – “That’s just human” – which smells rankly like bullshit. In another poem from the volume, “Regret Me Not,” Hardy writes:

 

“I did not know

   That heydays fade and go,

But deemed that what was would be always so.”