We’re only young once but how do we know when we’re old? Just when does the wisdom of the years kick in? When is the age of innocence over?
We have been going through boxes of old photographs and I came across this little clunker from yesteryear. I don’t know how old I was but clearly I am still in my age of innocence because I’m sitting on our back porch posing with the poems of T.S.Eliot.
I was young enough to be caught waving around a book of poems by T.S.Eliot. It hadn’t dawned on me back then that the “T.S” in T.S.Eliot disguised some sort of real given names or that T.S.Eliot himself might be a human being with a real life.
But they did and he was. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Tom as he was known to his friends, had made a most unfortunate marriage. His wife Vivien was a handful.
After a visit to the Eliots, Virginia Woolf wrote of Vivien:
“What agony to bear her on one’s shoulders. This biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered bag of ferrets is what Tom wears around his neck”.
When I was proudly reading such poems as “East Coker”, “Little Gidding” or “The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock” I had no glimmer of the real poet nor the real struggles that life can offer.
So now when an older, more wrinkled and bedraggled version of myself sits on the back deck to read the poet who wrote “The Waste Land”, I know he had difficulties in his marriage, that he set off a bucket of fireworks in a Faber boardroom meeting, that he prepared for meetings by setting out whoopie cushions, that he loved Groucho Marx and that he wrote a poem entitled “The Triumph of Bullshit” thereby creating a new and useful word.
So? Getting old or the getting of wisdom? I’m still forming an opinion but perhaps, just perhaps, it’s not the worse!
At the End of the Day 