Thoughts
on Youthfulness *
- Henry Miller (1972) -
If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an
invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal
(with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if
birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most
fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night
and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in
years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton,
it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “Fuck
you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you
can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you
are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive
as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and
cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.
….
I have very few friends or acquaintances
my own age or near it. Though I am usually ill at ease in the company of
elderly people I have the greatest respect and admiration for two very old men
who seem to remain eternally young and creative. I mean [the Catalan cellist
and conductor] Pablo Casals and Pablo Picasso, both over ninety now. Such
youthful nonagenarians put the young to shame. Those who are truly decrepit,
living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who
are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will
last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into
their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
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*Source:
from Henry Miller’s “On Turning Eighty” … as posted by Maria
Popova (http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/tag/philosophy/)
