God is by no means infallible. She seems to have made pretty obvious errors in some of her attempts at creation. For instance, unless someone can come up with an explanation, I cannot see why on earth she created cockroaches or, indeed, black sigatoka in plantains, to mention just two nauseating and ham-handed ideas she seems to have had while working at her drawing-board in the heavens. I even saw once a printed T-shirt accusing the Almighty of a misplaced sense of humour: “When God Created Man She Was Only Joking!”
Of course, God has also had some winners. The young Eve, despite her moral frailty, leading to that little mistake with the serpent, was and remains a marvellous, entrancing creation. The greatest artists among men have tried for thousands of years to imitate God’s wonderful design but have failed miserably: as the poet EE Cummings wrote – “ a pretty girl who naked is, is worth a million statues.”
But I take God especially to task for spoiling her fundamentally sound conception of living men and women with the terrible defect of growing old. That is like a workman creating a masterpiece only to introduce a deliberate flaw into his masterly design to satisfy some perverse quirk in his personality.
Dorothy Parker, the American writer, was particularly bitter about this when she said: “People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No, what’s the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.” Perhaps that is going a bit far – life is so full of beauty and delight that the oldest man in the world still will crave half an hour more of his last sunset before the night comes down.
But one can see what Dorothy Parker meant. The spring and freshness and ambition of youth should be ours forever. Nothing can replace that – not experience, not wisdom, not even the maturity that comes with lost illusions. A long time ago some lines by the poet Robert Lowell stuck in my mind:
Being old in good times is worse
Than being young in the worst times.
There is some truth in that – nothing sweet or comforting in an old man’s world can make up for the inner fire that burns so passionately in youth. If only youth itself appreciated this richness that it possesses instead of taking it for granted. The cruel paradox is that youth’s sweetness is its own forbidden fruit. The feast is over long before a man knows how good the menu was. Perhaps the fact that youth is wasted on the young is one more joke by a mocking God to test man’s fragile faith.
Ah, well, we must all put up with God’s spiteful humour. We can whistle a little song and whisper comforting clichés like “You’re only as old as you like to think” or “Life begins all over again tomorrow.” Best of all we can read the Chinese poets who in this respect give the most comfort: for instance in this poem – ‘On Being Sixty’ by Po Chu-I in the ninth century, remembering, as I presume to do, that sixty in Po Chu-I’s century is at least seventy in ours:
Between thirty and fifty one is distracted by the five Lusts,
Between seventy and eighty one is prey to a hundred diseases.
But at sixty one is free from all ills:
I have put behind me Love and Greed, I have done with Profit
and Fame:
I am still short of illness and decay, and far from decrepit age.
Strength of limb I still possess to seek the rivers and the hills.
Still my heart has spirit enough to listen to flutes and strings.
At leisure I open new wine and taste several cups;
Drunken I recall old poems and chant a stray verse.
But in the end we have to face reality, brace ourselves, and accept the fact of growing old with as much humour and philosophy as one can muster. And if we cannot muster up much humour or philosophy at least we can heed the advice Dylan Thomas gave his old father, passionate to the end:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And, also, before they grow too old to remember what it was like to be young, let us quote to our young friends in their heedless, springtime days the last lines of the greatest lyric poem in the English language – Feste’s song in Shakespeare’s
‘Twelfth Night’:
What is Love? ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure;
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
