Topical Guide 882
Mark Dorset
Aging: Youth and Age
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 4:
Even though the piece of the past that I was exploring was pocked with treachery, shame, and danger, being there, following my former self around, invisible to him and everyone else, I was, if not happy, exactly, at least amused, particularly by the difference between what I saw and understood and what my younger self saw and understood, and by the thought that he would grow up to be me, and would at my age be sitting where I was sitting, amused by his earlier self.
V. S. Pritchett, Midnight Oil:
I have before me two photographs. One is, I regret, instantly recognizable: a bald man, sitting before a pastry board propped on a table, and writing. He does little else besides sit and write. His fattish face is supported by a valance of chins; the head is held together by glasses that slip down a bridgeless nose that spreads its nostrils over a moustache. He is trying to find some connection with the figure in the other picture taken fifty years ago. He knows that the young fellow sitting on the table of a photographer’s in Paris, a thin youth of twenty with thick fairish hair, exclaiming eyebrows, loosely grinning mouth and the eyes raised to the ceiling with a look of passing schoolboy saintliness, is himself. The young one is shy, careless, very pleased with himself, putting on some impromptu act; the older one is perplexed. The two, if they could meet in the flesh, would be stupefied, and the older one would certainly be embarrassed.
See also:
Aging; Youth and Age; Old People TG 395, TG 422
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