* * * *
The change in his appearance after twenty years had actually frightened me. I suppose you think I mean that he looked older. But he didn't! He looked younger. And it suddenly taught me something about the passage of time.I suppose old Betterton would be about sixty-five now, so that when I last saw him he'd have been forty-five -- my age now. His hair was white now, and the day he buried Mother it was a kind of streaky grey, like a shaving-brush. And yet as soon as I saw him the first thing that struck me was that he looked younger. I'd thought of him as an old, old man, and after all he wasn't so very old. As a boy, it occurred to me, all people over forty ahd seemed to me just worn-out old wrecks, so old that there was hardly any difference between them. A man of forty-five had seemed to me older than this dodderer of sixty-five seemed now. And Christ! I was forty-five myself. It frightened me.
* * * *
If I'd had a mirror I'd have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don't have to tell me. But the thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back in my mouth, was that it doesn't matter. Even false teeth don't matter. I'm fat -- yes. I look like a bookie's unsuccessful brother -- yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me again unless she's paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don't care. I don't want the women, I don't even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive at that moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It's a feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it's like a flame.
I love this quotation! I just re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I hadn't read since I was a teen. Then I thought Dorian was really old at the end of the book. Or at least that's how I remembered it. Reading it now and realizing he was only 38 shocked me! Remember when the saying was "Don't trust anyone over 30"? I look at people in their thirties now and they look like kids to me! And as for the second paragraph, yeah, aging gracefully is my goal. I will never look 40 again or even 60, so wtf...just accept it and enjoy what is left!
ReplyDeleteDorian Gray: that's amazing!! I've never read it, only know it from popular culture, and have always assumed the story ended with him as an old man. 38?!
ReplyDeleteI think in the movie the character was much older at the end, which may be why we both remember it that way. But in the book he is about 20 at the start and the story spreads over 18 years. It's worth reading, though some of it is a bit of a slog (chapter 11 in particular). And it was very heavily edited by Wilde himself in order to get published so that you really have to read between the lines to figure out what Dorian did that made his behavior scandalous. Not hard to figure out, of course, but it is definitely a work of a particular era.
DeleteI also remember the Get Smart spoof of Dorian Gray!
ReplyDeleteThose coded scenes are always so bizarre, like a message from an alien world. D.H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams -- you've heard about shocking and censored scenes, yet a modern reader can't even tell what's going on. When I was a kid, there were several paperbacks in the house that had a big "unexpurgated version" banner on the cover, but there were no "good parts".
😂😂😂
ReplyDelete