The excellent Richard Morrison has a great article in the Times today that lightened my journey at approximately Loughborough Junction. "I am staggering through the black mist that descends when a chap with more than half his life over realises that, had he never been born, the world would be exactly the same as it is now." Yes, he graduated from university 30 years ago this week. (Which puts him in my ballpark.)
The piece is about the uselessness of giving advice to your children: "No wonder that my children look irritated or bewildered when I offer them advice. My past is a foreign country to them, and my recollections of what worked or did’t work for me at 21 might as well be in a foreign language, so irrelevant is it to their world."
I highly recommend reading the whole article, it is lovely, full of witty, self-deprecating Morrisonisms. If it is behind a subscription wall by the time you click on the link, let me know via email or in the comments and I will email you a copy. In the meantime, I will share with you the last two paragraphs:
"But one piece of advice is surely always pertinent. It is Horace’s fine old exhortation: carpe Diem — seize the day. If I could reclaim every minute that I wasted in my youth, I could probably have half my life again. The trouble is that when you are 21 you don’t truly grasp the fact that such moments are not infinitely available. And by the time you have grasped it, the moments have flown. As Trotsky observed, old age is the most unexpected thing that happens to a man (apart from being hacked to death with an ice-axe, presumably). Tell me about it, Leon.
Still, if any of the people who were at university with me 30 years ago happen to be reading, could I just say this? If we haven’t seen each other since 1976, please don’t get in touch. Observing how old we all look will only depress me further." Quite, Richard.
Excellent article, Maxine, and I also enjoyed the add-ons at the end (Dr of Nonsense and an item about computer checking of student papers). While it's true what Morrison says about the importance of seizing the day, has there ever been a young person who realized it? I don't think so.
Posted by: Susan | 20 June 2006 at 20:50
I'm probably unusual in that I made a conscious effort to follow all the advice of my elders when I was young. I can report that it didn't help much, because it's not the advice that counts, but the wisdom of experience. And everybody has to earn that for himself.
Posted by: Lars Walker | 21 June 2006 at 03:39