Slouching towards thirty

[kellinator]

Today is my half-birthday.

I'm now closer to 26 than 25.

Yes, I logically and intellectually know that 26 is not old. Unfortunately, our neuroses rarely listen to logic and intellectualism.

Comments

[artricia.livejournal.com]

Philip Larkin, "On Being Twenty-six"

I feared these present years,
The middle twenties,
When deftness disappears,
And each event is
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt,
And turned to drought.

I thought: this pristine drive
Is sure to flag
At twenty-four or -five;
And now the slag
Of burnt-out childhood proves that I was right.
What caught alight

Quickly consumed in me,
As I foresaw.
Talent, felicity --
These things withdraw,
And are succeeded by a dingier crop
That comes to stop;

Or else, certainly gone,
Perhaps the rest,
Tarnishing, linger on
As second-best.
Fabric of fallen minarets is trash.
And in the ash

Of what has plesed and passed
Is now no more than struts and greed, a last
charred smile, a clawed
Crustacean hatred, blackened pride -- of such
I once made much.

And so, if I were sure
I have no chance
To catch again that pure
Unnoticed stance,
I would calcine the outworn properties,
Live on what is.

But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall

At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,

Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise.

[kellinator.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's it, totally. And it's an amazing poem. Thank you.