High life | 29 September 2016

Although my birthday was in August, I chose the rather melancholy autumnal moment of September to celebrate it — mourn it, rather. There are no ifs or buts about it, turning 80 is like that final beautiful gleam of light just before you lose consciousness during a boxing bout. The beauty of adolescence is that one doesn’t know why one’s angry or unhappy. The tragedy of old age is that one does.

I was a lucky young man. I was often angry but hardly ever unhappy. That is why The Catcher in the Rye was my favourite book, Tender Is the Night and The Sun Also Rises included. Holden saw through human beings — hardly an adolescent trait — and he was unforgiving about phonies. I never met a phony whose spiel I didn’t fall for until too late, hence my admiration for Holden. One thinks of nostalgia as an emotion that grows with age, but in reality it is strongest when one’s young. (Revisiting one’s school two years after graduation and noticing for the first time how small the desks are; or looking at the post office where one stood heartbroken waiting for her letter.)

But hang on, this is supposed to be about old age, not adolescence, so Holden Caulfield has to take a back seat for a while. Many writers call it a day at 80, but that’s because they’ve written something of value. The poor little Greek boy has not, so I’ll keep going until I do. Which brings me to Papa Hemingway. Here he is in A Moveable Feast:

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people …People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.