Age has begun to stalk comfortably in the long shadows cast by the receeding light of my youth. I turned 30. The benefit of age, the old tell us, is wisdom, which, as I understand it, is the fruit of hindsight, itself the sense of wonder that arises from realizing the staggering number of accidents that have resulted in one’s survival. Becoming accustomed, then, to looking back over my shoulder, I cannot help but be confronted by my earlier metaphor, and realize that it doesn’t make any sense, as it both involves some very novel cosmological theories (namely that youth, a category traditionally thought to be comprised by age, is the center of a solar system where time is a predator), and a system of physics where light casts shadows, rather than – well – light. What is age hunting? Why is it comfortable? The vacant look we find in the aged doubtless arises from their interminable struggle with just such questions.
Archive for May, 2007
Long Vermont Roads
Friday, May 25th, 2007We Shall All Be Sober
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007Upon first listening to The Mountain Goats’ We Shall All Be Healed I was struck by the almost complete lack of any mention of alcohol – the only reference is to a man who “worked in a liquor store.” The juice of the grape and the grain have figured prominently in Darnielle’s oeuvre, and its consumption was the favored activity of the benighted Alpha Couple, consumption so prodigious that their livers seemed unable to survive a single song, let alone the dozen albums through which they were forced to suffer. Why the mainstream media has not pounced on this development baffles me.