It occurred to me, this weekend, that “happy” and “sad” are no longer the emotional poles of my life. That axis, so salient a feature of childhood, has been replaced by something a little messier, with hopefulness and energy indissolubly working at one end, and fearfulness and fatigue tied up at the other.

And I can see that it has been this way for a long time — decades. Possibly it has always been this way for me. Certainly the feeling of sadness, untinctured by anxiety, has from early on been anything but unpleasant. (The first poem that I voluntarily memorized was Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy.”) And now that I have aged into the foothills of extinction, I don’t mind the prospect of death itself; what bothers me is suffering at the end. Because suffering always makes me wish that I weren’t alive, you might think that I’d be gratified, just the once, to have my miserable prayer answered, but I think it’s a terrible gyp. If you’re really going to die, you oughtn’t to have to waste any time longing to.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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