Eternal youth

I was standing outside a disused church in the middle of a wood, waiting for an impromptu praise and worship service to begin. Also present were an Indian family. I asked the two children how old they were. It turns out that the girl is 10 and the boy is 8. I then asked them how old they thought I was. The boy said: Over 25. The girl said: Over 29. I said this was a clever answer, because there were very few cases where he was right and the girl was wrong. In fact they were both right, I added, because I was both over 25 and over 29.

The following evening, chatting with friends at the end of a club night, we got talking about age and I asked one of our older female members how old she thought I was. She said she was hopeless at this sort of thing but she thought I was probably 25. Once I had stopped laughing, I said: I’m older than I look. I can buy alcohol in supermarkets.

The last time I celebrated a birthday with a 0 on the end, it came as a shock. The accusing date on my birth certificate bears no relation to how old I feel. All around me, people I know are seeing their hair turn grey. Why do I feel as though the ageing process is passing me by? Maybe because I was ill for such a long time and had to allow others to look after me. Being in charge of your own life requires many decisions, some of them hard, and the stress can add years to your life. As it happens I do feel things deeply but I am not at all an anxious person.

Of course, all things come to an end. I know that. Here is a moving passage from the German Requiem by Brahms:

Herr, lehre doch mich,
daß ein Ende mit mir haben muß,
und mein Leben ein Ziel hat,
und ich davon muß.

Brahms was using Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible from Latin into German. Psalm 39.4 in the King James version in English is equally poetic:

Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am.

So my examples of eternal youth are all fictional.

In Greek mythology, Hebe is the goddess of youth. She had the exclusive ability to restore youth to humans, being in charge of the Fountain of Youth. Her day job was cupbearer to the gods on Mount Olympus. She served them ambrosia, thought to possess anti-ageing properties, and she was sometimes seen in the guise of an eagle, which in some traditions is able to renew itself, like the phoenix. In art she is depicted as a young woman in a sleeveless dress. That’s me, sometimes. Generally my sleeves are longer.

Obviously, one of the problems of being young forever is that you have to watch your friends grow old and die. In episode 6 of series 1 of The Sandman (‘The Sound of Her Wings’), Morpheus and Death encounter a commoner named Hob Gadling in a tavern in the Middle Ages. He says he wishes he would never die. Death agrees to spare him until he changes his mind. Morpheus and Hob then meet each other once a century, in a different setting each time. Hob always looks the same.

Eternal youth has its darker side. In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian is a beautiful young man who knows that one day his beauty will fade. He has been painted, he sees his portrait, and he wishes that the ageing and fading would transfer from him to the portrait. He then leads an amoral life as a libertine, always remaining young and beautiful while his portrait ages and records all his sins.

For a modern and futuristic reinterpretation, see ‘Rescue,’ episode 1 of series 4 of the 1970s cult TV series Blake’s 7. The crew of the Liberator, their own ship destroyed, encounter Dorian, the pilot of the spaceship Scorpio. They end up at Dorian’s home base, containing a cavern with a terrible secret: the bodies of his victims who have absorbed his ageing, leaving him still youthful at 200 years of age.

I don’t want any of this to happen to me. All I want is that the inner grace I have been given will manifest itself in an outer grace as time goes by.