Aspirations

Just finished a magnificent book about a Spitfire pilot in the first year of World War 2. While recuperating from severe injuries the fellow and a friend went out for a night on the town and wrote this:

. . . we were now medically fit and perfectly content, yet we were still naturally enough drained of any exuberance of youthful vitality.

One night over a particularly good dinner I summed it up to Tony. ‘Well,’ I said, waving a vague hand at the crowded dance floor, ‘we’re a lucky pair. Here we are enjoying all the pleasures of old men of sixty. To us it has been granted to pass through all the ages of man in a moment of time, and now we know the joys of the twilight of man’s existence. We have come upong that great truth, that the warmth in the belly brought on by brandy and cigars leaves a glow that is the supreme carnal pleasure. Not for us the exacerbation of youthful flesh-twitching, not for us palpitations and agnoy of spirit at a pretty smile, a slender waist. We see these things with pleasure, but we see them after our own fashion – as beauty, yes, and as a joy for ever, but as beauty should be seen, from afar and with reverence and with no desire to touch. We are free of the lusts of youth. We can see a patch of virgin snow and we do not have to rush out and leave our footprint. We are as David in the Bible when “they brought unto him a virgin but he gat no heat.”‘

Tony nodded owlishly and lit a cigar. Then, jabbing it through the air to emphasize his words he spoke. Slowly and deliberately and with great sorrow he spoke.

‘Alas,’ he said, ‘it is but a dream, a beautiful, beautiful dream, but still a dream. Youth will catch us up again. Youth with all her temptations, trials, and worries. There is no escape.’ He lowered his voice and glanced nervously over his shoulder. ‘Why, even now I feel her wings fluttering behind me. I am nearly the man I was. For you there is still a little time, not much but a little. Let us then enjoy ourselves while yet we may. Waiter, more brandy!’

That, my friends, is my goal in life. To reach the point in time where “the warmth in the belly brought on by brandy and cigars leaves a glow that is the supreme carnal pleasure.” If I wasn’t going to be out this evening I would buy a bottle of brandy and a cigar on the way home and see if I couldn’t attain nirvana.

I hate this age.