I was a child but yesterday
Smooth of skin and loud with youthful laughter
And now I am an aged man already
Doing nothing till the end of day
With bloodshot eyes dimly gazing after
With bended back, walking on legs unsteady.
Oh how swiftly life just fades away.
Yesterday red, today blockhead
Tomorrow dead!
Had I not by my mistress been betrayed
And had my wife not from me run away
Then I’d go singing through the streets all day
And in the night lie snugly in my bed.
But when the women leave you high and dry
Give up, my son, because you cannot win.
Reach for the whisky, bear things with a grin
For now the time has come to say goodbye.
In the face of rights accepted by all humans, the older man is in the wrong if he accepts the love of a much younger woman and then lets her down, because the older man should be the wiser and the more circumspect.
From a letter written c1925
to his wife Ruth
At the age of fifty a man gradually casts off certain childish things, the quest for reputation and respectability, and he begins to look back over his own life without passion. He learns to wait, he learns to stay silent, he learns to listen, and if these good gifts must be paid for with some illnesses and weaknesses, he considers that he has made a profit from the transaction.
Note written on the fiftieth birthday of his wife Ninon 18th September 1945