DYING

When children playing games I see

Their foolish laughter strange to me

And I no longer understand their play

I know it is a warning note

From an evil foe once so remote—

A foe from whom I cannot run away.

When I see young lovers kiss

And gladly leave them to their bliss

And Paradise has no appeal for me

Implicitly, alas, I part

With all the poetry of the heart

That promised to give youth eternity.

When I hear some vile oration

Don’t react with indignation

Pretend I don’t know what it’s all about

Then I realise with a start

That there’s a numbness in my heart

And the light that burned within is going out.

Growing old is in itself, of course, a natural process, and a man of sixty-five or seventy-five is, if he doesn’t long to be younger, every bit as healthy and normal as one of thirty or fifty. But unfortunately people are not always on a level with their own age—inwardly they often rush ahead, and even more frequently they lag behind; then their conscious mind and feeling for life are less mature than their body, they resist its natural manifestations, and demand from themselves something that they cannot achieve.

From a letter written in 1935 to
Hans Sturzenegger

As one matures, one grows ever younger. That’s how it is with me too, although that doesn’t mean much because basically I’ve always maintained the same feeling for life that I had when I was a boy, and always felt that being grown up and getting old was some sort of comedy.

From a letter written on 24th January
1922 to Werner Schindler

Just as in youth, in times of beauty and enjoyment, one can never get enough of the pleasures of the eyes and the other senses etc, as one grows old it’s the same with knowledge—one knows one must gather in as many as possible of the endlessly knowable things on earth, and that is a wonderful occupation.

From a letter written in 1938 to
Fanny Schiler