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Who I am
I know one thing now that I did not know in my youth. It is that a man stays always the same age, somewhere down inside himself. Only the outside of him grows older. Inwardly, he reaches a certain age, and stays there throughout his whole remaining life. I suspect it gets fixed at early maturity, when the mind has reached adult awareness and acuity, but has not yet been calloused by habit and disillusion; when the body is newly full-grown and feeling the fires of life, but not yet any of life’s ashes. The calendar and his mirror may tell a man he is old; he can see for himself that the world and all about him have aged; but secretly he knows he is still a youth of nineteen or twenty. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty are so much more to be treasured and conserved. I am sure there is not anywhere a woman of advanced age who has not inside her a maiden of tender years - that even in her ancient dotage, a woman can see in her mirror the radiant eyes and willow grace her first love could see, more than half a century after parting from her, and attribute to her, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth.
Carmel, February, 2022