old. When one is a twenty-five-year-old, such concepts can be experienced only academically. Age, then, is not something that can be understood; it is a preoccupation of the old, and the old is anyone older than oneself. It is a subject that has no relevance, a subject that seems a bore, an indulgence and lament of the weak-minded and feeble and querulous. As I have grown first older and now old, however, I have contemplated the dreamers’ fate more and more, and today I see it very clearly for what it is—a curse. There is a point—for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago—when, without even
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