Ever After

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These are, I should warn you, the words of a dead man.

Or they are at least — the warning stands — nothing more than the ramblings of a prematurely aged one. I have been in this place now barely a year, but I am fully aware from the inside, as I think the public is from the outside, of its effect of induced senescence. There are, these days, those sexy young studs of academe who attempt to go against the grain. But even they, it can be observed, when they reach a certain age — roughly my age, a little past fifty — begin to settle rather quickly into the lean and slippered pantaloon. They look about them at their venerable surroundings, at the privileges they possess, they take stock of their no longer galloping careers, and they decide, consciously or not, that true donhood, like the quality of fine wine, is inseparable from age.

It is something in the air here. Before they are sixty, they are emulating one of the many varieties: the crusty and cantankerous; the bald and bumbling; the silver-haired exquisite; the bespectacled and tousled distrait; the freewheeling eccentric; the wide-eyed, latter-day infant, helpless in all mundane matters but possessed of a profound understanding of Sanskrit. By seventy or eighty — and there is no reason, given the pampering they get, why they shouldn’t go on for decades — they are convinced they have reached their true flowering and that, whatever their status in their particular fields (though eminence may be assumed), they are, in themselves, rare birds, exceptional cases, worthy of living enshrinement.

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