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I have nor Youth nor Age, but as it were, an after dinner sleep dreaming of both

Do we each see a different world, or is it more that we just see it in different colours for our own hopes and dreams, our expectations, our needs? Are each of us more than merely different editions of what others think; of what other people see? Do only our crayons stray beyond the lines? I wonder… As Oscar Wilde opined, ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’

I’m certainly not claiming that my own drawings still ignore the colouring book lines as they did when I was a child, but when I look back from the doddering heights of Age when there are none left that can refute my memory of those times, it sometimes seems as if I now have free rein. Still, how can I rely on those self-aggrandizing memories? Are they merely boasts, or are they confessions? And if I stray from the lines now, is it Age, or degeneration driving the perambulations?

I do not wish to live out whatever few years I may still have clinging to me as if I were the unimpeachable chronicler of my past. I do not wish to be seen (or heard) as unreliable, but there are some memories that tug on me from time to time; memories that beg for validation, and yet may be surfacing as merely vainglorious boasts from a different and perhaps largely blemished epoch.

What am I to do with them? Should I grasp them to my chest and decide whether or not my reputation should live or die in that battle, or should I instead scatter them like seeds and hope that at least some of them may germinate in a faraway place where I am less well known? Sometimes it’s difficult being an octogenarian with those around me nodding their heads at me with smiles, while their eyes flit to others standing nearby…

Maybe unreliability -or at least a gentle receipt of any claims- is the fate of any unverifiable aged memories, but we are what we can recall. It’s up to the recipients to sift through the images and hang the ones they like on the fridge door as they do with their own children’s drawings. I am in good company, I suppose; like them, it’s up to me to explain their significance.

But a particular worry nags at me -the same one that has dogged me all of my adult years: am I -no, are we– all imposters? Do we, any of us, really know who we are if our memories can be false, and if our beliefs are pinned to things we can never know for sure? Never know if we have copied inadvertently from others and can only hope also to be true about ourselves? Do we all, unbeknownst to each, live in a hall of mirrors? Are we still like small children playing identity games about who we are, about what we would like to become as grownups, and never knowing if any of the games we played would ever become real: chess pieces being moved on a board without our knowledge of how they work?

I remember, years ago when I was in university and began reading my way through many of Hermann Hesse’s books, I came across Magister Ludi (the novel The Glass Bead Game which won him the 1946 Nobel Prize for literature). For some reason it fascinated me: the idea that the protagonist of the novel, Joseph Knecht, after years of pursuing mastery of a game – a game of knowledge, a game of knowing everything that purported to be important in life, and the ability to explain everything– became disillusioned. The goal of becoming a Magister was sort of like winning an Olympic medal but followed by the realization that okay, now what? Spending your whole life to become the best, or the most knowledgeable, was a dead end street. I took that to mean that he eventually realized that the real meaning of Life -its goal- was living life as the best you could manage. Being the master of the Glass Bead Game was actually no better than being the grandmaster, not of chess, but maybe of tiddlywinks: meaningless in the end… And in ironic keeping with that end, Knecht himself drowns – perhaps proving that he was just as meaningless as his life turned out to be…

At least that’s what I took it to mean. Of course, like the non-reliability of the recollections of my memories, I may have misconstrued the thrust of what I have since learned to call a Bildungsroman (a literary genre that purports to explore the moral and psychological changes of the protagonist as they age). But once again, have I got that wrong too: by assuming that because my past has thus far proven to be a foreign country for me, it may well have been the same for Hesse, and his literary ruminations, even in translation, may mirror mine… or perhaps the other way around.

But that, too, may be a part of the Imposter Syndrome which I sometimes wear when I go out to meet my friends for coffee. Do they believe all that I say: doubtful; do I believe everything that comes out of my mouth…? I’m not sure. Not anymore.

Maybe I was a believer in the imaginative world I inhabited as a child, or the world I chose to wear in my profession, but now that I’m retired and on the downhill slope, I’m not as sure of my footing. Or is it something else entirely: if I really am my past; does it matter? If I am my memories, there’s not much I can do about it, except recognize that I am still writing my own Bildungsroman and hoping it ends well.

Perhaps, to paraphrase the Duke Vincentio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, ‘I am not myself; for I exist on many a thousand grains that issue out of dust…’

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