High life | 29 September 2016

Although my birthday was in August, I chose the rather melancholy autumnal moment of September to celebrate it — mourn it, rather. There are no ifs or buts about it, turning 80 is like that final beautiful gleam of light just before you lose consciousness during a boxing bout. The beauty of adolescence is that one doesn’t know why one’s angry or unhappy. The tragedy of old age is that one does.

I was a lucky young man. I was often angry but hardly ever unhappy. That is why The Catcher in the Rye was my favourite book, Tender Is the Night and The Sun Also Rises included. Holden saw through human beings — hardly an adolescent trait — and he was unforgiving about phonies. I never met a phony whose spiel I didn’t fall for until too late, hence my admiration for Holden. One thinks of nostalgia as an emotion that grows with age, but in reality it is strongest when one’s young.