Tuesday 24 August 1999

But yes, I guess I feel ageless, sort of. Now it is a well known fact that old people tend to feel young. Or rather they feel like a young mind in an old body. Which is why you often see them with those ridiculous hair styles and clothes. Please, people: Age gracefully or not at all.

Unlike most, I started to feel old already when I was fairly young. In the beginning, it caused some problems: I wrote my birth year wrong on some official form once, I remember, and had to hesitate when I needed to remember how old I was. But after a while the difference became too wide, and I sort of split in two. Not like in multiple personalities, really, more like multiple memories. The personal me, my memories of my own life, reverted to normal age. (Or less...) The impersonal me continued to grow older and older at an astonishing speed.

I'm not the only one who experience this built-in ancient person. The famous psychiatrist Carl G. Jung had such a structure from his childhood. I guess it is more like a way of structuring the impersonal knowledge that we have acquired. After all, in my mind I have walked the streets of ancient Ur, dominated by the great temple to the moon goddess. I have followed the Greek heroes in the siege of Troy, and trudged through the desert with the nomads that would become the core of Israel. I am human, and nothing human should be really alien to me. It is this my share in humanity that makes me old.

I know that some New Age people have these fanciful explanations about old spirits and how they have been incarnated again and again. I don't think that is relevant. Certainly not for me. Rather I have assimilated some of the knowledge that is our common heritage, and made it my own. I think that is a good thing to do. Learning from the past should change us. What does not change us, we have not truly understood.

Compared to the age of our civilization, I certainly feel young. I sometimes think of a line from the song Young offender by the Petshop Boys: "I've been a teenager since before you were born." But I guess that era is slowly drawing to a close.

On the bus to work today, a teenage girl plopped down beside me. A cute one too. And as my reading of Scientific American was diverted by the feeling of her firm young thigh against mine, I felt a kind of human emotion. Like a soft longing. And as I glanced briefly at the lithe young form beside me, I thought: "If things had only been different ... I could have had a child like you, too."

I'm at my youths end.

Not that this is stopping me from going wild in Daggerfall when I have a little free time. "Get in touch with my inner child? I am my inner child!" Watch out, skeletons: There's an old kid on the block!