#declining years

[thebotanicalarcade]

n92_w1150 by Biodiversity Heritage Library Via Flickr: Flower emblems, or, The seasons of life. London :Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday,MDCCCLXXI [1871] biodiversitylibrary.org/page/59933957

[bsd-bibliophile]

I sacrificed ten years of my life for this one volume of short stories. For ten full years I did not know what is was to eat the invigorating breakfast of the good citizen. Because of this one book I lost my place in the world, was constantly wounded in my self-esteem and buffeted by the cold winds of the world, and I wandered around in a daze. I squandered tens of thousands of yen. I could not lift my head before my eldest brother, knowing the hardships I was causing him. I burnt my tongue, singed my breast, and deliberately harmed my body beyond any possibility of recovery. I tore up and discarded over a hundred stories. Five thousand sheets of manuscript paper. And all that remained, just barely, was this one volume. Nothing else. The manuscript comes to about 600 pages, but the fee is altogether a little over sixty yen. But I believe in it. I believe that ‘Declining Years’ will take on deeper and deeper colors with the passing years, that it will surely penetrate ever more profoundly into your eyes, your heart. I was born only to write this one volume. From today on I am a corpse, through and through. I am merely living out my remaining days.

Dazai Osamu, found in Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1028-9

[x-yuri]

раньше ведь оно как было

[stoicmike]

There is a tipping point in midlife, a midpoint in your journey, a day when you feel that middleness of having equal parts past and future, of the life that you’ve lived and the life that you will live, of what is done and what is still possible.

Michael Lipsey