No fool like an old fool.
Surely language is a frivolous way to spend a life. Almost as bad as being a general in Afghanistan. I spent a couple of spring months at age nineteen studying Finnegans Wake and the damage was irreparable. I still hear parts in my dreams. My last birthday I was concerned that I was one hundred and seventy-four. My wife was driven batty by this and finally convinced me to knock off a hundred so I was only the age of grief-stricken Goethe when he couldn’t convince the eighteen-year-old neighbour girl to marry him. It would be fun, or so he apparently thought. Yummy! Older writers are those about whom it is written “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
Extracted from the essay Pain by Jim Harrison, published in Brick number 89.
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Crikey, I’m always a fool for everything – don’t seem to learn my lesson but you know what they say, ‘it’s the journey that counts’:)