The Diary of a Man of Fifty | Page 3

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THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY

Florence, April 5th, 1874.--They told me I should find Italy greatly
changed; and in seven-and-twenty years there is room for changes. But
to me everything is so perfectly the same that I seem to be living my
youth over again; all the forgotten impressions of that enchanting time
come back to me. At the moment they were powerful enough; but they
afterwards faded away. What in the world became of them? Whatever
becomes of such things, in the long intervals of consciousness? Where
do they hide themselves away? in what unvisited cupboards and
crannies of our being do they preserve themselves? They are like the
lines of a letter written in sympathetic ink; hold the letter to the fire for
a while and the grateful warmth brings out the invisible words. It is the
warmth of this yellow sun of Florence that has been restoring the text
of my own young romance; the thing has been lying before me today as
a clear, fresh page. There have been moments during the last ten years
when I have fell so portentously old, so fagged and finished, that I
should have taken as a very bad joke any intimation that this present
sense of juvenility was still in store for me. It won't last, at any rate; so
I had better make the best of it. But I confess it surprises me. I have led
too serious a life; but that perhaps, after all, preserves one's youth. At
all events, I have travelled too far, I have worked too hard, I have lived
in brutal climates and associated with tiresome people. When a man has
reached his fifty-second year without being, materially, the worse for
wear--when he has fair health, a fair fortune, a tidy conscience and a
complete exemption from embarrassing relatives--I suppose he is
bound, in delicacy, to write himself happy. But I confess I shirk this
obligation. I have not been miserable; I won't go so far as to say
that--or at least as to write it. But happiness--positive happiness--would
have been something different. I don't know that it would have been
better, by all measurements--that it would have left me better off at the
present time. But it certainly would have made this difference--that I
should not have been reduced, in pursuit of pleasant images, to disinter
a buried episode of more than a quarter of a century ago. I should have

found entertainment more--what shall I call it?--more contemporaneous.
I should have had a wife and children, and I should not be in the way of
making, as the French say, infidelities to the present.