Youth

I can’t raise my arms so well anymore, she says, gazing down at herself as if at a foreign body. She looks the same as ever, a bit older perhaps than thirty years ago, but certainly not like an old woman. After all, I’ll be seventy next week, she says, speaking in a voice that sounds just like her voice thirty years ago. Next week, though, I’m going to the Baltic coast, to a spa, she says. That will be lovely, I’m sure. She says ‘the Baltic coast’ no differently than she would have spoken these words thirty years ago—to a lover, perhaps.

Really, where does the time go, I once read in letters written by a girl who was forced to live apart from her parents for two years in Fascist Germany. One year later, she was dead, murdered by the Nazis. Where does the time go?

The illnesses that start to befall us fill us with astonishment, they cause our bodies to move in a different way than we intend, they accelerate and delay, they spoil the meter. They astonish us. The years spatter our skin—which just a moment ago was the skin of a child— with the brown spots of age, they make the small print flicker before page 247 our eyes, they astonish us, and since all of this occurs so gradually, we don’t even understand where the point of transition occurred. Gradually, one hair at a time, the years make off with the youth of men, they imperceptibly crease the skin of women, gently laying it in folds, and there we are, encased in this skin, gazing with eyes before which the small print has already blurred to the point of illegibility, it is only our thoughts that do not appear to us to age, and for this reason we are astonished to find that the years have settled around our shoulders, and we think that actually, if we wanted to, we could shrug them off again, and for this reason when we look at our own arms, we see something that—the older it becomes—appears to us less and less recognisable and becomes more and more removed from us the more it tries to force us by means of pain and shortcomings to acknowledge its closeness, and this is why we are astonished when our own exhaustion renders us defenseless; and when we realise that death is coming closer to us one friend at a time, we would like best not even to know any longer that our lives often outlast our own ability to age.