The Culture of the High Middle Ages Guided Reading Activity 10-3
An Ode to Centre Age
Your trunk begins to betray you. You take neither the vitality of youth nor the license of old historic period. But beingness over the hill has its pleasures.
From the outside it looks steady.
Information technology looks resolved. Sitting heavily in a chair, with settled opinions and stodgy shoes—in that location's something unbudgeable about the middle-aged person. The immature are dewy and volatile; the quondam are toppling into fragility. Just the middle-aged hold their ground. At that place'southward a kind of magnetism to this solidity, this dowdy poise, this impressively median land.
But on the inside … You're in deep flux. A second puberty, almost. Inflammations, precarious accelerations. Dysmorphic shock in the bathroom mirror: Jesus, who is that? Strange new acts of grooming are suddenly necessary. Maybe you've survived a bout of something serious; you probably have a couple of fussy niggling individual afflictions. You demand ointment. Information technology feels like a character flaw. Maybe it is a character flaw.
For all this, though, you are weirdly and unwontedly calm, similar someone riding a cycle without using his hands. You're not an apprentice developed anymore. You're through the disorientation period, the Talking Heads moment—"And you lot may find yourself in a cute house / With a beautiful married woman / And you may enquire yourself / Well, how did I get here?" You're through the angst and the panic attacks. You don't yet accept the wild license of old age, when you can write gnarly, scandalous poems similar Frederick Seidel, or tell an interviewer—as The Who'southward Pete Townshend recently did—that "it's too late to requite a fuck." But you're more free. The stuff that used to obsess you, those grinding circular thoughts—they've worn themselves out. Yous know yourself, quite well by now. Life has introduced you to your shadow; yous've met your dark double, and with a scrap of luck the ii of you have made your accommodations. You lot know your friends. You dear your friends, and yous tell them.
I'm generalizing from my own case, of grade, because what else can I do? Besides, a sense at terminal of having some things in common with the other humans, the other wobbling bipeds—this, too, is ane of the gifts of center age. Good experience, bad experience, doesn't matter. Feel is what you lot share, the raw weight of it. The lines around the eyes. The bruising of the soul. The banging up confronting your own boundaries, your own limits.
Limits, limits, give thanks God for limits. Give thanks God for the things you cannot do, and that y'all know you cannot practise. Thank God for the final limit: Death, who now gazes at you levelly from the pes of your bed, and with an ironical twinkle, because you still don't completely believe in him.
At whatsoever charge per unit, if you're reading this, you lot're not expressionless. So: Should yous leap gladly, grinningly, into these contradictory center years, when everything is speeding up and slowing down, and becoming more than serious and less serious? The center-aged person is non an idiot. Centre historic period is when you tin throw your dorsum out watching Netflix. The middle-aged person is being consumed by life, and knows it. Feed the flame—that's the invitation. Go up brightly.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/ode-to-middle-age/603067/