Analyse, This

You are today a young person of 24 : an aspiring writer, novelist, poet, thinker, academic, journalist, musician, blogger, painter, composer, dramatist, or politician. You struggle hard to establish your voice, opinion, style or view in this world, and you often feel amazed that the others around you have actually managed to make it into the newspapers in spite of being so pathetic, ridiculous, untalented, mundane, frigid, tame, pedestrian, platitudinous, insipid, vapid, cliched, thoughtless, deplorable, drab, and uninspired. You strive vigorously to expose the shallowness and the utter inanity of your competitors, with the hope that the world out there too will see through them and come around to your point of view. You dearly hope that your rivals will somehow just disappear from the face of the earth, leaving it a much better, cleaner, healthier, and safer place for everyone else to live in.

Now analyse this. Tomorrow you are an old person of 74 nodding by the fire, turning the dusty pages of your youthful masterpiece. Nobody reads through that masterpiece anymore, except perhaps for a few quotes from it in some anthology that students are compelled to memorise for their final-year exams. The generation around you has not even the faintest clue of what those great debates were about, and it has now moved on to find better and more interesting things to do. You have become a moth-eaten museum icon from an age of some forgotten quarrels that nobody remembers, nobody except the odd PhD student who makes an appointment with you one evening to ask you some questions for her thesis. And then you see your old competitors dying off, one by one. But this time, strangely enough, you do not want them to go away; you want to hold on to them, and their passing away becomes a reminder of your own approaching death.

And then at 74, you begin to wish that you had apprehended all of this at 24. You might then have lived happier, learnt and heard a few more things, and not have had the realisation that all flesh is grass strike you like a sudden thunderbolt in your dying years. You might then have pondered just a moment more on why an Old Master had once said that philosophy is but the art of learning how to die.