The Journeyer

Hi Morpheus,

I am reading a book at the moment by Gary Jennings titled "The Journeyer" and I came across this section which I would like to share with you:-

"I was left to wonder: does immortality reside in memory? - and with such deep metaphysic my mind was incapable of grappling.

My mind still is, as most minds are. But I know one thing now which I did not then. I know it from my own experience and knowledge of myself.

A man stays always the same age, somewhere down inside himself. Only the outside of him grows older - his wrapping of body, and its integument, which is the whole world.

Inwardly he attains to a certain age, and stays there throughout his whole remaining life. That perpetual inner age may vary, I suppose, with different individuals. But in general I suspect that it gets fixed at early maturity, when the mind has reached adult awareness and acuity, but has not yet been calloused by habit and disillusion; when the body is newly full-grown and feeling the fires of life, but not yet any of life's ashes.

The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that HE is still a youth of eighteen or twenty.

And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am.

It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved.

I am sure there is not anywhere a woman of advanced age who has not inside her a maiden of tender years."

--This so accurately sums up what I have always thought about myself, yet I have never been able to express it so eloquently.

Just recently when I was shopping with my sister I said to her as we left a shop "That shop assistant thinks I am an old woman - she doesn't know that I am eighteen".

I remember that my sister laughed - but I MEANT it!

Janice K.