Inside

As reported by the late-great Roger Angell in his brilliant essay, “This Old Man: Life in the Nineties,” the actor Laurence Olivier, reflecting on aging, once said in an interview. “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

Maybe, but I think that’s more poetry than reality.

For someone my age (five and sixty as I write this), it’s more like “Inside, we’re all 35, with full heads of hair.”

When I close my eyes and imagine who I am, I don’t feel like a teenager.

But I do see myself as no different really, than the young man I was in my prime—physical prime, that is.  I’m still mostly wrinkle-free, with a pretty flat stomach, and a hairline that doesn’t start in the middle of my cranium.

The face that stares back at me these days from the mirror or even worse, the Zoom call, isn’t who I am.  That’s some old guy masquerading as me.  He’s okay, I guess, but I can’t help thinking that whoever sees him, doesn’t really see me.  Even when I look his way, I can’t really make the connection to my true self.

No doubt this will continue to become more pronounced with each passing year.  By the time I’m eighty or so, the difference between my outward appearance and my inward self-conception will be half a century apart.  Maybe that’s what ultimately leads to death: your immaterial homunculus becomes so detached from your physical body that you just slip away to nothingness, leaving a dried-up husk of what you looked like but really weren’t.

I don’t mind aging; as mom always said, the alternative is much worse.  But it’s sort of confounding because to some extent, what’s aging isn’t me.  Not to get all Cartesian, but, since I  can imagine my being without my body, then my body can’t be me.

So, I probably shouldn’t worry that the container is past its “best by” date; what’s inside remains fresh.