Very interesting piece. This part makes me think of Helen Keller and her experience when her teacher/companion Anne Sullivan was tracing the word 'water' into her hand -" Imagine going through life in this unstoried state. Your existence would be wordless. There’d be no talking, no reading, and no chatter inside your head: no sense-making gossip or discussion; no rumination; no defensive, self-justifying bullshit. You’d be a feeling-making machine moving mutely through the world, having experiences that continually changed the sensations of your inner-state." Even though she spent the rest of her life blind and deaf it always seems to me as if she found the biggest 'disability' - the most tortuous one - to be without concepts and words and stories. In her autobiography she describes it like this - “As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”
Beautiful essay. But I think you are describing a random rough patch that could happen at any age. I am just into my 50s and honestly happier, in some ways healthier/stronger, and more excited than ever. I finally have the courage and calm to do all the stuff I was too afraid to do before.
Without sounding weird, I think you have a great middle-age look, Will. And spending days in bed with The Sopranos and Charlie Bigham’s chicken korma sounds like heaven, tbf…
Just here to say thank you so much for this. I am 50 in three months and I recognise so much of what you write here. I feel utterly trapped and really, art, and my attempt to create something new and meaningful, is where I am clinging, in order to give myself meaning.
I have a bad feeling the social media/porn/dating app generation will have a collective meltdown in about 10 years. It’s in the mail. My parents and aunts and uncles aged with grace. The wish to stay young would have been considered silly and self indulgent amongst those tough old Irish people. No vanity in them at all.
I’m a little further down that holy-sh*t-I’m-50 timeline (only by 4 months) and felt a similar flood of emotions, for similar reasons. In part through reading your work it struck me my gaping black hole of grief was caused by a collapse of identity, utter and sudden and surprising. Since then my subconcious, little brick by little brick, has started to wedge together a new identity. It’s not as svelte, sleek or hopeful. Many of the bricks are second-hand. But as a work in progress it’s slowly taking shape. Which is a long way of saying thank you for the insight your work has brought.
Turned 50 on Monday and been sick with a cold all week. So far, no new identity crisis (just the usual one 🤞🏻) but yeah. Thank you for sharing, and the idea of scrolling auctions!
Thanks for this. At 49 I'm already there. Getting old is hard enough in itself, but the changes to the culture and society since 2012 or so (to which you allude) added greatly to the burden. Once books, movies, and television were of essential help to me in making sense of the world. Then they were entirely captured and hijacked by ideologues with Cluster B personality disorders. We all know what happened next.
I feel like I adapted to one world and am now obliged to live in an entirely different one. I was once very at home living in the blue tribe mecca where I remain to this day. But by 2019 I felt like the last undercover sane person surrounded by lunatics and barely holding on. Thank goodness that has shifted a little in the last two or three years. But the loss is still felt so keenly.
We late Xers have always been a very small cohort. We went from the Boomers' shadow to the millennials' in the blink of an eye. That hasn't helped either.
As it happens, I too just started rewatching the Sopranos. Maybe Livia speaks for me now, lol.
I'm Jan 1975, and this resonates. For what it's worth, Selfie and The Status Game were greatly influential and informative for me, and I continue to enjoy your work as it evolves.
I spiral and am spiralling; strangely, it feels like standing still. Potential faded in my forties, and invisibility seems to have set in. There are upsides, fewer people to impress. But those crepey hands, who the hell stuck them on the end of my sleeves?
Having left the orbit of my 50s, and now drifting about like a banged-up 63-year-old Soviet Sputnik that gets rebooted every once in a while to let the folk back at Ground Control know that I’m still serviceable (and not ready for the graveyard orbit), I remember those halcyon years when I dabbled in a spot of art collecting. These days I’m happy to let my wife decide what should hang in our hallway. I have a large cork board hanging in front of my writing desk; its frame lined with postcards I’ve collected, and family photographs I’ve taken, over the decades. It is enough art for me: my self as captured by a 115 by 85 cm rectangle of cork.
Although I still have the framed New Yorker edition poster from when I turned 50 and gave myself a first time - and, to date, last time - trip to the Big Apple.
But that’s another story.
One of the postcards is a copy of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of Der heilige Hieronymus im Gehäus (Saint Jerome in His Study). Among the many objects that occupy the room where St Jerome is engrossed in his study and meditation, there is a skull sitting on a window ledge. And it is here, with this symbol of death, the end, Finita la musica, that I would like to etymologically tease out the idea that Fine Art, the art that hangs in our hallways and other people’s galleries, is ‘fine’ in the Latin sense; that it is art for its own sake, it has its limits, its borders. I know that this runs counter to those who adhere to the idea that fine - capital ‘A’ - Art is all about the highest level of quality. But it is to the quality of the mind, rather than the quality of the canvas that I am drawn.
It is from the Latin ‘finis’ that we derive the idea of the ‘finite’, the end. It is this idea of the finite that the author Oliver Burkeman argues for people to consider embracing our non-negotiable limitations. That while there is an “infinite treasure chest of ideas” from which we can construct our identity, we are also defined - and hopefully thrive - by our toolbox of limitations.
‘The self is made up of pieces and parts of things we find in the physical, psychological and cultural space around us.’
Another postcard pinned to my board is a copy of a painting, in the style of a film poster, submitted for the Archibald Art Prize back in 2014. Titled Citizen Cave, it is headed by my Nick Cave (your Nik Kershaw) and credits Tom Waits, Wim Wenders, Debbie Harry, Harry Dean Stanton, Nina Simone, Anita Lane, Roland S. Howard, Johnny Cash, Shane MacGowan and Robert Mitchum; truly an Ocean’s Eleven crew I would still pay to sign on for.
A big part of the reason I’m still a Nick Cave fan, is that he is constantly exploring new ways of plying his craft. It keeps him relevant, and his ever-changing roster of Bad Seed band members seeking to push themselves to create new music that is unperturbed by the thought that it may piss-off the die-hard fans who expect only more of the same.
So yep, I guess you could say I’m pitching for that “Open to Experience” scout badge.
We are our stories, our songs, our images. Just as the story ends with a full stop, Nick Cave’s “The Weeping Song” ends with a fade out, and an oil painting ends with a signature.
Thank you (and Substack) for posting your long essay.
Will, you write so beautifully and this piece resonates strongly. Especially this idea of making a choice for ourselves - because in mid-life any champions or cheerleaders have very much left us to it? - to be someone different, ‘but someone who was still worthy of life’s rewards’.
Ah yes. I relate. Am 51. For the first time I feel…. age creeping, decay. A quite cool hip Parisian gay friend who I’d messaged telling them I was finally cracking the running man dance (in a burst of enthusiasm) asked me if i was still at ‘drunk aunt’ stage, or if I had really mastered it? It hit me at that moment that eternal youth is not mine despite not being a mother and ‘still’ looking quite cool. I also had an art buying spate a few years ago - such enthusiasm - and then…. it abated and I was left deflated , with a load of oils to get framed and hang. Where the fcuk is my definitive dharma, that’s what I’d like to know. I always held out hope that once I found it I would have reserves and reserves of energy but for the first time fear it may never happen and so, I try to resist spiralling…. Your dogs slowing down at 10 & 12 brought a tear to my eye, it’s so hard. Our girl is 11 (a pointer, we used to walk with no limits) and we lost our boy at 10 (just awful, too soon) last year, the grief was brutal and the 2 rescues we homed since are lovely but… not him, not ‘them’. It feels like everything is on the turn. My dad died two months after our dog. And yet… I look at my mum, 87, and think how much enthusiasm she could / would still muster if only she had a body , a heart twenty years younger and I feel ashamed - I rouse myself from my torpor and try to get my mojo back. ‘Don’t spiral!’ Is such great advice. Sometimes, everything feels insurmountable, nothing feels exciting - but it passes. Flu doesnt help, makes you feel shitty! So get well quick and 50 is not old, my husband is 57 :)
Very interesting piece. This part makes me think of Helen Keller and her experience when her teacher/companion Anne Sullivan was tracing the word 'water' into her hand -" Imagine going through life in this unstoried state. Your existence would be wordless. There’d be no talking, no reading, and no chatter inside your head: no sense-making gossip or discussion; no rumination; no defensive, self-justifying bullshit. You’d be a feeling-making machine moving mutely through the world, having experiences that continually changed the sensations of your inner-state." Even though she spent the rest of her life blind and deaf it always seems to me as if she found the biggest 'disability' - the most tortuous one - to be without concepts and words and stories. In her autobiography she describes it like this - “As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”
I'm going to have to check this book out, thank you
Beautiful essay. But I think you are describing a random rough patch that could happen at any age. I am just into my 50s and honestly happier, in some ways healthier/stronger, and more excited than ever. I finally have the courage and calm to do all the stuff I was too afraid to do before.
Without sounding weird, I think you have a great middle-age look, Will. And spending days in bed with The Sopranos and Charlie Bigham’s chicken korma sounds like heaven, tbf…
Ha ha thank you Jodie! I appreciate it. It would have been heaven but for the Wuhan Flu
This reminds me that I annually need to sit on the couch for a week and binge TV *without being sick* so that I can actually enjoy it….
Just here to say thank you so much for this. I am 50 in three months and I recognise so much of what you write here. I feel utterly trapped and really, art, and my attempt to create something new and meaningful, is where I am clinging, in order to give myself meaning.
Thank you Ben. Trapped, yes.
Great piece. Can you recommend any good sites for buying art online?
The best is Auctionet - it's a bit addictive though
Thank you!
I have a bad feeling the social media/porn/dating app generation will have a collective meltdown in about 10 years. It’s in the mail. My parents and aunts and uncles aged with grace. The wish to stay young would have been considered silly and self indulgent amongst those tough old Irish people. No vanity in them at all.
This is interesting - and rings true that our obsession with youth is particular to now
Enjoyed your piece. Thank you
I’m a little further down that holy-sh*t-I’m-50 timeline (only by 4 months) and felt a similar flood of emotions, for similar reasons. In part through reading your work it struck me my gaping black hole of grief was caused by a collapse of identity, utter and sudden and surprising. Since then my subconcious, little brick by little brick, has started to wedge together a new identity. It’s not as svelte, sleek or hopeful. Many of the bricks are second-hand. But as a work in progress it’s slowly taking shape. Which is a long way of saying thank you for the insight your work has brought.
Thanks Mateo, glad it's not just me
Very good mate. I’m definitely going through some identity crisis - at our age.
But always remember your mind is a beacon in the veil of the night.
Good to see you here Brendan
Turned 50 on Monday and been sick with a cold all week. So far, no new identity crisis (just the usual one 🤞🏻) but yeah. Thank you for sharing, and the idea of scrolling auctions!
Rueful fist-bump from a fellow 'fifty in February' traveller.
Sending solidarity! What date is your birthday?
5th!
9th - we're practically twins!
Thanks for this. At 49 I'm already there. Getting old is hard enough in itself, but the changes to the culture and society since 2012 or so (to which you allude) added greatly to the burden. Once books, movies, and television were of essential help to me in making sense of the world. Then they were entirely captured and hijacked by ideologues with Cluster B personality disorders. We all know what happened next.
I feel like I adapted to one world and am now obliged to live in an entirely different one. I was once very at home living in the blue tribe mecca where I remain to this day. But by 2019 I felt like the last undercover sane person surrounded by lunatics and barely holding on. Thank goodness that has shifted a little in the last two or three years. But the loss is still felt so keenly.
We late Xers have always been a very small cohort. We went from the Boomers' shadow to the millennials' in the blink of an eye. That hasn't helped either.
As it happens, I too just started rewatching the Sopranos. Maybe Livia speaks for me now, lol.
I'm Jan 1975, and this resonates. For what it's worth, Selfie and The Status Game were greatly influential and informative for me, and I continue to enjoy your work as it evolves.
I spiral and am spiralling; strangely, it feels like standing still. Potential faded in my forties, and invisibility seems to have set in. There are upsides, fewer people to impress. But those crepey hands, who the hell stuck them on the end of my sleeves?
Having left the orbit of my 50s, and now drifting about like a banged-up 63-year-old Soviet Sputnik that gets rebooted every once in a while to let the folk back at Ground Control know that I’m still serviceable (and not ready for the graveyard orbit), I remember those halcyon years when I dabbled in a spot of art collecting. These days I’m happy to let my wife decide what should hang in our hallway. I have a large cork board hanging in front of my writing desk; its frame lined with postcards I’ve collected, and family photographs I’ve taken, over the decades. It is enough art for me: my self as captured by a 115 by 85 cm rectangle of cork.
Although I still have the framed New Yorker edition poster from when I turned 50 and gave myself a first time - and, to date, last time - trip to the Big Apple.
But that’s another story.
One of the postcards is a copy of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of Der heilige Hieronymus im Gehäus (Saint Jerome in His Study). Among the many objects that occupy the room where St Jerome is engrossed in his study and meditation, there is a skull sitting on a window ledge. And it is here, with this symbol of death, the end, Finita la musica, that I would like to etymologically tease out the idea that Fine Art, the art that hangs in our hallways and other people’s galleries, is ‘fine’ in the Latin sense; that it is art for its own sake, it has its limits, its borders. I know that this runs counter to those who adhere to the idea that fine - capital ‘A’ - Art is all about the highest level of quality. But it is to the quality of the mind, rather than the quality of the canvas that I am drawn.
It is from the Latin ‘finis’ that we derive the idea of the ‘finite’, the end. It is this idea of the finite that the author Oliver Burkeman argues for people to consider embracing our non-negotiable limitations. That while there is an “infinite treasure chest of ideas” from which we can construct our identity, we are also defined - and hopefully thrive - by our toolbox of limitations.
‘The self is made up of pieces and parts of things we find in the physical, psychological and cultural space around us.’
Another postcard pinned to my board is a copy of a painting, in the style of a film poster, submitted for the Archibald Art Prize back in 2014. Titled Citizen Cave, it is headed by my Nick Cave (your Nik Kershaw) and credits Tom Waits, Wim Wenders, Debbie Harry, Harry Dean Stanton, Nina Simone, Anita Lane, Roland S. Howard, Johnny Cash, Shane MacGowan and Robert Mitchum; truly an Ocean’s Eleven crew I would still pay to sign on for.
A big part of the reason I’m still a Nick Cave fan, is that he is constantly exploring new ways of plying his craft. It keeps him relevant, and his ever-changing roster of Bad Seed band members seeking to push themselves to create new music that is unperturbed by the thought that it may piss-off the die-hard fans who expect only more of the same.
So yep, I guess you could say I’m pitching for that “Open to Experience” scout badge.
We are our stories, our songs, our images. Just as the story ends with a full stop, Nick Cave’s “The Weeping Song” ends with a fade out, and an oil painting ends with a signature.
Thank you (and Substack) for posting your long essay.
Thank you for this engrossing contribution Richard. I'm a big fan of Nick Cave's recent work - especially Ghosteen and Skeleton Tree
Will, you write so beautifully and this piece resonates strongly. Especially this idea of making a choice for ourselves - because in mid-life any champions or cheerleaders have very much left us to it? - to be someone different, ‘but someone who was still worthy of life’s rewards’.
Ah yes. I relate. Am 51. For the first time I feel…. age creeping, decay. A quite cool hip Parisian gay friend who I’d messaged telling them I was finally cracking the running man dance (in a burst of enthusiasm) asked me if i was still at ‘drunk aunt’ stage, or if I had really mastered it? It hit me at that moment that eternal youth is not mine despite not being a mother and ‘still’ looking quite cool. I also had an art buying spate a few years ago - such enthusiasm - and then…. it abated and I was left deflated , with a load of oils to get framed and hang. Where the fcuk is my definitive dharma, that’s what I’d like to know. I always held out hope that once I found it I would have reserves and reserves of energy but for the first time fear it may never happen and so, I try to resist spiralling…. Your dogs slowing down at 10 & 12 brought a tear to my eye, it’s so hard. Our girl is 11 (a pointer, we used to walk with no limits) and we lost our boy at 10 (just awful, too soon) last year, the grief was brutal and the 2 rescues we homed since are lovely but… not him, not ‘them’. It feels like everything is on the turn. My dad died two months after our dog. And yet… I look at my mum, 87, and think how much enthusiasm she could / would still muster if only she had a body , a heart twenty years younger and I feel ashamed - I rouse myself from my torpor and try to get my mojo back. ‘Don’t spiral!’ Is such great advice. Sometimes, everything feels insurmountable, nothing feels exciting - but it passes. Flu doesnt help, makes you feel shitty! So get well quick and 50 is not old, my husband is 57 :)