minda

For many years, I felt that my youth had been wasted. I spent my adolescence drinking, taking dope, robbing, and fucking around, when I could have been learning to fluently read Sappho and Thomas Mann in the original. But, while I still feel that it would be wonderful to fluently read Sappho and Thomas Mann in the original, I no longer feel that my youth was wasted. For with age comes the wisdom that it all comes down to ashes in the end. Mary Barnard's rendering of Sappho, along with what little Greek I possess; William Trask's rendering of Mann's Die Betrogene: these are enough for one, such as myself, who was long ago written off for dead. My youth, as I see it now, was spent as it should have been spent. I am alive, and as I write this, the pleasant morning of the vast blessing of another day, another breath, flows through me. I want now to learn to do the tango, so that I can dance in style on the graves of those of my peers, dropping dead around me like flies, who lived their youths, and their lives, properly and salubriously. Mens sana in corpore sano, they say. But a sound mind in a sound body is but a plain and pretty flower in a plain and pretty vase. The world is full of such parlour pieces. Fuck them, and prepare thy dancing shoes, for, having survived my youth, and all that followed, I now enjoy the gentler madness to whose shore I have been delivered, and I look forward to tangoing in the graveyard, with you, my darling, or over you.