W.H. Auden, from his “Reading” essay in The Dyer’s Hand:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes … When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.

Lorrie Moore, from her novel Anagrams (via Vintage & Anchor):

Basically, I realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Back on 24 January I go to the Guns n’ Roses show here in Hamilton. The venue is conveniently located right down the street. It is a rainy Sunday night. I walk. The show is kind of fun but kind of depressing. I am not sure what proportion of this depressed response can be chalked up to the advanced age of the band, the advanced age of the crowd, and the advanced age of me. There is something absurd and vaguely off-putting about the way Axl Rose sprints offstage during every non-vocal part of every song, as if he figures why bother wasting his time being in front of people if sound isn’t coming out of his mouth. There is also something vaguely off-putting about the way his face looks like it is melting off his skull.

AAAGH!!!
Twenty-five years later and still in dire need of some serious haircut science.

So today I turn thirty-two and I won’t lie, I am posting the above image in an attempt to make my parents cry like babies. Oh, boo-hoo! Oh cruel time! Whatever happened to our precious little snowflake! (Actually, I’m fairly confident that Mom and Dad are instead just snickering uncontrollably at the sight of their pencil-necked little snowflake’s monkey face and mullet and ridiculous shirt collar like the rest of us are.) Now if you’ll all excuse me, I’ve been looking at these two photos side-by-side for way too long today and now I must be off to cry like a baby. Oh cruel time!