Something about ageing
Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.
St Augustine, Confessions
I just got back from an Explosions in the Sky concert. I feel compelled, for the first time in my life, to use the acronym OMG. OMG! OMG! OMG! This, I assure you, is a big deal.
There’s not much to say about the concert. I’ve heard the band before, a few years ago in Sydney, and I was disappointed. They simply played from beginning to end the album that was current at the time. Tonight they played their best songs from 5 or 6 albums. Including this and this and this. It was was sensational. Ejaculatory.
My post-best-concert-ever euphoria has made it suddenly urgent to write about something else, however: something I can’t quite capture in a simple three word label, something to do with ageing, with the fear of youth passing and with the rediscovery of youth.
Berlin is a divided city. It is not divided by ethnicity – though of course some would say that it is – there is a division between the old and the young, a division which has more to do with attitude than with the slow breakdown of the body.
Berlin is full of 30 and 40 year old teenagers – I am increasingly proud to count myself among them – but there are also a few 20 year olds who, in line with all the clichés about Germanic conservatism, worry about a future which is probably not going to be all that great no matter how well we prepare for it (*nevertheless, fill your basement with cans of baked beans and bottles of water). But the old and the old-young are a minority, and they are probably from Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg anyway. The future, for most, as it is for me, is on hold.
Berlin is a place where, having achieved the requisite level of maturity, you finally come to value your youth, feel the exhilaration and the urgency of being alive as you feel being alive slowly seeping away. It appears, you can be young indefinitely, despite your greying hair and the wrinkles beginning to cluster around your eyes. Perhaps when the skin starts to sag, it’s all over, but until then, it seems that Berlin is the fountain of youth.
At first, it is disorienting, it feels like this. But once you start to get the hang of being young, of being alive again (or perhaps for the first time), it’s really not that hard.
Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.
Augustiner. Neukölln. Fettnäpfchen. Breit sein. Verkatert sein. Alles scheint möglich zu sein. Graue haare. Scheißdeutsch. QWERTZ. Alles.
