Beautiful essay by Joseph Epstein on his 70th birthday.

Seventy ought to concentrate the mind, as Samuel Johnson said about an appointment with the gallows on the morrow, but it doesn’t–at least, it hasn’t concentrated my mind. My thoughts still wander about, a good part of the time forgetting my age, lost in low-grade fantasies, walking the streets daydreaming pointlessly. (Tolstoy, in Boyhood, writes: “I am convinced that should I ever live to a ripe old age and my story keeps pace with my age, I shall daydream just as boyishly and impractically as an old man of 70 as I do now.”) Despite my full awareness that time is running out, I quite cheerfully waste whole days as if I shall always have an unending supply on hand. I used to say that the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months seemed to pass at the same rate as ever, and it was only the decades that flew by. But now the days and weeks seem to flash by, too. Where once I would have been greatly disconcerted to learn that the publication of some story or essay of mine has been put off for a month or two, I no longer am: the month or two will now come around in what used to seem like a week or two.

I hope this does not suggest that, as I grow older, I am attaining anything like serenity. Although my ambition has lessened, my passions have diminished, my interests narrowed, my patience is no greater and my perspective has not noticeably widened. Only my general intellectual assurance has increased. Pascal says that under an aristocracy “it is a great advantage to have a man as far on his way at 18 or 20 years as another could be at 50; these are 30 years gained without trouble.” To become the intellectual equivalent of an aristocrat in a democracy requires writing 20 or so books–and I have just completed my 19th.

Still, time, as the old newsreels had it, marches on, and the question at 70 is how, with the shot clock running, best to spend it. I am fortunate in that I am under no great financial constraints, and am able to work at what pleases me. I don’t have to write to live–only to feel alive. Will my writing outlive me? I am reasonably certain that it won’t, but–forgive me, Herr Schopenhauer–I keep alive the illusion that a small band of odd but immensely attractive people not yet born will find something of interest in my scribbles. The illusion, quite harmless I hope, gives me –I won’t say the courage, for none is needed — but the energy to persist…

Well worth reading in full.

Thanks to the wonderful Arts and Letters Daily for the link.

Today’s Guardian brings us up to date on the Blairs’ property portfolio…

Tony and Cherie Blair have bought another house in London near the property they will move into when they leave Downing Street, it was reported last night.

Number 10 refused to comment on the claims that the Blairs have exchanged contracts on an £800,000 house behind the Bayswater property they bought in 2004. The Daily Mail said they planned to knock through the walls to join the buildings together and create extra space.

The Guardian reckons that this will bring the First Couple’s mortgage payments to nigh on £20,000 a month. But do not panic — the piece goes on to predict that Tony will earn £20 million a year when he leaves office.

Gosh! I had no idea that lecturing to right-wing Republicans could be so lucrative. If it isn’t, there are always directorships of Halliburton, Bechtel and aerospace companies to be considered. Wonder who his agent is.

Later… Quentin points out that:

The [ !supportEmptyParas] stuff is not standard HTML – it’s a proprietary Microsoft extension which used to have a nasty habit of turning up where it wasn’t wanted. Outlook would hide it, but some other non-MS programs wouldn’t. All of which makes me suspect that this wasn’t how the cake was meant to turn out.

I did a quick Google search and found another document by way of an example.

What a wonderful thing it is to have erudite readers. A few entries back I wondered aloud about the expression “gilding the lily”. Now William James has written to say that it’s a misquotation of Shakespeare, from King John, Act IV, scene 2:

To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

Just been listening to an absorbing Radio 4 programme by John Simpson about T.E. Lawrence, and was catapulted back to a sunny Saturday afternoon in September 1967, when I made my first visit to Oxford. I wandered into Jesus College (then open to the public) and vividly recall standing contemplating this plaque. (It’s strange how memory plays tricks on one: I’m convinced that I’d seen it in the college chapel, but various online sources concur that it’s in the entrance to the college by the Porters’ Lodge. Must have a look when I’m next in Oxford.)

Translation:

Three years were spent here by Thomas Edward Lawrence who fearlessly championed the cause of Arabia when it was prostrate. This bronze is erected by the young men of Jesus College to preserve his name.

“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars”.

The quotation is from Proverbs 9.1, and is obviously where he got the title of his account of the Arab Revolt during the 1914-18 War and of the part that he played in it.