Tuesday, 22 November 2011

Too Late for Wisdom.

I was thinking this morning about a girl called Pauline McNicol. I had an innocent, lightweight sort of relationship with her when I was eighteen. I remember her being very pretty, and her father a strict and highly principled Irishman – a bricklayer by trade. I remember respecting him.

I remembered a conversation I had with Pauline when we first started dating, and another we had when she dropped me a month later. I thought about how I’ve always been confused as to why my attitude on a certain subject should have switched so radically from one extreme to the other a year or so after I knew her. This morning I got it. And then something occurred to me:

You know that old saying: ‘Youth is wasted on the young?’ I think it might also be reasonable to suggest that wisdom is wasted on the old.

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