I have long been haunted by a passage from Milan Kundera’s Immortality.
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Years ago—way back in the early ’90s, I’d guess—my girlfriend at the time sat me down and told me to read the first couple pages of the book. It opens with the narrator, Kundera himself, sitting by a swimming pool at a Parisian health club, watching a comically earnest older woman—60 or 65 years old—taking swimming lessons from a young lifeguard.
As she leaves the pool, she smiles and waves at the lifeguard with the “charm and elegance” of a twenty-year-old: “Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover.” For that moment, Kundera says, she forgot her age.
He is struck by that contrast, by the “charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body,” and goes on to reflect: There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard (who couldn’t control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved.
I’ll admit that the first time I read it, I didn’t really get what my girlfriend saw in it. I mean, I understood the fact that she found it deeply beautiful and profound, but I didn’t fully understand why.
But over the years, my mind often returns—not inexplicably, perhaps, but usually unexpectedly—to this image, to the disjunction between the aging body and the ageless young woman living inside that body, outside time.
For years, the ageless part of me didn’t really seem all that ageless, since it had a specific number tied to it: 26. I don’t know why I spent so many years feeling precisely 26 years old. For one thing, I have no idea what “26” actually feels like, and, for another, I’m sure that, when I was in fact 26, I felt some other age.
There’s an Escher-like quality to agelessness.
As I’ve aged, that agelessness has become much more vague, but I’m jarred out of the feeling, made aware of my age so often—usually by my ankles, when I have to hobble across the room after sitting too long, or when I don’t pay enough attention descending my doorstep—that I would hardly consider these moments “exceptional.”
As ageless as I’d like to feel, or as unconscious of my age as I’d like to be, my body seems determined to remind me that I’m hurtling towards 60.