Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

90. PERSPECTIVE OF THE MOMENT:

One of the things that usually happens over time is that perspectives change little more than do attitudes - and therefore most people go to the grave with pretty much the same ideas with which they lived most of their life - which is why for instance one can still see older people relishing a World War II movie or a Vietnam Vet reliving his Vietnam story - and it just goes on like this - for the defining ethos of one's life is made up of the accumulated moments of its most vivid and most shattering moments and these together occlude to make the thematic scope of that life manageable - it's a kind of rationalizing away of our days and without it many of us would be otherwise insane over moments and ideas and it reminds me of a kid named Nathan who once said to me off-handedly that 'you can always tell when people stopped changing their lives - like my grandmother - because they go on still wearing the type of clothing that was current when they stopped' and it was a funny little comment not meaning much and we sort of laughed it off as he said it (we were in some Houston Street garden looking at fish and turtles in the heat) but the more I think of it the more I sometimes realize the import of what he meant and how it's in many ways profoundly true - I just don't know how much value to give it as an observation - and funnier still is the fact that right there at the corner of Houston and the Bowery most of the people who hung there then were bums and cast-offs without much real choice in their clothing or appearance and lucky to be still wearing any thread at all and having a few teeth BUT nonethless it was a small comment between us and what he meant by 'changing their lives' was that period of a person's life when all is still vivid and when the dynamics of a life would still allow for CHANGE and for most anything to happen - and a lot of that disappears as we coalesce and harden into older age and settle in to the means and ways of things as we would like them to stay SO it all did make sense in a way and 'so much for grandma' too.
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There's always the other factor too of some sort of circular wheel-of-life thing going on in that at any one time all over the globe older people are faced against the rush of younger people coming across and learning (as if for the first time)conclusions of their own about life and its matters which they somehow feel are oddly unique to them but are not - in fact it's the same old stuff being re-learned over and over anew and it's as if an 'old' person is at some (arbitrary) number of (say) 58 in his or her conclusions and the young person is on his or her own number 5 or 7 - and these numbers never catch up to one another for the older person dies off and the young coming up after that old person singularly work through and re-learn at their own pace the lessons the old person left behind - everyone starts at zero - and it's part of the age-old differentiation and difficulty between youth and age : 'nothing new under the sun I've heard it all before tell me something I don't know...' etc. and I know for myself that very often I can't abide more than five minutes worth of young company because of the paucity of references and understandings and the lack of any symmetry between my 70 and their 7.