Middle Age Dread?

“Only the young have such moments.”

That's the opening line of “The Shadow-line; A Confession” by Joseph Conrad. It's one of my favorite stories ever about the existential threshold one crosses between youth into adulthood. Conrad even comes out and says that in his second paragraph of the story:

“One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness—and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction. And it isn't because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation —a bit of one's own.”

I first read this story in my late 20s about the time when I had finally convinced myself that getting a college degree might be important. It struck a chord with me because, at the time, I had recently crossed my own shadow-line, I was an adult but I could look back and still see the sharp outlines of my youth.

I had finally reached that point of maturity that I had always longed for as a child. The story was assigned reading in a literature class and some in that class I know were turned off by the nautical setting Conrad uses, but the language is pure and the emotion is sincere – you believe the author knows what he's talking about. Some of my classmates, though, were still on the naïve side of that line.

The shadow-line, the story implies, is that the changes from one era of a life is not always so easily defined in the moment, but a fuzzy line that you only realize you've crossed in hindsight. What Conrad doesn't explore in this story, thought, is that a lifetime is filled with numerous shadow-lines. Where are the romantic notions of crossing that shadow-line of simple adulthood into middle age? I'm sure they are out there, but right now I'm too immersed in that transition to want to read about it. Things like this are best left to nostalgia.

The author in his "shadow-line" phase

I think about these things as I nurse a sore, arthritic knee. When I tore the thing up at 17, the orthopedic surgeon at the time that I would one day face a knee replacement. Over the past 30 years numerous orthopedic specialists have repeated that diagnosis. Each time, I laughed it off, that was “in the future.” And, of course, I convinced myself as a young man that when the time came, medical technology would be such that I would be closer to the Six Million Dollar Man than some gimping old man.

Now, the decision on knee replacement is getting closer and closer, and I'm a little offended about that. I've got an appointment with the ortho doc next week about the prognosis on my knee. Talk about confronting middle age.

All of this is swirling around at the same time I've been going to regular check ups. Last week, I had my six month dental cleaning and am now set up to get a partial bridge installed where I had a tooth pulled years ago. I had my annual physical exam, which I usually schedule closer to every other year. If you are an egocentric kind of person, the physical can be either the best or worst kind of experience. For starters, the experience is all about you – your blood, your weight, your blood pressure, your hearing, your everything. If you don't like to hear criticism and judgments about how much ice cream you eat, you probably won't enjoy it.

I don't need a doctor to tell me I'm 48 years old – I feel it every morning – so it doesn't bother me that much to hear what's going on with my body. Plus, going in, I figured that the results were going to tell me what I already know – I got some extra pounds I need to shed. My doc had scheduled this physical when I came in for a referral to orhto. I could see the concern and judgment or her face – she had my weight and blood pressure numbers for that appointment. Both were too high in her estimation, but she didn't ask me if I had just finished an energy drink before my appointment. Those things are great for a jolt to wake you up, but don't really help on blood pressure checks.

The author in middle age

So, I got the blood work ups and came in for the once over. I think the doctor was a little surprised and perhaps disappointed that my cholesterol levels are well within normal and that my triglycerides were only slightly elevated. My good fats are a little low and my heart is good and strong. My PSA levels on my prostate are fine – but not well enough to forgo the physical check of that tricky little organ. Whose idea was it to put the prostate right near a bodily exit?

So, barring some unfortunate event or illness, it looks like I'm destined to be around for a few more years. The one test I flat out failed was my hearing test, a new test where a machine does a radar mapping of your inner ear, or something like that. I can still hear well enough, but I know a hearing aid is somewhere in my future – a genetic disposition toward hearing loss is coded in my DNA.

So I get to confront my middle-agedness.

As I've been thinking about this over the past week or so, I was trying to convince myself that the shadow-line into middle age is marked by physical ailments. Conrad would have laughed at me for my narrow thinking. It's true that the physical gives us constant reminders that shit eventually falls apart, but it is our emotional health that tends the suffer the most. It comes down to the fact that there is very little anymore that is surprising and new.

Think of it like this: Remember all the firsts in your life – your first crush, your first kiss, your first love, your first broken heart. These induce very strong emotions, and even their memory can move us and we savor those emotions. There are days when I long for the feelings I had when I was younger – it's more addictive than cigarettes and just as bad for you. When you begin to reach middle age, you come to the realization that the world doesn't hold much surprise anymore, so you go seeking those things. But in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, “It's a trap!” You can only fall in love for the first time once. That doesn't make second and third loves any less valid or fulfilling; but it's just not the same.

I know I'm passing into this garden of middle age, and I know that all of mankind has passed there before me. And I'm actually looking forward to “the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation,” as Conrad wrote. It's something new, and I can only experience once. It seems, like a first love, to be something to savor.