'Age Is a Quality of Mind;' 'Youth Is Not a Time of Life'

Volume 3, Issue No. 21

OPINION/COMMENTARY

/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /

. . . . . A community service of The Filipino Web Channel (TheFilipinoWebChannel@gmail. com) and the Philippine Village Voice (PhilVoiceNews@gmail.com) for the information and understanding of Filipinos and the diverse communities in North America and beyond . . . . . .

 

 Our latest as of Tuesday, December 28, 2021 

~ The holiday season isn't over yet. And so is the greatest challenge of our lifetime, the coronavirus pandemic. Amidst the crisis, we can find comfort in words that soothe and give inspiration. Two poems about age and youth provide the balm against frayed nerves, which is just about what we need to ease our minds.

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'AGE IS A QUALITY OF MIND'

Poems in the Time of the Pandemic 

By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ

Editor, The Filipino Web Channel

TORONTO - Flipping through the pages of Poems That Live Forever, one of three dozen poetry books in my collection that I brought here from California in 2010, my attention was riveted to two poems by H. S. Fritsch (1878-1933) and Samuel Ullman (1840-1924), both Americans.

I find them meaningful in the current situation we are in. The New Year could already be felt. As we gallop through myriad problems, we keep count of the events that affect us most profoundly. 

The recent past and the incoming year would inescapably be identified with the coronavirus pandemic that began in March 2020 and practically hamstrung us, listlessly, and as Montreal-born writer Jill Clement says, like a fish in an aquarium.

Just to think about it is horrible. In the nearly two years of the pandemic gnawing away at our lives, we find solace in the hope it would die out with the help of science. Truly, a number of vaccines have been already developed, shielding us from catastrophic harm.

The numbers are staggering: 281,228,145 total cases; 5,405,654 total deaths; and 8,971,972,583 total vaccine doses administered, according to Johns Hopkins' Coronavirus Resource Center's statistics as of Monday, December 27.

It is in this circumstance that I find Fritsch's "How Old Are You?" and Ullman's "Youth" appropriate. The pandemic is a universal experience and what to make of the moment is encapsulated in these two poems. 

Fritsch wrote in How Old Are You?: 

Age is a quality of mind.

If you have left your dreams behind,

If hope is cold,

If you no longer look ahead,If your ambitions' fires are dead --Then you are old.

But if from life you take the best,
And if in life you keep the jest,
If love you hold;
No matter how the years go by,
No matter how the birthdays fly--

You are not old.

The worldwide lockdowns, isolation, quarantine, and other stringent public health measures 

spurred by the pandemic have aged many of us, outwardly at least, as we weigh the

the future. But we're far from being old, wiser we would become, if we continue the

trail to optimism.

Ullman felt almost the same, thus in his "Youth" he wrote:

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

General Douglas MacArthur, the first and only Field Marshal of the Philippine Army who famously vowed "I shall return," had this poem hung on the wall of his office in Tokyo, says Wikipedia. And I see the reason why. Not only was it his inspiration, it was also the stimulant that kept him fighting.

"Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul". This is just so beautiful; it's something I can identify with. 

My contemporaries in the Philippines and in foreign media frequently asked why my journalism practice appears uninterrupted from age 18 through more than five decades. Well, without being facetious, Ullman's poem is the answer to that. (Copyright 2021. All Rights Reserved).