The conversation had ended abruptly but not impolitely. Perhaps he had said all there was to say for the moment. He had certainly left me wanting to know more. Hadn’t I, like everyone else, often thought of how I’d live had I known all that I know now? But wasn’t it a ridiculous idea? If anything made life and feeling possible, it was transience.

I watched Ralph join a group of drama students, his “contemporaries.” Like him, presumably, but unlike me, they didn’t think of their own death every day.

I got up and briefly talked to my friends—the old fucks with watery eyes; some of them quite shrunken, their best work long done—finished my drink, and said goodbye to the host.

At the door, when I looked back, Ralph was dancing with a group of young people among whom were the two women who’d been watching him. Walking through the house, I saw the kids I’d met at the front door sitting at a long table drinking, playing with one another’s hair. I was sure I could hear someone saying they preferred the book to the film, or was it the film to the book? Suddenly, I longed for a new world, one in which no one compared the book to the film, or vice versa. Ever.

In order to think, I walked home, but this time I didn’t feel tired. As I went I was aware of groups of young men and women hanging around the streets. The boys, in long coats and hoods that concealed most of their faces, made me think of figures from The Seventh Seal. They made me recall my best friend’s painful death, two months before.

“It won’t be the same without me around,” he had said. We had known each other since university. He was a bad alcoholic and fuckup. “Look at your life and all you’ve done. I’ve wasted my life.”

“I don’t know what waste means.”

“Oh, I know what it is now,” he had said. “The inability to take pleasure in oneself or others. Cheerio.”

The chess pieces of my life were being removed one by one. My friend’s death had taken me by surprise; I had believed he would never give up his suffering. The end of my life was approaching too; there was a lot I was already unable to do, soon there would be more. I’d been alive a long time but my life, like most lives, seemed to have happened too quickly, when I was not ready.

The shouts of the street kids, their incomprehensibly hip vocabulary and threatening presence, reminded me of how much the needs of the young terrify the old. Maybe it would be interesting to know what they felt. I’m sure they would be willing to talk. But there was no way, until now, that I could actually have “had” their feelings.