This is the article I mentioned in my last post “The Thai Time Machine”. What do you make of it?
““Consume my heart away; sick with desire, and fastened to a dying animal it knows not what it is…”
The lines above, and the title, are taken from the W. B. Yeats Poem Sailing to Byzantium.
In my 20s, when I first read this poem – about the spiritual journey of a man, an old man, seemingly expelled from his desires, and from the arms of the young, his heart sick – I felt removed from its meaning. My heart had an excess of affections, and so I could not empathise with this Dying Animal. I was too young to get it. These days, as I journey into the colder climate of the Middle Ages, I too am wondering if age-enlightenment is any kind of decent replacement for the wonderful arrogance and physical lustre of youth.
Jess Boyd 