AT FORTY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20292, 28 December 1927, Page 7

AT FORTY.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL ACTIVITY

When I was a young man—say, about 22 years of age —'men of 40 seemed to me to be so old that the only thing for them to do was to retire from active life and prepsue for the next world (wiitcs MuglWalpole in T.P.'s Weekly)- Indeed, I wrote at that time a novel called “ Maradick at Forty,” and the point of this book was that 40 marked the close of life. Incredible though it may seem there are numbers of voung men at 20 or so at the present moment who think now exactly a. 3 I did then. My difficultv, now that I am 43, is to know when middle age begins. I am certainly more active physically and mentally; I am stouter in. figure than i was at 22, but not so stout as I was af 55; I do not feel now, as I did then, that some catastrophe is waiting round the corner to leap upon me at any moment and spoil all my cherished plans. It will be seen that I was a morbid young man ; I was certainly more morbid spiritually, mentally, and physically than I am now. I am forced, in fact, to make the platitudinous statement offered by all ageing persons that I feel younger than when I was a- hoy ; I feci younger because I am much more tolerant, because I no longer try to do the things for which I am quite unfitted, and because I am not so deeply impressed bv the unioueness of my pci sonalitv. But then it is precisely these changes, I suspect, that mark middle ago. The 'first compensation of middle age -s

that one ceases to feel middle-arted. Some one once said, rather cmellv, that I was enjovinc: my second childhood an'' this, *f 1 remember riuhtlv, because I published a novel shortly after tlv war 'i which I snegested that the world -ossibly wasn't i n complete ruin and was movinrr into a state of its history more interesting then the h»inrdinte pre-war period. But if 10 vears ago I was in my seem' d childhood, I am now, I suppose, in my second middle ace. and it is beyond question the most delightful cf all ages that 1 have known.