Don't Get Too Paltry

[poliphilo]

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Yeah, that's what I think too- only Yeats took it too far with that monkey gland treatment which turned him into a randy old muppet and probably killed him early. There's an art to growing old. You gotta let go, but not so your brain starts turning to porridge.  Listen, the world belongs to the young and anyone over a certain age ought to get out of the road and go sit under a bo-tree- but not so far out of the way as to be out of sight and hailing distance of passing traffic. There's this wisdom thing, see, and this death's head thing; both of which the old should cultivate and present to the young with a teasing smile so the young know they've got it coming.

Comments

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

Doyle converted Professor Challenger into a spiritualist, but probably realized that fans would cry bloody murder if tried that with Holmes, who'd spent far more time in the public's eye. In "The Sussex Vampire," written around the same time, he has Holmes say, "This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."

Many of the later Holmes stories collected in "The Casebook of SH" do seem strange in comparison to the better known, earlier entries, but that's part of why I enjoy them--they feature more scenes of violence and horror than usual, and Doyle even experiments by leting Holmes narrate sometimes. Holmes also gives more speeches than usual in the later stories, including my favorite, from "The Retired Colourman": "Pathetic and futile. But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow — misery."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's always a bit of a shock to recall that Holmes was still detecting as late as the 1920s- that his career overlaps that of Hercule Poirot.

The Retired Colourman is one of my favourite stories, ditto Thor Bridge. The later collections are bittier, more hit and miss than the early ones, but the best of the late stories are as good as anything that went before.