Approaching 50, I like to keep track. And the tracks are there to see.They say, the lines on your face are the expression of spirit and experience, of choice and circumstance, whether of bliss or blunder--pluck or plunder--love, luck, or lucre. Perhaps, the etchings of duck-and-cover versus what-and-wonder. (Like Hamlet, "when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw"; I wonder which way the wind's blowing now.) I hope you can see that I smile a lot, usually; I feel lucky that way.
In what's probably my favorite novel--John Fowles' Daniel Martin--the main character keeps many, many mirrors on the walls of his Oxford bed-sit. The narrator offers two interpretations, not wholly mutually exclusive: first, the signs of vanity, invocations of Narcissus, the celebration of self; and, second, attempts to move from the first person to the third, from mere subjectivity to heightened objectivity. When I reflect on the many, many "profile pics" I'm accumulating, I prefer to think I'm echoing that latter impulse. I think this photo works, showing me as I am: a man of 49 and a bit more, still smiling, still exploring, still willing to tilt at a windmill or two.
Self-Portrait #49. With beret.
