Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits -- what else should a man's life be? Especially an old man who has, by a clear stroke of fortune, been violently freed of the comfortable securities that make old men happy to sink into blindness, deafness, the paralysis of all desire, feeling, will. What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings off into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become...
I have become braver in my old age, ready at last for all the changes we must undergo, as painfully we allow our limbs to burst into a new form, let the crust of our flesh split and the tree break through, or the moth or bird abandon us for air. What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?
An Imaginary Life, David Malouf
1978
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