THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

Conrado de Quiros

Our teacher used to tell us the same thing: Enjoy your youth, it comes but once.
But such is the irony of life that you see things only when they are no longer there.
George Bernard Shaw did say once that youth was often wasted on the young. He
certainly knew a thing or two.

There’s this song, “We May Never Pass This Way Again,” by the Seals and
Crofts, that says what I’m trying to say better. In the 1970’s many universities in the US
and elsewhere adopted it as their graduation song. It’s easy to see why. It begins this way:
“Life, so they say/ Is just a game and they let it slip away…” And it goes on to talk about
life’s wonder and mystery, before which we stand like Columbus in the open sea. Don’t
let it slip away, grasp it while you can. For as the song says again and again in the refrain,
“We may never pass this way again.”

The movie “Dead Poets’ Society” makes the same point poetically. Robin
Williams is a teacher in a school pretty much like this, and he begins his course by
bringing out the students into the hall to look at the photographs there. What are you
looking at? He asks his students. The graduates of the past, they reply. No, Williams says,
what you are looking at are dead people. These are people who, like yourselves, once
stood here gaping at the world. But they are gone now. Food for the worms. If you listen
close enough, he says, you will hear them whispering. They are saying, “Seize the day.”

Different expressions, same point. Life: Grasp it like a drowning man, embrace it
like a lover, stalk its wildness like an adventurer. The best time to do it is now, while you
are young, while the blood rushes in your veins, while the world offers itself to you like a
sculptor’s stone waiting to be wrought into a god.

One way to do this is to fill your heart with poetry. For as Dead Poets’ Society
shows, you do not really “read” poetry. You live poetry. Contrary to rumor, poetry is not
something added to life, it is something essential to life. It is not icing on the cake, it is
the cake itself. It is not something about life. It is life. You want to live life fully, live life
poetically.

Easier to understand this if you substitute the word “dream” for “poetry.” By
dream, of course, I do not mean the dream that happens while you are asleep. I mean the
dream that happens while you are awake. The dream of changing the world, the dream of
making things happen, the dream of making yourself matter. Contrary to rumor, dreams
are not life’s trimmings, they are life’s essence. They are not the cold breath of an air-
conditioner. They are the very air you breathe. Your dreams die, you die.
 But the opposite is also true. And this is the point I most want to bring out. Your
dreams do not die, you do not die. Your dreams do not grow old and faded, you do not
grow old and faded.

The Bible says only a child will be able to enter heaven. It’s true, whether it’s the
heaven up there, or the heaven down here. Whether it’s the heaven of religion, or the
heaven of the full life. You need the same spirit of wonder, the same sense of
boldlessness, the same faith in the possibility of the impossible, as those of the child to
enter heaven. Of course, as you very well know, it’s one thing to be childlike and another
thing to be childish. Poets are childlike, government officials are childish. Just as it’s one
thing to be mature another to be aborido. Maturity causes you to build new worlds.
Aborido cuses you to have heart attacks.

Being childlike though is not always as easy as simply refusing to grow old, like
Peter Pan. This world is not hospitable to children and fools, drunks and dreamers. Our
world above all. Ours is a world that likes pragmatists and realists, which are often really
just big words for crooks and tyrants. I don’t know which goes faster these days – dreams
or virginity, poetry or innocence.

But it’s not as easy holding on to dreams when the family gathers to say how very
admirable that one, who has built a big house, and how utterly miserable that other, who
sings for his supper. It’s not easy holding on to dreams when the neighbors gather to say
how very admirable that one, who shapes the nation’s laws, and how utterly miserable
that other, who shapes the children’s minds. It is not easy holding on to dreams when you
gather 25 years later to say how admirable that one, who owns a telephone company, and
how miserable that other, who writes for his keep.

Lucky for us we had activism, although that too wasn’t enough to keep many of
us from biting the dust of conformity, from falling into the pit of submission, from dying
the death of ordinariness. Of course, there were those of us who went to their graves from
the don’t know that they are not as real or present to us today as the pillars of this
building. Old soldiers, they say, never die, they just fade away. Well, young dreamers
never die, they just live on and on.

Juan Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of youth, and never found it. He
dies a bitter man, though not as bitter as the natives he left standing in his murderous
path. But how could he find the fountain of youth? He was looking for it in the wrong
place. It was never in the forest fastnesses of the Americas.

It was always in the quiet redoubts of his heart.