How To Stay Young
On The Sweet Amazement At The Stars & The Love Of Wonder
The last house we rented in Los Angeles had belonged to a gentleman called George, who had died at home at 100 years old, after living in the same house since he was a young man, and raising his son there as a single dad. We felt like we got to know George pretty well, as the garage - which for some reason always becomes our favourite part of any house - was pretty much untouched/uncleaned when we moved in and all of George’s cool stuff was in there. This is where he kept his remote controlled electric train set which had train tracks winding around the top of the four walls, up high, decorated with painted skies and trees and tunnels and all that fun stuff. It was probably the reason why we rented the house, because what could be cooler than a house with an old garage with a semi-working train track in it? We spent a small fortune trying to make it all function smoothly again for the delight of our young boys but eventually, after a solid few years of trying, had to give up the train ghost and pass them on to a true train enthusiast (no it wasn’t Neil Young*, though that would’ve been really cool).
This was where all his tools were meticulously hung with labels and hand drawn outlines to show what belonged where, pages torn from magazines with incredible photographs of planets and space and the cosmos decorated the cupboard doors. And this is where we found this poem printed on a parchment thin piece of paper, in the trash, along with George’s driver’s license and old electricity bills and various statements and periodicals and the paper trail of life. We saved it from the trash and stuck it back on the wall and read and pondered on it often. The words seemed very wise. What I took from it was to maintain a love of wonder and sweet amazement at the stars and an unending appetite for what’s next.
In case you can’t read ye-olde fonte, I transcribed for you:
Youth is not a time of life.
It's a state of mind.
Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, distrust, fear and despair … these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.
Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart the love of wonder, the sweet amazement at the stars and the starlike things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what’s next, and the joy and the game of life.
You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
Curious to see if I could find any more about it, I got my Google on this morning, and discovered that this poem was written at age 78 by Samuel Ullman, a German Jewish immigrant to Alabama, and rather bizarrely the poem is very well known and loved in Japan as it hung on the wall behind the desk of General Macarthur in his Tokyo office. Ullman was apparently a humanitarian hardware store owner, who was dedicated to advocating for education for Black children and hospitals for the poor.
I also found out that George’s version was a fairly brutal edit of the full poem, which amongst other sentences, also had this final verse, which I really love:
In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite - so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!
Friends - keep those wireless receivers open!
*Here’s more about Neil Young’s trainset, I know you’ve been waiting:
From Trains magazine:
To begin, Neil created his layout, which covered approximately 1,000 square feet on his ranch in northern California, to run through an assortment of natural landscapes outside his home. That’s right – the unforgettable three-rail display was built not inside an immense train room but instead filled in space among the gardens and landscaping outdoors. Few O gauge modelers ever attempt such a venture, much less one on the scale of Neil’s.
And from a 2012 New York Times profile titled Well Hello, Mr. Soul written by David Carr:
Just in case I was too wound up about making sure I was getting all I needed for a big rock-star profile, we stopped at the train barn for about an hour. This is a place where Young is supremely comfortable, a miniworld he built with his own two hands, where he controls everything with technology that he helped make. I found the layout baffling and thrilling — there were rocks and chunks of redwood from all over the ranch and he had let some of the verdant moss go dry to “model the drought” that was going on in the world at large. There were at least six different trains on hundreds of feet of track and when Young, with a little urging on my part, set everything to motion, we weren’t so much a journalist and subject as a couple of grown men on a caper, playing with a massive train set in the middle of the day. It was sort of magical in there and the fact that the guy who made it and ran it also wrote some of the most important songs in the rock canon seemed a little beside the point. It was hard not be charmed by the remarkable execution of a deep obsession.
Here’s to weird obsessions.
Hope the Easter Bunny hid some chocolate eggs in your back yard (not weird at all…)
Stay young etc
Eeeeek that Bunny!! Spooky old thing.
What a great post!! Loved the wireless image as well. My wires used to be a bit fragile, I’ll keep it in mind.
I just love your stories Lo. And the way you tell them 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽❤️