Jonathan Thornhill

Old Man of the Inner Sea Jonathan Thornhill

This particular old man enjoying his Last Weekend has a penchant for the sea, but what he finds there is not all as easy-going as he had imagined it would be. He is forced to confront his weaknesses, especially his enormous attachment to a woman, and learn to live without any fear in the freedom of his solitary contemplation. When I was young, I wrote about an old man, and in a way I knew that I was writing about myself. Anyhow, as result of this I had a role to emulate. I spent my whole life practicing being an old man, and experiencing the vicissitudes associated with that phase of life, but on the positive side I learned how to dispense with the frivolity of youthful aspirations and so on and so forth. Now I am old, and I would like to be a young man, probably the same as most, but there is no going back. Instead I seem to myself doubly old, packed tight, tried and tested, surviving against all the odds, resistant to all vagaries of fortune, and somehow impossible just like the man who I once wrote about. Is there sense in this folly?