Yet there is something wanting to me in this peculiar situation. Things do not pass for the same as they did in one’s first youth: then I looked forward, now I look back.
But even this living backwards is more curious than may appear at a first glance. It is like taking up, let us say, some seven photos of one’s self with a ten-years’ interval between each. The last is wrinkled and bald; one looks at it and wonders how a countenance could have reached so dilapidated a stage.
One takes up the one before; gazing at it, one tries to hope backwards, but is not much encouraged; it is still wrinkled and bald in its sixtieth year.
The third manifests a slight gain—the wrinkles are in part removed, as if they had been under the beneficial influence of cosmetics.
Then comes the fourth in the order of precedence, and it is not so bad; it has all the promise of youth.
We go back a little further; the previous likeness has kept its word—it restores us to what we have been missing so long—our early prime.
But here sets in a most strange mental confusion. Up to this time we have been hoping backwards; we have looked over a past life with ever-increasing hope of the yet better days; our hair has been restored to its pristine beauty, our wrinkles are as if they had never been, our eyes are lustrous, our first youth returns; we shall soon be fourteen years of age once more. Of a sudden, after hoping backwards all this way and becoming our former selves more and more, we encounter our old hopes; so we are hoping both ways—backward, to our beautiful first childhood, forward to our second, in the midst of a mental hurricane, whirling us in an instant into old age again. So ends the pleasing retrospect—our second youth as far off as ever from our first.