There is a scene towards the end of Francois Truffaut's movie "Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent" (Two English Girls), that in its stark simplicity perfectly captures a moment of chilling awareness. In this scene, the by now middle-aged hero of the story, while passing by a group of schoolgirls, sees the reflection of his face in a car window. Shaken by what he sees, he mumbles to himself, "Mais, qu'est-ce que j'ai? J'ai l'air vieux aujourd'hui." [forward to 1:34]
I will never forget my Pakistani shipping clerk in the port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia whom I had to eventually ban from my office because of his vile body odour. "Don't you ever wash, Akbar?" I wanted to know. "Why?" he replied. "There is no need for it. There are no women here."
Not wanting to be like Akbar, I still take my daily shower but I don't always bother to shave. The last time I did and I saw my face in the mirror, it shook me like it had that middle-aged hero in "Two English Girls". "Is that really me? Have I really grown that old?" I wondered.
All of us who have already waved our goodbyes to the prime of youth are likely to have shared that same shudder of recognition. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his book "Being and Time" referred to it as "death anxiety", although it is not death, per se, that provokes our fears but the fragility of our existence. As human beings, we know that our life's journey will inevitably arrive at its endpoint.
How each one of us deals with it is likely to be as varied and unique as our experience of being alive. Most of us go through life as though we were immortal, and while I regret some of the wasted years I can say, in all sincerity, that I would never wish to be a teenager again — but then, of course, I am saying this from the standpoint of one who already was one, and at a time and in a place when being a teenager was not much fun, hence my decision to emigrate to Australia when I still was one.
My last shave was on Tuesday, so it's time for another one before I sit down for lunch on the sunlit verandah. I still use the old safety razor, albeit a disposable, shamelessly adding to that huge mountain of other disposables. I may even give a thought to Akbar. Did he die a malodorous but very rich man after saving all that money by never buying any soap?
