For a long while there, I was a young writer, and then, for nearly as long, I was a younger writer (younger than whom, I used to wonder—Robert Frost?). Now I'm just a writer. Certainly not an old writer, no éminence grise, no member of the Academy with yellowed hairs growing out of my ears and nostrils, but a writer, I like to think, of wisdom and maturity, with a few good years left ahead of me. Still, I had a shock a couple of months ago, when an old friend stopped by on his way back from Mexico and revealed something to me about the age we'd attained—or were rapidly approaching. We were sitting at the kitchen table, and he'd just fanned out a group of photographs and narrated the story of each one: I saw the Zócalo, the soap-powder beaches of Puerto Escondido, the catacombs beneath some ancient church. There was a pause, and then he said, “You know, in a couple of years I'm thinking of retiring.” I was stunned. This was a vigorous man of forty-nine, a snappy dresser who'd made good money in his own business. “Retire?” I gasped, summoning up ghosts in carpet slippers hunkered down before the TV at eleven A.M. and slurping up lime Jell-O and bourbon. All I could think to do was fish through the glossy photos before me till I found the one of the catacombs, shrunken tanned hides and lipless teeth, the claws that used to be fingers, people laid out on slabs like fallen trees. I held it up. “This is my retirement,” I told him.
James Baldwin said that we write to give order and structure to a chaotic world, and this is surely part of it, ma