The Diary of a Man of Fifty by Henry James

Florence, _April 5th_, 1874. -- They told me I should find Italy greatly / changed; and in seven-and-twenty years there is room for changes. But to / me everything is so perfectly the same that I seem to be living my youth / over again; all the forgotten impressions of that enchanting time come / back to me. At the moment they were powerful enough; but they afterwards / faded away. What in the world became of them? Whatever becomes of such / things, in the long intervals of consciousness? Where do they hide / themselves away? in what unvisited cupboards and crannies of our being do / they preserve themselves? They are like the lines of a letter written in / sympathetic ink; hold the letter to the fire for a while and the grateful / warmth brings out the invisible words. It is the warmth of this yellow / sun of Florence that has been restoring the text of my own young romance; / the thing has been lying before me today as a clear, fresh page. There / have been moments during the last ten years when I have fell so / portentously old, so fagged and finished, that I should have taken as a / very bad joke any intimation that this present sense of juvenility was / still in store for me. It won't last, at any rate; so I had better make / the best of it. But I confess it surprises me. I have led too serious a / life; but that perhaps, after all, preserves one's youth. At all events, / I have travelled too far, I have worked too hard, I have lived in brutal / climates and associated with tiresome people. When a man has reached his / fifty-second year without being, materially, the worse for wear -- when he / has fair health, a fair fortune, a tidy conscience and a complete / exemption from embarrassing relatives -- I suppose he is bound, in / delicacy, to write himself happy. But I confess I shirk this obligation.

I have not been miserable; I won't go so far as to say that -- or at least / as to write it. But happiness -- positive happiness -- would have been / something different. I don't know that it would have been better, by all / measurements -- that it would have left me better off at the present time. / But it certainly would have made this difference -- that I should not have / been reduced, in pursuit of pleasant images, to disinter a buried episode / of more than a quarter of a century ago. I should have found / entertainment more -- what shall I call it? -- more contemporaneous. I / should have had a wife and children, and I should not be in the way of / making, as the French say, infidelities to the present. Of course it's a / great gain to have had an escape, not to have committed an act of / thumping folly; and I suppose that, whatever serious step one might have / taken at twenty-five, after a struggle, and with a violent effort, and / however one's conduct might appear to be justified by events, there would / always remain a certain element of regret; a certain sense of loss / lurking in the sense of gain; a tendency to wonder, rather wishfully, / what _might_ have been. What might have been, in this case, would, / without doubt, have been very sad, and what has been has been very / cheerful and comfortable; but there are nevertheless two or three / questions I might ask myself. Why, for instance, have I never / married -- why have I never been able to care for any woman as I cared for / that one? Ah, why are the mountains blue and why is the sunshine warm? / Happiness mitigated by impertinent conjectures -- that's about my ticket.