Youth and age are opposite forces. They often meet in fascination and horror but, with great luck, they eventually coalesce, writes MICHAEL HARDING
JOHN O’DONOHUE, the philosopher from west Clare, was in my class in college. We hitched a lift to Italy, in a truck, in the summer of 1981.
We went over the top of the Alps and stopped at an old church, where a caretaker greeted us, in the fog and snow, and brought us into the ancient sanctuary.
There we saw a splendid altar, on which stood two majestic candlesticks. The caretaker said that Napoleon had come across the snowy path on one occasion and rested there. When he returned to Paris, he sent the candlesticks as a gesture of his gratitude.
I remember John fingering them with love and reverence. It was the way he touched everything he came in contact with – the flowers of the Burren, the rocky fields of Connemara and the hearts of all the people he met around the world, through his writings. In Milan, we had a few drinks with the truck driver, and then got a train to Venice, where we stayed in a monastery. The abbot was an expert on Caravaggio, and the monks put brandy on their ice-cream in the refectory each Sunday.
In the years that followed, John and I rarely met, except perhaps by accident; like once, in the doorway of Kenny’s bookshop, years later, when we brushed by each other with the aloof courtesies of old friends who have grown apart.
Two years ago, John was in New York, and he went to a concert in the Lincoln Centre, where a violinist was playing a Tchaikovsky concerto in D.
He had a seat near the front. He was so close to the young musician that he could feel the intensity in her body as she played. She was so alive in the passionate and creative act of making music that he wept.
It was the measure of how intensely John O’Donohue loved life, and how he continued, all his days, to be fired by awe and a reverence for beauty.
He told the story to an interviewer for public radio but, by the time the interview was broadcast the following month, John had been laid to rest in the cold damp clay of a graveyard in Clare.
He had no grey hairs, and he was only in the early stages of an important career, but he did not get the chance that old age brings, to sit back and relish the past.
When I was young, I considered the prospect of old age frightening. But now I suspect that maybe it is sweet, for anyone lucky enough to get there.
On the day my father died, 30 years ago, my mother brought a flask of tea and a bun into the hospital; he was always fussy about his tea.
And he loved the buns ever since the time she used to work in the Metropole Hotel in Cork; they would meet at weekends, when he drove down from Clare.
One day in the hospital, he squeezed her hand and closed his eyes and died. Thus he deprived her of all the days she had dreamed about, after his retirement, when both of them might have had oceans of time to sit beside each other, just looking out a window.
After that, she had to face old age alone.
As a child, I was sometimes obliged to serve morning Mass in November. My mother drove me into town, and she would always give the front seat to Mrs Coughlin, an old woman who lived beside us.
As Mrs Coughlin manoeuvred her stiff and rotund body into the Morris 1100, I would stare at her legs, because she had huge purple veins behind the grey stockings and the ugliness of them fascinated me. I thought about her as I watched the Michael Jackson movie last week.
Jackson’s legs were more interesting than Mrs Coughlin’s but, even so, it was almost unbearable to watch him move so gracefully across the stage, knowing that a few months later, he too, was asleep in the earth.
On the way home, I noticed a group of gaunt young boys at a street corner, huddled together like poor people in a medieval village; their faces half-hidden by hoods, and as sorrowful as all the Christs that Caravaggio ever imagined.
But they did not notice me, because I am old enough now to be invisible.
Michael D Higgins remembers John O'Donohue in The Irish TimesMagazine tomorrow