Downhill


Dear Eugene,

The idea of life being akin to going uphill maybe halfway and then going down for the rest is a dubious picture.

It is to assume there is a hill to climb and I did climb it.  What is this hill then?  And how did I climb it?  The metaphor is leaking out of more than one hole.

Let's take a step back (downhill?) and say there is a hill, whatever it be, career, family, intellectual ascent, even simply our daily rise to meet the morning sun.  Yet the givenness of a pair of healthy legs doesn't by itself take me to a hilltop.  To say life is "going downhill" when one's health deteriorates is then a bad metaphor if one means only the losing of a gift, albeit gradually, as if a "stepping down" of some sort is made happen.

If I've been standing on flat ground with my healthy legs all these years I can't really say I am going downhill.  I can say I am being dragged to a lower place with a name that rhymes with yell.  I was hapless in the first half, helpless the other, and have no hill to speak of.

There is joy and satisfaction in coming down a hill, she who once climbed would say.  She takes with her memories exhilarating, bittersweet, melancholy, on her way back home.  She leaves pieces of herself up there, scattered, by choice.

She didn't lose them; she gave them away.

Yours, Alex

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