Rejuvenation

Yesterday I read the most amazing article in the London Review of Books (a somewhat ponderous publication that I get and dutifully flip through) titled A Lazarus Beside Me by a fly-waisted woman (seen above) named Avies Platt. The piece was dated November, 1946 but chronicled events from 1937 and was only discovered recently in a carrier bag full of "diary entries and other bits and bobs." The article was fantastic -- and immensely pleasing to me -- because it's about an encounter between this Avies Platt woman and the great Irish poet, W.B. Yeats.  First of all, did you know that in the early part of the twentieth century, an Austrian physiologist developed an operation for what was known as "rejuvenation?" Meant for aging men, the operation (which was basically a vasectomy) purported to give men a "second puberty," making them virile again. Sigmund Freud had the operation (good Lord), as did Yeats. What is there to say about this and why did I not know about it, even as I read nearly every single poem that Yeats wrote and particularly love some of those crazy ones he wrote in his latter years? I'd throw up my hands and say Men!, but you know I would have been all over Yeats if he'd so much as crooked his finger at me.

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That’s all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.

W. B. Yeats