Tomorrow I Shall Cross Thirty!

The motion pictures signal the passing of time by flipping the pages of a daily calendar, or by showing flurries of snow melting on the mouths of apple buds; but real life is otherwise. You walk on quietly and reflectively, indifferent to the change that may come over your appearance without your perceiving it, until you reach a day when you stand looking back at ten years gone by, and heave a deep sigh as this phrase strikes your ear: "Tomorrow you reach the age of thirty." You ask in astonishment: Who? I? Why, there must be some mistake I ought to look into — this happens to other people!!

When you turn thirty you imagine you are done with the pleasures of life, and you sigh, saying: only yesterday I was twenty; I cannot be thirty yet, for I am not ready, and it seems utterly remote from me. I still feel strength and drive and vitality; I still watch the delights of life — friendship, love, beauty — crystallizing before me, and in my mind is a notion urging me to change the whole world. Whence, then, comes this strange whisper?...

The specter of thirty looks strange to my eyes; at times it fills me with a deep melancholy and a sense of the end of things that will not return. This feeling of ending I never knew at ten, nor even at twenty. At ten I was a merry child, and life spread out before me easy and serene; cares did not weigh upon my shoulders — in their place were the innocent whims of early youth.

At twenty a girl's mind is in her heart, and she cares nothing for the change she will face after leaving school. All she need know then is that she has grown up quickly, spellbound by the beauty of life, ringed about with sweet hopes. At twenty-one you see her sure of her personality, discussing every subject with interest and examining every conversation spread before her. She tries to lift the mask from the face of life, to work either for a living or for riches; love is her paradise or her inferno, and life seems to smile upon her — or turns its back on her; and the whole world, through her glasses, appears black or white, with no middle ground between.

The day after tomorrow, I must think with my head, not with my heart — and that is the hardest road I shall travel in what remains of this journey. The thirtieth birthday is the harshest day that passes over me, for with its coming I shall give up all my former rights, neglect everything whose possible happening I used to watch for, and stop suddenly to look at nothing but myself for the first time. The end is no longer distant but expected; sweet sayings grow tedious in my eyes, smiles grow old, and fresh hopes turn gray, since that ringing phrase no longer attends them: "and she is still young, too."

Tomorrow I shall stand on an equal footing with the grown-up world, and there is no escaping that stand. Nothing awaited will come forth from the dreams of youth, and there is no time to add to my knowledge. I may feign childhood after this night, but I shall not be the child I pretend. What, then, is the secret that sets these differences between this birthday and all the rest?

At twenty, everything is possible; that is the time for gathering some experience and many capacities — but not so at thirty. Yet I cannot say: my life is over, for I still hear them call me "the little one," and perhaps the spark of luck will flash; the world still holds many possibilities, and I feel an impulse spurring me to grasp any means of climbing the ladder upward, however futile the attempt may seem to me.

The age of thirty teaches me that things, however bad they may be, are bound to move toward the worse; also that I no longer pass quickly from gladness to gloom. Friends occupy a corner of my thoughts at this stage of life, but I prefer the chosen few among them; and I have lost a portion of them to death or emigration and the other affairs of this world — but I have learned one thing: that people do not only die; they move away from their places, or change their policies, and learn pretense and play-acting.

I no longer look down on the world from on high as I did at twenty; and I listen to what a man says, not to the style of his talk. I feel the need for love, though I avoid speaking of it openly. At twenty I saw in a man nothing but his fine appearance and his way of dressing; now I gaze into the breadth of his heart, and measure the depth of his courage and his enterprise, and I want him as he is, not as he ought to be. And I persuade myself, at last, that I am an imperfect person in a world that knows no perfection; so I lower my gaze, knowing that success does not hang upon a single source.

Tonight I feel that love and work unite so that you may walk the winding paths of life, captain of the ship of my own soul. So I shall think with my head, feel with my heart, and help to steer another ship. And if I gather up the harvest of ten and twenty and thirty, I shall step across the threshold of forty merry and active — not gloomy and listless, a vain weight upon the shoulders of life!