‘Miserable old age’, by Luis Antonio de Villena: Meditations in front of the wounds of time

He traveled south to find him, fled all moral winters to feel the intensity of enjoying. His vitalism was a gun of passion, A defense against all the gray of this time of ours. But there was always celebration and elegy in him, that is, awareness of time.

That awareness of time is present in this memorable book that is ‘miserable old age’. In it, Villena teaches us wrinkles and loneliness, deaths and dimensions of absences, the future without a future, the wreck, and Consuelo find again In the latter banners of beauty that are young bodies, about to become unattainable.

His poems, crossed as Milosz wanted for the best prose of poetry, are a gallery of lives, of places, stories that form the great plot of old age. That plot where personal biography is filled with other biographies, where The face looks on other facesin other mirrors.

Of an emotion at the same time contained and stark, of a High voltage poetic forcethe book becomes a very lucid contemplation on the human condition, on its limits and the dreams of finding what age seems to deny us.

His long regret, his plant is so sincere, so true that he does not stop at the suburbs of the Senectud, his decline, his shadows, that plenty of the life that Céline said, but continues to seek that glimpse of fullness in the middle of the collapse, that form of Feel the Pálpito de la Vidaalthough the age leaves its irrigation of decay.

It is there where ‘miserable old age’ becomes a major book, a book as disturbing as exciting, in a great book. Under the guardianship shadow of Jaime Gil de Biedma, Villena speaks of old age not only from the biographical point of view, but also from his reflection in culture, in his own feeling, thinking and suffering human, in the splendors and defeats of figures such as Proust, Lezama LimaRussian count Víctor Dolgurov or Leonardo da Vinci.

It is certainly interesting the point of view that adopts, since the illustration that appears on the roof: Ludwig von Hoffmann’s ‘rowers’. Old age accompanied by youth, old age comforted by those luminous youth beings, that “opposite coincidence” that is reflected in the poem that carries that significant title. Because perhaps at that point Aging is not yet to die, but a truce, suspensive points before time ends.

With ‘miserable old age’ Villena is again the great Villena. Because it is intense, ruthless and lucid biographical meditation has a Certainly powerful writingpowerful in its simplicity and powerful in the expression of all the nuances of that “time that takes inexorable” towards that moment when the world weighs too much in the body, oblivion in life.