When you reach that point in life when you realise, perhaps quite unexpectedly with a kind of clunk, as in certain schools of Buddhist meditation after many years of disciplined aspiration the meditator becomes instantaneously enlightened when the master suddenly shouts Boo! Hooawrrh! or hits him with a bamboo stick, when you realize that the heroic ambition of one’s youth will now never come to be, you don’t quite know what to do with it. For although now dead it nevertheless refuses to quite die, as in classical antiquity the souls of dead heroes were thought to go on living a grey spectral life in Hades, or as a novelist, the adventures of his hero now having terminated, doesn’t quite know how to end the book and writes lamely ‘He lives a quiet life these days in a flat in Earls Court and is occasionally to be seen shopping in the local supermarket largely unremarked, for few realise that so ordinary a looking man in his blue anorak and somewhat faded corduroy trousers had led such an extraordinary life’.
