Ages

By David Livingstone

David Livingstone takes a view on life from his perspective at 77 and where things are going in the near future. The wild fires and hurricanes of the past 5 years cause him to take a dystopian view of the future and offers a surprising possibility for the planet's revival. He leaves you, the Reader, to turn the pages through for more than one surprise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796088816

David Livingstone

David Livingstone teaches English literature and other subjects at Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. He has translated a number of texts from Czech into English.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by David Livingstone.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2020903602

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-7960-8883-0

                Softcover        978-1-7960-8882-3

                eBook              978-1-7960-8881-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/06/2020

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CONTENTS

Part 1    The Age of Innocence

Part 2    The Age of Denial

Part 3    The Age of Consequence

Part 4    The Age of Retribution

Part 5    The Age of Failure

Part 6    The Age of Finality

Thanks to Corri

Loschuk for the artwork and title.

PART 1

The Age of Innocence

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I am old now—well, perhaps that’s not strictly correct. I am very old now but not too sure just how many years have passed. I do remember my eighty-fifth birthday, but just how I ended up here is rather a long story. But before going any further, I had best explain just what and where, here actually is.

Lately I have been pondering this age thing. I look out onto a world through eyes that do not yet require spectacles and see cherry trees in full blossom, blue skies, distant snowcapped mountains, and shimmering lake water. I react to a photo of a beautiful woman just as I did when I was eighteen. I enjoy sitting in the sunlight reading the pages of my book collection. There is no aging out there. But if I turn my gaze inward upon a mirror, I see an ancient, weather-beaten, wrinkled face with a bald head sitting atop a skinny and equally wrinkled body—horror of horrors—aged, aged!

So that is me and I live, no—exist in a small cabin on a lakeshore, completely off the grid. I have a wood-burning cast-iron stove for heat, on top of which I cook. I dig latrine holes outside, the depth of which lessens the older and weaker I become! There’s no artificial light, so I go to bed very early in winter and late in summer. I have what, with some imagination, maybe called a lounge, a bedroom, and spare room. The content of this spare room is my life.

At first glance, it all seems rather innocuous, rather dusty, somewhat disheveled, nevertheless innocuous. It is a large collection of my handwritten diaries all filed away in boxes from floor to ceiling. It’s probably of no interest to anyone but me, and after my passing will simply rot away to nothing.

So let us call it an old man’s fancy that I summarize these diaries into a story. The early diaries reflect the thoughts of a child, but as I grew up, they begin to reflect more upon the world around me rather than my own day-to-day activities.

I guess it could be said that the here is this room, and the what is simply me. Perchance this may be read somewhere, sometime by someone, and it is to that someone I write my story.

I open the oldest box and take out my first diary—it was a present on my seventh birthday. I quickly realized that the words of a seven-year-old boy, such as It is a sunny day, so I went outside to play or It is raining, so I played inside are not exactly words of wisdom and are of no interest to anybody! So what to do? I will read through each year, or years, and simply summarize into a readable story.

It is said that