Time’s immemorial work
“The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who’s there?” So, in “Dream Song 36,” did my great hero the poet John Berryman express the problem. The grown-ups get scythed down by the grim reaper and you, still feeling yourself no less a child, eventually look around and realise that there’s nobody left to look up to: you’re it. Or, as Berryman put it in another poem: “Now Henry is unmistakably a Big One./ Fúnnee; he don’t féel so./ He just stuck around.”