Welcome 

     I like this painting. A man not past his prime, but on the tired side of his best years, looks back with exasperation at youthful exuberance which time,  that implacable grinder  of lives, has pulverized with its millstones of reality.
     He wears his past, his triumphs, and his losses, with certainy; wears them with an acknowledgement that he is more of the past than of this moment. In this respite he wonders that he has arrived here, still strong but not unlimited, still formidable, but not indomitable. And he thinks, in a flash of comprehension that is more encompassing than judgment and more nuanced than intuition, he grasps that he is like all those now and before and for all time; that we are all products of our ambitions and our fears as well as of our fortunes; that he has accumulated a ledger of triumphs and failures; that hisjoys were always transient and elusive; that he cannot escape hisr regrets and sins, those missed chances, cowardly deceptions, and cruelties (accidental or intentional. And in this moment he knows, with tired certainty, that none of this, may we call it wisdom? None of this could be comprehensible to the  people around him.
     They will have to come to this point on their own. Without him.