In a slightly personal new piece at The American Conservative, Dalrymple borrows a line from Marguerite Duras (“Very early in my life, it was too late”) and weaves it through a meditation on the places and ages he might have wished to inhabit, the faded literary hotels he arrived at decades after their glory, and the impossibility of bohemianism in a world where bourgeois propriety has ceased to exist.
You don’t realize until maturity, at least if you are like me, that time is not on a spool that can be wound backwards at will. Every moment that is ill-spent is too late. Too-lateness is the common condition of mankind.