Undefeated

While reading the end of the play, I couldn't help but thinking of a common saying in the NBA whenever a great player nears the end of his career that goes something like this: "Father time is undefeated." Chance says almost the exactly the same thing: "Time--who could beat it, who could defeat it ever?" Yet, despite the inevitability of time, there seems to be a major effort to defeat it and turn back the clocks. Aunt Nonnie seems to sum it up pretty well: "What you want to go back to is your clean, unshamed youth. And you can't." Chance yearns to live in those idealized moments when he is young and with Heavenly. But he can't.

In Sweet Bird of Youth, beauty and love are very strongly tied with with time. It is common, and inevitable, that physical beauty fades with time. What seems new, however, in the play is the notion that "you're too old for a lover." This is especially depressing following Chance's conclusion that love is everything. Chance explains:

"the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don't mean just ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure"

The notion that love fades with time is only later reinforced as Chance gives "back a feeling of youth" to "Middle-aged people" through his "love-making." To Chance, this idea is just a cog in the wheel of the clock of father time that inevitably defeats everyone; time is is an "enemy" that "gnaws away, like a rat gnaws off its own foot caught in a trap, and then, with its foot gnawed off and the rat set free, couldn't run, couldn't go, bled and died."

While father time is, in fact, undefeated, Chance gives himself something to be happy about that he overlooks. As he points out, "nothing that’s happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives” (36). As everyone succumbs to time we can either focus on turning back the clock (as Chance and Princess do), or as Chance aptly points out, we can focus on creating memories that nothing can take away, not even father time.

-Andrew T