Middle-age has its compensations. You feel no need to do what you do not like. You are no longer ashamed of yourself; you are reconciled to being what you are, and you do not much mind what people think of you.

I am often tired of myself, and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality, and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.

My work is done; I have nothing left to do but to go to my Father.

Middle-age has its compensations. You feel no need to do what you do not like. You are no longer ashamed of yourself; you are reconciled to being what you are, and you do not much mind what people think of you.

Writer Somerset Maugham, after his parents deaths, spent a few stultifying years in his uncle's vicarage. Later, in his teens at a boarding-school, having lost his belief in the existence of God said: "The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God, but on the fear of hell, tumbled down like a house of cards."