Peeri Rased Fasle Jawani

Old Age Has Arrived at the Season of Youth meditates on the intersection of time and desire. The speaker is caught between the phase of life that belongs to desire and the intimations of age that have begun to arrive — a collision that Persian poetry has always taken seriously, since desire is understood to be not just personal but cosmic, and its dimming a form of loss.

Recorded in the early 1971 sessions, this song belongs to the period of Zahir's career when he was in his mid-twenties — which makes the meditation on age and its arrival a precocious act. Young men in the Persian tradition have always written about old age; the tradition understood that wisdom about time did not require waiting for it.