When I was about eighteen, I saw myself as a rather sensitive

Hear now the words of Walter Matthau, spoken with candor and the weight of years: “When I was about eighteen, I saw myself as a rather sensitive, delicate, poetic, romantic figure. And then I got into the Civilian Conservation Corps and into the army, and I started smoking and drinking and being tough and getting muscles, and I had a whole different image of myself.” In these words lies the eternal drama of youth and manhood, of self-image and transformation, of the tender dreamer reshaped by the forge of the world.

At eighteen, the soul is aflame with ideals. Matthau saw himself as a poetic figure, fragile and noble, one who might wander beneath the stars and write verses to the moon. This is the vision many of the young carry: to be delicate, to be profound, to be touched with a light of destiny. But life, stern teacher that it is, seldom allows such visions to remain unchallenged. It thrusts us into fields of labor, into barracks of discipline, into trials where strength of body becomes as necessary as strength of spirit. Matthau’s entrance into the Civilian Conservation Corps and later the army was such a crucible.

The Corps itself was born in the fire of the Great Depression, when young men were set to work healing the land—planting trees, building trails, mending soil that had been broken by greed. There, Matthau found not poetry in ink, but poetry in sweat. His hands, once delicate, grew calloused; his back, once untested, bent and straightened beneath the weight of labor. He began to learn that there are many kinds of poetry: the poetry of words, yes, but also the poetry of endurance, of effort, of comradeship forged under hardship.

And then came the army, where the tender youth became a soldier. Smoking, drinking, muscles hardened by drills and battles—these were not the trappings of the poetic soul he once imagined, yet they were part of the man he became. Here lies the lesson: life does not always honor the image we first hold of ourselves. Instead, it remakes us, often harshly, into beings of iron and scar. Yet even so, the soul does not vanish—it adapts, it deepens. The romantic spirit may have traded verses for grit, but it did not perish; it was tempered, made more resilient.

Consider the life of Theodore Roosevelt, who as a boy was weak, asthmatic, frail. He dreamed of scholarship and books, yet the world’s demands pushed him into ranching, into war, into politics. Through rigorous discipline, he remade his body into strength, and his spirit into boldness. Yet beneath his toughness, the poet still lived—he wrote histories, he cherished nature, he spoke with passion. So too with Matthau: the sensitive youth and the hardened man were not enemies, but two faces of one soul.

The wisdom is thus: the image you hold of yourself at eighteen is but a seed. Life will not leave it untouched; storms will bend it, seasons will test it, and in time it will grow into something unexpected. Do not mourn the loss of one image, for what is born in its place may hold greater depth. Strength and tenderness can dwell together; poetry can live even in the heart of the soldier, even in the calloused hands of the laborer.

Therefore, children of tomorrow, embrace both the dreamer and the warrior within you. Do not fear when life roughens you, when it demands toughness and endurance. Carry your romantic heart into the trenches of reality, and let it guide your strength, so that your muscles serve not only survival, but also beauty, kindness, and truth. Be willing to change, yet never abandon the core of who you are.

And thus Walter Matthau’s words become a teaching for all: the self is not a statue of marble, fixed and fragile, but a living clay, reshaped by time, by struggle, by triumph and failure alike. Honor the dreamer you were, but also honor the stronger self you may yet become.