Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation.

Taken at face value, the line reads as a bleak, ironic generalization about midlife: men at a certain age are trapped in ongoing anxiety—about fading vitality, social expectations, work, marriage, or the narrowing of future possibilities. Coming from Sackville-West, whose writing often anatomizes class, gender roles, and the emotional costs of convention, the sentence can be read as a sharp social observation rather than a literal claim about all men. The phrasing “continual desperation” suggests not a single crisis but a sustained condition—an inner pressure maintained by outward composure, and by the demand to appear successful while privately fearing decline or failure.