| Favorite Trivia – AGING |
| “So far, this is the oldest I’ve ever been.” T-shirt |
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“The aged man is happy, he [Emerson] says, in the first place because he has escaped from many dangers, and he rejoices in his escape. He no longer has anything to fear: his life is there behind him, and nothing can take it away.“ Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
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“Older women don’t swell, tell, or yell, and they’re grateful as hell.” |
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“Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.” Jacques Barzun |
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“Neither every wine nor every life turns to vinegar with age.” [De Senectute., I, 18.] Cicero |
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“The hell for women who are only handsome is old age.” Saint-Evremond |
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“That old person in the mirror scares me.”
The B Word Engagement Calendar
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“I think of age as an acquisition, not a loss.” Diane von Furstenburg |
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“To reach old age is part good luck and part good management.” David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Long Life |
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Old age should be a time Linda Pastan (from Musings Before Sleep) |
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“The secret of youthful looks in an aged face is easy shoes, easy corsets and an easy conscience.” Anonymous |
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“Old age, to the unenlightened, is winter; to the enlightened, it is harvest time.” David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
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“That senile stupidity which we call dotage is not characteristic of all old men, but only of those of small mental capacity.” [De Senectute., I, 11.] Cicero |
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“The best armor of old age is a well-spent life preceding it; a life employed in the pursuit of useful knowledge, in honorable actions and in the practice of virtue; in which he who labors to improve himself from his youth will in age reap the happiest fruits of them; not only because these never leave a man, not even in the extremest old age, but because a conscience bearing witness that our life was well spent, together with the remembrance of past good actions, yields an unspeakable comfort to the soul.” [De Senectute., I, 3.] Cicero |
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“You are not permitted to kill a woman who has injured you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged 1440 times a day.” Ambrose Bierce |
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“Every girl should use what mother nature gave her before father time takes it away.” Laurence J. Peter |
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age: The people who will always seem young are those who never reveal their rage – Wall Street Journal Leonard Louis Levinson – Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: 5,000 Defiant Definitive Put-Downs |
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“Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.” Bob Hope (That’s Really Funny) |
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“Perhaps that is the trouble with occasional friends. The less we see them the more we notice their decline.” Ellen Feldman – Lucy |
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middle age: “When a man is warned to slow down by a doctor instead of a policeman.” – Sidney Brody Leonard Louis Levinson – Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: 5,000 Defiant Definitive Put-Downs |
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“Time hasn’t done a thing but wrinkle you.” (Henry II to his wife Eleanor) The Lion in Winter (play) – James Goldman |
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“THOMAS HOBBES: In his old age he was very bald (which claymed a veneration); and sayd he never tooke cold in his head, but that the greatest trouble was to keepe-off the flies from pitching on the baldness.” John Aubrey, Brief Lives (Christopher Morley’s Book of Days for 1931 [October 5]) |
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“When he was eighty, Claudel wrote in his Journal, ‘Some sigh for yesterday! Some for tomorrow! But you must reach old age before you can understand the meaning—the splendid, absolute, unchallengeable, irreplaceable meaning of the word today!’ “Some say that when they are old they find happiness in the very act of living. ‘Never,’ says Jouhandeau, ‘have I felt myself attached to life by so slender a thread, so slender that it might snap at any moment. It is this that crowns my joy in still being.’ “And again, ‘Survival is extraordinary. You are no longer attached to anything and yet you are more sensitive to all.’ “Mauriac says more or less the same thing: ‘I do not fell detached from anyone or any thing. But from now on living will be enough to keep me occupied. This blood which still flows in the hand I lay upon my knee, this sea I feel beating within me, this transitory, not eternal ebb and flow, this world so close to its end—all these insist upon being watched every moment, all these last moments before the very last; that is what old age is.'” Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
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“. . . it is really something of a feat to have lived seventy-five years . . . And now every fresh day finds me more filled with wonder and better qualified to draw the last drop of delight from it. . . I get up before anyone else in my household, not because sleep has deserted me in my advancing years, because an intense eagerness to live draws me from my bed. In the same way I drop off every night with a kind of secret satisfaction as I think of the day to come, even if it is likely to be a dark one; for tomorrow is the future and tomorrow contains the whole of that which is possible. . . “Eventually I emerge into the street, and of all wonders, the street is the most wonderful. I do not always approach it the same way. Sometimes I adopt what I call my photographic eye, and then it breaks up into snapshots, set portraits, and groups. Sometimes I look rather for color, and the combinations of color. Sometimes it is hearing that takes precedence over the other senses. But always there are faces, a sea of faces, with everything that they conceal and everything that they give away. “I set out, walking, walking, and toward me, surrounding me, there comes this passing show, these unresolved destinies that for a fleeting second brush against my own. At the same moment I feel both united to them and entirely separate. I walk on, on and on, faster and more happily; my senses grow sharper, my thoughts soar up and away, and all the time there is the humming of the great swarm of memories feeding upon my past years, and the mere throbbing of my arteries makes my head swim like wine.” Maurice Goudeket (Colette’s husband) – The Delights of Growing Old |
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“When I lamented the loss of memory to Janet, she took the opposite tack, as is her wont. ‘Were I you,’ she opined in the subjunctive, ‘I should practice forgetting instead of remembering. The past is not a bone to be gnawed the way you do.'” Richard Selzer – Diary |
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“Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.” Leon Trotsky – Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935 |
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“Life is just wanting to be older and then wanting to be younger.” refrigerator magnet |
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“Let me grow lovely, growing old— Karle Wilson Baker – Growing Old |
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“How puzzling. Die young, our years are numbered. Die old, we suffer old age infirmities, disappointments, and disadvantages. . . but at least we are alive to smell the roses!” Patty Martino Alspaugh |
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DEAR ABBY: “A friend of mine sent this to me. He had torn it for his church bulletin. He says the author is unknown, Too bad, because I’d like to give this contemporary a big hug. Just sign me.” GETTING THERE OLD FOLKS ARE WORTH A FORTUNE “Old folks are worth a fortune: With silver in their hair, gold in their teeth, stones in their kidneys, lead in their feet and gas in their stomachs. I have become a lot more social with the passing of the year; some might even call me a frivolous old gal. “I’m seeing five gentlemen every day. As soon as I wake, Will Power helps me get out of bed. Then I go to see John. Then Charley Horse comes along, and when he is here he takes a lot of my time and attention. When he leaves, Arthur Ritis shows up and stays the rest of the day. (He doesn’t like to stay in one place very long, so he takes me from joint to joint.) After such a busy day, I’m really tired and glad to go to bed—with Ben Gay. What a life! “P.S. The preacher came to call the other day. He said that at my age I should be thinking about the hereafter. I told him I do—all the time. No matter where I am—in the parlor, upstairs in the kitchen or down in the basement—I ask myself, ‘Now what am I here after?'” |
| prune: “A plum that didn’t take care of itself.” – Anon., Jr.
Leonard Louis Levinson – Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: 5,000 Defiant Definitive Put-Downs |
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“It’s weird being the same age as old people.” T-shirt slogan |
| “‘The unpleasant side of being a certain age,’ says Léautaud in his Journal, ‘is that the least indisposition makes one wonder what disaster is going to strike us.’ The deteriorations observed are saddening in themselves; and they foretell others of a more final nature. ‘It is attrition, ruin, the downward slope that can only grow steeper,’ says Léautaud in another place. It is perhaps this which is most piercingly sad about growing old—this feeling of irreversibility. With disease, there is at least a chance of getting well or of halting its progress. Incapacity caused by an accident is what it is and no more. The degeneration caused by senescence is irreparable and we know that year by year it is going to increase.”
Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
| “Kendy and Mom and I had decided to peel off from the moviegoing one afternoon to look at possible retirement communities—or, as Mom calls them, ‘Finishing schools.'” [After moving into a retirement home:] “Mom’s one-bedroom apartment, in the main building, is at once cozy and spacious . . . she found that putting herself in her new life situation while she was still at the top of her mental game was unexpectedly flattering. ‘This is the Land of Unfinished Sentences,’ she told me. ‘Down here, I’m Mensa.'”
Henry Alford– How To Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People |
| “Growing old, to me, has to do with repetition. Something gets old when you’ve done it for a long time. If you’re always changing, if you’re always curious, how can you be old? You’re someone new today.”
Selma Hayek |
| “‘Sad age comes,’ he [Horace] writes. ‘Farewell to laughing, happy love and easy sleep.'”
Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
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“What’s your advice for people over 50? “. . . Life is an extraordinary gift but it has diminishing returns, so it’s important to laugh. It’s not about you anymore. You don’t matter. And that takes the pressure off having to be successful or earn a lot of money. I ascribe to the London bus philosophy of life. Any minute, you may be just about to walk under a London bus. You’re at the edge of your life at every moment and as you get older, it becomes more imperative to appreciate that. Fifty is a good time to start . . . Don’t waste any time. There’s no time to lose. Get on and enjoy the last half of your life . . .” Interview of Monty Python’s Eric Idle by Hugh Delehanty (AARP Bulletin, October 2018) |
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“Few men know how to be old.” [CCCCXXII] The Moral Maxims And Reflections of the Duke De La Rochefoucauld |
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“Old Age is a Tyrant, that forbids us all the Pleasures of Youth, upon Pain of Death.” [CCCCLXI] The Moral Maxims And Reflections of the Duke De La Rochefoucauld |
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“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, William Shakespeare – Sonnet 60 |
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Synopsis of The Picture Of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde): The portrait of Dorian begins to display the cruel sins of Dorian the day he is cruel to his girlfriend, and the portrait ages progressively while Dorian appears youthful and angelic. When the artist reveals the locked up ‘aging’ portrait to Dorian, Dorian stabs the artist. Later, Dorian decides to destroy the portrait that has aged him so hideously. In so doing he kills himself and the portrait is once again young. |
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“We are lucky when we realize in time that before us are a finite number of years left to live out. Such fate is always at our side. We must endeavor to make good use of our time while it still remains within our power to do so.” David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Good Luck |
| “I am getting so ugly these days that I shock myself.”
John Steinbeck – Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath |
| “Old age brings along with its uglinesses the comfort that you will soon be out of it,—which ought to be a substantial relief to such discontented pendulums as we are. To be out of the war, out of debt, out of the drought, out of the blues, out of the dentist’s hands, out of the second thoughts, mortifications, and remorses that inflict such twinges and shooting pains,—out of the next winter, and the high prices, and company below your ambition,—surely these are soothing hints. And, harbinger of this, what an alleviator is sleep, which muzzles all these dogs for me every day?”
The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, ed. by Bliss Perry |
| “Oh, you fools at Morton’s, thinking you have everything worthwhile with your cars and your money and your deals. The only real value is youth, the only meaningful coin of life, and you and I can only watch the truly rich of the world, the young, as they frisk on the beach and at the Winter Wonderland Dance.”
Ben Stein – Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: Diary of a Mad Screenwriter |
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“He [Andre Gide] is very old and knows it perfectly well. ‘Old age is a horrible thing,’ he says. ‘Aren’t there a few compensations at least?’ I ask. He collects his wits and, as though to contradict what I have just been thinking, finally murmurs what I consider a very fine thing. ‘It is harder to carry one’s glass to one’s lips, but one feels less thirsty.’” Julian Green – Julian Green: Diary 1928-1957 |
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“FLEXIBILITY: Rigidity of thought, decision, opinion is by no means reserved for the old, but the danger of becoming rigid of mind increases with the years. Old people are most conscious of their stiffening bodies; they are completely unconscious of their stiffening minds.” Marlene Dietrich’s ABC |
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“‘Like the leaves that bring on the time of flowers beneath the sun, for a fleeting moment we rejoice in the bloom of our youth; and presently there are the dark Fates at our side, the one bringing wearisome old age and the other death. The fruit of youth rots early; it barely lasts as long as the light of day. And once it is over, life is worse than death. When the time of youth is past, he who once was beautiful arouses pity, even in his children and his friends.'” [Mimnermus, a priest at Colophon, 630 B.C] Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
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Beautiful Women: “Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass |
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“For our life is most short and unhappy, The Ninth Satire: On the griefs of a career man (The Satires of Juvenal – trans. by Rolfe Humphries) |
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“When I am old I shall not waste my days Constance Breed – When I Am Old |
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“My room at Claridge’s is full of mirrors and bright overhead lights which do my undressed figure no charitable deed.” Tennessee Williams Notebooks |
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“Day before my 30th Birthday: Last day of my twenties. I have told myself for months that this would be no big deal . . . I usually like to be in the limelight, but not now. I just wish I could go away. It’s not that 30 is old. It is a different decade. Twenty is still young, youthful, not on the downward side. I know that from here on in, age will come, the wrinkles and gray hair and flab will appear, not all of a sudden, but the shortness of life is suddenly very apparent to me. Also, it is so damn shitty how the body ages, but inside, in my mind and heart I feel 18.” Linda M. Rio (Tara’s mother) – The Anorexia Diaries: A Mother and Daughter’s Triumph over Teenage Eating Disorders |
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“Nothing is more ridiculous in old People, that have been handsome formerly, than to forget, that they are not so still.” [CCCCVII] The Moral Maxims And Reflections of the Duke De La Rochefoucauld |
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“I was fascinated by old people. I tried to solve their mystery with my eyes and young mind but was continually astounded to realize that once upon a time they had been me, and some day up ahead I would be them. Absolutely impossible! Yet there the boys and girls were, locked in old bodies, a dreadful situation, a terrible trick, right before my gaze.” Ray Bradbury – Zen in the Art of Writing |
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“Adolescents who last long enough are what life makes old men out of.” Marcel Proust |
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“Regarding plastic surgery: Is it preferable to not look like yourself rather than to look like yourself old? Is this why so many put themselves under the knife?” Patty Martino Alspaugh |
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“For death is certain, and possibly on this very day.” “Hours, days, months, and years glide by, and the past never returns, nor can anyone know what the future holds.” “Old persons do retain their faculties as long as enthusiasm and industry continue.” The Best of Life: A streamlined translation of Cicero’s essay On Old Age – Georgia Wilson Dingus |
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“Why turn back the clock? Just let it tick tock, tick tock . . . ever so slowly.” Patty Martino Alspaugh |
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“I’m ninety-nine years old. Everything from my neck down is shit, but everything from my neck up is just as good as everyone else’s. How lucky is that?” Unidentified man in photo by Brandon Stanton in Humans of New York |
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“In an epigram he [Lucian of Samosata] addresses an elderly woman: ‘You may dye your locks, but you can never dye your years; you will never make the wrinkles vanish . . . Never will white lead or vermilion turn Hecuba into Helen.'” Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
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“People always say that from a worm there comes a butterfly: with mankind, it is the butterfly that turns into the worm.” Ferrante – La Reine Morte (Henry de Mntherlant) |
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“You have to look not between, but beyond, the lines as you age.” Patty Martino Alspaugh |
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“Make war upon this bloody tyrant, time!” Sonnet 16, William Shakespeare |
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“In 1926, speaking to the American Viereck, he [Freud] said, ‘It may be that the gods are merciful when they make our lives more unpleasant as we grow old. In the end, death seems less intolerable than the many burdens we have to bear.'” Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
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“‘Give us many years, O Jupiter, give us long life!’
“But a long old age is full of continual evils: “Young people vary a lot; one, you will find, is more handsome, “Wine is no good any more, food everlastingly tasteless. The Tenth Satire: On the vanity of human wishes (The Satires of Juvenal – trans. by Rolfe Humphries) |
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“I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward, but I look forward with joy to the years ahead and especially to the surprises that any day may bring.” May Sarton – At Seventy: A Journal |
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“Space and Time. As one ages, time flows faster. Once I read an interesting comment upon this fact: If you tell a five-year-old boy he must wait one year before going to the circus, he has to wait one-sixth of his life. If you tell me I must wait a year for something to happen, I have to wait only 1/84th of my life.” Edward Robb Ellis – A Diary of the Century: Tales From America’s Greatest Diarist |
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“Eighty years old! No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind! And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does without them!” Paul Claudel – Journal |
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“…So precious life is! Even to the old
The hours are as a miser’s coins!” Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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“Every stage of life is a burden to those who have no fund of happiness within themselves: but they who derive all their felicity from this source cannot possibly think anything grievous that proceeds from the stated order of nature. In which class old age may, in a special manner, be ranked: the attainment whereof is the universal wish of mankind; who make it no less the subject of complaint, when obtained. So great is the mutability of their folly and perverseness! “It has stolen upon us, say they, sooner than we could have imagined. But then who obliged them to make a false computation? For how faster, pray, does old age creep upon youth, than youth upon infancy? Again, what less burdensome would old age be, should they live to eight hundred years, than it is at eighty? For the past part of life, however long that may be, can afford no satisfaction to comfort an old age ridiculous in itself.” [De Officiis., I, 2.] Cicero |
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“It’s about time I started looking my age [68].” Patty Martino Alspaugh |
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“None of us wants to look old. But if you want to get old I guess you gotta look old.” Patty Martino Alspaugh |
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“To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.” [September 21, 1874]
Amiel’s Journal
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“Both women were what can most easily be called nice. They dressed in good black or navy-blue clothes for dinner, even through the Canal Zone, and their hair was soft instead of in the tight waves of most elderly middle-class American women . . . All in all, they were as nearly invisible as one can be after sixty-five and still breathe and defecate and chew.”
M.F.K. Fisher – Sister Age
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“The whole secret of remaining young in spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthusiasm in oneself, by poetry, by contemplation, by charity. . .” [December 4, 1863]
Amiel’s Journal
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“If I learned anything in my 29 years, it’s never admit your age.”
The B Word Engagement Calendar
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“Monsieur Patrouix is a Catalan born in Perpignan. ‘In order to reach old age,‘ he says, ‘people must work. Only the lazybones die early.’ I tell him that in order to grow old, we have to stay young.”
Ernst Jünger – A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945
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“Except for Garbo and Shearer, Crawford was the only MGM star to have made the transition from silent star to sound star. She had, over time, become a credible actress. And at thirty-five she was more beautiful than ever. For all that, Louis B. Mayer wanted to replace his stable with new faces. His method of eliminating the older actresses was to give them bad films; they, in order to preserve their dignity, would exit gracefully. The plan worked. After Crawford had a series of flops and Mayer awarded plum parts to newcomer Greer Garson, Crawford got the point and demanded a release from her contract. In 1943 she cleaned out her dressing room and left the only real home she had ever known. . . “In 1945, Crawford didn’t have to work at keeping her image alive. The release of Mildred Pierce and the Oscar for Best Actress signaled a renaissance in her career . . . Unfortunately middle age brought on insecurities. She felt threatened by the younger actresses who appeared in her films. During these years her drinking escalated and her ritual of evening cocktails was changed to begin earlier in the day. On the set she drank 100-proof vodka from a flash encased in one of the many covers she had designed to match her outfits.” Annette Tapert – The Power of Glamour
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“Grandmother loved medical treatment, and constantly drove to hospital, where she said she was fifty-eight instead of seventy, for she feared that if the doctor knew her age, he would refuse to treat her, and would tell her it was time to die.”
Anton Chekhov – The Peasants
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 “I went from zero to sixty a lot quicker than I expected to.”
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“‘Never let them see you in public after you’ve turned thirty-five. You’re finished if you do,’ Edith Shearer once cautioned her daughter [Norma Shearer]. Off-screen, Norma no longer stuck her head out for even a breath of fresh air without full makeup. As a guest in other people’s homes she always checked the lighting before positioning herself in an area of the room.”
Annette Tapert – The Power of Glamour
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“‘It takes a very long time to be young,’ she [Claudette Colbert] confided when she was pushing eighty.”
Annette Tapert – The Power of Glamour
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“In 1956, Del Rio embarked on a stage career that brought her an equal measure of success [as film had] . . . ‘She looked thirty-two on stage,’ recalls Douglas Whitney. ‘She always said, “When you reach a certain age, the stage is much kinder.”‘”
Annette Tapert – The Power of Glamour
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“With maturation you don’t necessarily feel a whole lot different from what you felt when you were younger. I’m just looking for the joy of a good moment.” Michael Douglas, AARP interview (April/May, 2021) |
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“[Dolores] Del Rio saw her real secret as more internal: ‘Exercise, diet, beauty treatments—these things are all a complete waste of time,’ she explained in 1964, ‘because everyone must get older. If women were more sensible they would cease going to beauty parlors for facials and would instead lie down quietly in the peace of their bedroom for the same length of time and arise more beautiful in face and more peaceful in spirit. The fact that I’m aging makes me a part of life, a part of the bigger scheme of existence . . . It is my mind, not my body, that I am trying to preserve, because it is through the mind that I can stay young’ . . . “Del Rio more than anyone understood the foundation of supreme style: ‘Take care of your inner beauty, your spiritual beauty, and that will reflect in your face. We have the face we created over the years. Every bad deed, every bad fault will show on your face. God can give us beauty and genes can give us our features, but whether that beauty remains or changes is determined by our thoughts and deeds.” Annette Tapert – The Power of Glamour |
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“I walked over to have a look at this Hungarian bombshell (Zsa Zsa Gabor]. I saw she was one of the those blondes who put on ten years if you take a close look at them.” Marilyn Monroe (with Ben Hecht) – My Story |
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“What pleasurable hopes are thine, Old Age! Euripides |
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“Day 142. As Julie and I finish our dinner, we watch an old man get up from his table and shuffle off to the bathroom. He emerges a few minutes later and sits down at an empty table. It is a table two tables away from the table with his wife and kids. He sits there alone for several minutes, his head cocked, staring into the middle distance. What’s going on? Is he mad at his family? I didn’t see them fighting. Why his banishment? “Suddenly the daughter notices her father sitting two tables away. ‘Dad!’ she calls. ‘We’re over here. Over here!’ He looks over, suddenly remembering. He returns to the table, still somewhat dazed.” [January 20, 2006] A. J. Jacobs – The Year of Living Biblically |
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“Some satirists have complained of life, inasmuch as all the pleasures belong to the forepart of it and we must see them dwindle till we are left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age. ‘To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season—delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Fontenelle at the age of ninety, being asked what was the happiest time of his life, said he did not know that he had ever been much happier than he was, but that perhaps his best years had been those when he was between fifty-five and seventy-five . . . True, in old age we live under the shadow of Death, which, like a sword of Damocles, may descend at any moment.” Samuel Butler – The Way of All Flesh |
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“When I am an old woman, I will stop trying to look beautiful. I will quit wearing makeup and buying uncomfortable clothes because they look good. Maybe I will take up nudism. I will dance and play basketball and replenish my stock of Crayolas. I will write stories and they will be good, because by that time I will have real stories to tell, and I won’t be just a sack of words. When I am an old woman I will leave my clothes on the floor (if I wear any) and make someone else do the laundry. I will put plants everywhere and plant flowers in the yard. I will take up karate and learn how to flamenco-dance. I will never, ever, ever cook. I will race my grandchildren and beat them and I will actually run when we play baseball. I will get a cow and put it in my backyard and I will get a motorcycle and some leather pants.” [March 9, 1993] Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie |
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“‘Would you like to do an old woman a favor?’ “‘Very much so,’ said John, smiling and looking first at Mrs. Tenaker and then about the room, ‘but there are no old women here as far as I can see.'” Edward Noyes Westscott – David Harum |
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“As I was dressing this morning, I had a disheartening concept of what my aging body requires. It is not only a poor, fumbling, tremulous machine; it is a decaying mass of flesh and bone. It needs constant care to prevent its being a nuisance to others. It stinks. It sweats, wrinkles and cracks. It was a poor contrivance at the beginning—it is now a burden. I must continue to wash it, dress it, endure its out-thrusting hair and fingernails and keep its internal cogworks from clogging. The best I can do for it is to cover it up with cloth of pleasing texture and color, for it is certain to become more unsightly as the months march on.” [July 18, 1939] Hamlin Garland’s Diaries |
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“For him [Aristotle] the soul is not pure intellect; it is in necessary relationship with the body and even brutes possess one; the body must remain intact for old age to be happy. ‘A beautiful old age is one which may have its inherent slowness but without any infirmity. The whole depends not only upon the physical advantages the person may have, but also upon chance,’ he says in the Rhetoric. Simone de Beauvoir – The Coming of Age (trans. by Patrick O’Brian) |
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“Caresse Crosby gave me a shock when she appeared in a bright deep red dress, a buoyant dress, frou-frou, walking lightly on very high heels, but then her face appeared like a ruined mural, eroded with time. The powder and the lipstick did not adhere to its dryness but seemed about to crumble off.” [Fall, 1956] Anaïs Nin – The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume Six 1955-1966 |
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“Grow old along with me! Robert Browning – Rabbi Ben Ezra |
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“It is frightening to lose control of your body in any way. It is especially tragic when the body’s central control system, the brain, is the target of an angry destructive process that science has been unable to tame or reclaim. Memories tell us who we are and where we have been and they warm us and provide direction. In later years, the old memories remain to offer familiar anecdotes and the safety of the past.” Thomas DeBaggio – Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s |
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“Lord Chief Justice reprimands Falstaff and mocks him, in a tirade of negative images of age, for trying to appear young [Shakespeare’s Henry IV]: ‘Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, and an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part of you blasted with antiquity? And will you yet call yourself young? Esther Harriott – Writers and Age: Essays on and Interviews with Five Authors |
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“We, the aging, are viewed as a burden instead of a resource. As Betty Friedan wrote in her own book on aging, ‘The old people begin to look like greedy geezers to the young, because (we’re) costing the young so much, in so many ways.’ “This is a distorted view, of course, and not only a great disservice to the old but also one that inevitably returns to haunt the young. A Chinese story I love points this out beautifully. “It tells of an old man who’s too weak to work in the garden or help with household chores. He just sits on the porch, gazing out across the fields, while his son tills the soil and pulls up weeds. One day, the son looks up at the old man and thinks, ‘What good is he now that he’s so old? All he does is eat up the food! I have a wife and children to think about. It’s time for him to be done with life!’ “So he makes a large wooden box, places it on a wheelbarrow, rolls it up to the porch, and says to the old man, ‘Father, get in.’ The father lies down in the box and the son puts the cover on, then wheels it toward the cliff. At the edge of the cliff, the son hears a knock from inside the box. ‘Yes, father?’ the son asks. The father replies, ‘Why don’t you just throw me off the cliff and save the box? Your children are going to need it one day.'” Ram Dass – Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying |
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“. . . the urgency to keep our bodies alive for as long as possible is undeniable. This reminds me of a comment made by a French woman, the oldest living person on record, when she was asked on her birthday what she expected the future to be like. ‘Very short,’ she replied.” Ram Dass – Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying |
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“T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘Getting older, you refuse to fritter away your time on nonsense. You drop your masks, your little vanities and false ambitions.’ He hadn’t known my mother. I was alone with her one day in her hospital room a few days before she passed away. She was very weak, but with what little remaining strength she had, she held a fan in front of her mouth so that I wouldn’t see her without her dentures. Her gums had become so sensitive that she could no longer wear her false teeth, and nobody but my father and her dentist was permitted to see her without them.” Ram Dass – Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying |
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“When I got to my mother’s house, the first thing my mother said was that she was waiting for Mr. Ardamanian [her Mother’s rug cleaner who had almost seduced her]. I jerked in my chair. It seemed too strange, to have thought about him that morning for the first time in many years. Suddenly I was very upset, for of all things in the world I did not want that old man who had once found me worth touching to see me tired, mopish, middle-aged. I felt cruelly cheated at this twist and I cried out, ‘But he can’t be alive still! Mother, he must be a hundred years old.’ She looked at me with some surprise at my loud protest and said, ‘Almost. But he is still a good rug man.”
M.F.K. Fisher – Sister Age
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