This business of being old is bothering me. Yes, there are aches and fragilities and coughs and creaks and increasing physical ineptitude of all kinds. But in what really matters – love of what the brain can do and fascination with what it can never know, eagerness to learn, delight in new revelations of nature’s variety and man’s achievements, desire to be around forever to see what happens – I feel as I have always felt. It does not change.
Cicero, in his great essay on old age, is not entirely consoling when he writes: “It cannot be supposed that nature, after having wisely distributed to all previous periods of life their peculiar and proper enjoyments, should have neglected the last act of the human drama and left it destitute of suitable advantages.” That “last act” business intrudes ominously on the pleasing truth of the observation.
