1. In case you were thinking of growing old, I offer you the following reflections (thirteen in number, in no particular order), starting with this one: The mental state that accompanies old age, much more so than in other periods of life, is that of disbelief. Am I really already old? How is it possible that so many years have passed? Wasn’t it just yesterday that I wrestled with the world? And where did that world go, anyway, my old familiar opponent? I assure you, it never stops being surprising. Or put another way: It never feels quite natural to be old. (Old age brings with it, for example, a most unnatural fragmentation of the body: the left hip goes years before the right; this or that organ begins to fail while the one adjacent to it remains perfectly healthy; every piece of you turns out to be on its own separate schedule.) Poor Hegel was probably never more foolish than when he wrote on the subject of old age, never more violent in his desire to press human life into the rounded loop of reconciliation (he had the temerity even to describe old age as “a return to oppositionless childhood”). But no, contrary to Hegel’s fantasy, old age is nothing other than estrangement itself—estrangement from the world, from our bodies, and finally from life—even if it be a sort of estrangement which, like that exhibited by stone monuments whose original significance no one remembers any longer, is borne serenely and like a secret. “Such are the indignities of time that take you unawares,” said a great moralist from Cambridge; “within your power is little more than the grace with which you sit for your portrait.” And does not a bust or stone statue—or for that matter a human skull—always look at least a little surprised? Is death itself not a betrayal? It is possible, should we look deep enough, that we will detect the surprise of Medusa in every frozen form, just as we find it in ourselves the moment we start to ice over.
2. Everything around you—technology, the social world, time itself—only speeds up as you get older. Given enough years you will find yourself lagging behind. At some point, you’ll cease to care about this; at another (later) point, you may even start to feel proud, proud of not keeping pace with the world. All life leads to the same noble end: that of being left behind. One day, if you live long enough, and if you’ve drained your cask down to the dregs, you’ll welcome this situation as if it were a reward, one that had been doled out very slowly. Being old—and perhaps dying, too—is after all not a speeding-forth (into the unknown or the future or the afterlife), but, in the ideal case, a gentle lingering back. (Remember that the Proustian sigh of age was not without sweetness, the velvety patina of the years…)
3. A discovery you will make in old age, should you be lucky or unlucky enough to get there: All the old impulses are preserved. The rich and exhausting life you led, the pleasures you felt or denied yourself, won’t matter; whether you were loved or unloved, well-heeled or cracked and calloused, it won’t matter. The primeval, mindless desires, coming and going like clouds over the sea, now in wisps, now in rolling banks, now dissipated, now storming—they will stay with you, deep into your last days. (The plundered lily, said Philoxenus, with swollen stem, still longs for the moth.) Even the eunuch, whose flushed cheek betrays him, feels remnants of once-powerful but desultory wants, and every respectable man, though weary with age and custom, must hide his howling ape. No man is spared it, I’m quite sure. (I suppose it’s not my place to speak on behalf of women, but probably they’re not spared either.) Even at a hundred, when your teeth have gone hollow and your sweetbreads are failing you, you’ll still dream, from time to time at least, of shapely limbs and soft lips.
4. Adolescents often go through a sulking phase. This is because it is at that point in their young lives that they first learn: they are not special. This truth is learned a second time in old age. The first time it was a tragedy; the second time it is a farce (or better, it is a comedy in spite of itself, a melodrama whose old seriousness now makes it unserious, a Trauerspiel). No one is special enough not to die; universality will have the last word, no matter how strenuously our rebellious pluralism might protest.
5. Books are the great reward of old age. (You will never read more deliberately than when you are old.) Woe to those who would embark upon advanced years without some small library!
6. According to an old Mesopotamian legend—a poet’s invention, no doubt, as all legends are—Ashur-shaduni, the brief Assyrian king, was visited by Pazuzu the devil after only a month into his reign. Over the course of their exchange, which lasted but a day, the young monarch aged sixty years—“Two years for each day of your tenure as king,” the devil said, “which, though you do not remember, I granted you, and for which you now pay in the currency of time.” When his uncle sought to depose him, the suddenly-elderly Ashur-shaduni relinquished the throne without resistance. “What is power without time,” he asked his usurper. “A nullity,” his grinning uncle replied. After a year locked in a cell, and after languishing almost to the point of death, Ashur-shaduni was visited once more by his uncle, who then asked him, “And what is time without power?” Ashur-shaduni replied, “Peace, a hell.” The wretchedness of all politics, and of all aged politicians, is expressed in this parable, and no doubt was known to the poet who composed it. Such knowledge, indeed, is as ancient as politics itself. The old Cynic maxim is eternal: Only the worst would rule. (I recite this fable as an allegory, and as an example: All the most difficult truths are learned in old age.)
7. Just speaking mathematically, at least half of all people will leave no sweetheart behind when they die. To be sure, the rarity and finitude of romantic love are part of its charm. No one grasps these realities better than the old.
8. It may be a tautology to say that old people are well-acquainted with time. It takes a while, of course, to build up that closeness. I’m reminded of J.B. Rhine’s speculation that we are all capable of seeing into the future; the problem—or so Rhine hypothesized—is that actual pre-cognition and mere imagination are likely to be phenomenologically indistinct from each other: we can never be sure if we are seeing the future, or if our minds are just making up pictures. (All images of the future, in other words, both real and fabricated, would be experienced the same; indeed it is just so with memory, which is why we can never be sure if the remembered images that flash through our minds are the actual past or just the inventions of our fancy.) It is only when we get old and can look back over our lives—now that it’s too late to trust our youthful visions—that we can see just how frequently we were correct in our predictions. Young seers we were! Alas, and as Proust revealed in his thousands of pages, true familiarity with time only dawns on us when we are old. Only then do we get to shake its paw, as it were, and greet it as we might a longstanding and more powerful rival with whom we must now draft an armistice.
9. A society in decline tends to deal poorly with its elderly, for it “fears…its reflected image in old age” (E. Bloch). But we can detect another reason for that ill-treatment: older generations know better than anyone else that there is no such thing as pure progress. Every advance is also a loss of ground somewhere else; every gain is forfeiture. Part of old age is being aware of just how much has been lost; nostalgia, as both Schopenhauer and the devil knew, is no illusion. Indeed to the contrary: our memories of lost beauty are the brutal truth! Decaying societies and decaying men keep the same belated knowledge in their hearts, that nothing was good or bad but time made it so. And Time—if you’ll excuse the anthropomorphism—changes her mind quite a lot.
10. Everything Hegel says about the superfluity of prefaces (at least when they are attached to philosophical works) applies equally well to epilogues. For whatever might be said about the contents of a book in an epilogue either belongs in the main body of the text (in which case the book must be judged to be incomplete), or else it is extraneous to it, and is fastened onto the work more or less artificially. But is this not just a prejudice of our thought, i.e., that we prefer organic unities at the expense of more disjointed and fragmented forms? It has become something of an intellectual habit—among dialectical thinkers, for example—to say, after Hegel once more, that the bud transcends itself in the blossom, as the blossom does in the fruit. We seem less eager, however, to declare that the fruit transcends itself in wilted leaves and drooping stems, or that the purpose of the former was to generate the latter. It is a question worth asking: Is old age the final outcome of life, its consummation, or is it only its decline and, therefore, ultimately unnecessary? Is becoming old the essential thing, or “just” an epilogue? It may be that both possibilities are true at once; it may be that there are “epilogic” properties which give old age a superseding value. Dare we imagine it? A book written for the sake of the afterword? A pilgrimage whose most holy plateau is off to the side and away from the sacred path? The necessity of the extraneous! The priority of the epilogue! (As someone who began writing late in life, and who—at least at the time I write this sentence—is the same age as Marcel Proust when he died, I am moved to ponder the reality that my life has been but a staircase leading to this very room in which I now write—that this room, so scantily appointed, and in which nothing is not extemporaneous and impractical, was somehow the point of it all.)
11. All writing is preparation for old age. Even when it is done in old age. All love, too.
12. A more old-fashioned view might say instead: Old age redeems the mischiefs of youth. (But then, as the religions have taught us, redemption is rarely a laughing matter.)
13. The habits of an idle young man sometimes resemble those of the elderly. Both are play-acting at immortality. A creature blessed with eternal life, after all, would have almost no sense of urgency; and although it may seem counterintuitive, the old are rarely in a rush. But that’s in the nature of the pantomime. It is when we are most idle that we roleplay as gods. (And, if we are old, we may do so with the soothing proverb on our lips: Gray hair is a crown of splendor; it is attained in the way of righteousness!)