Category: Ageing
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Can One Get Older Without Aging?
"My father is 95 years old except that he's dead." Is this a nonsensical thing to say? No. Death is an entirely effective bar to aging: you can't age if you are dead. But you can get older. The sentence sounds like nonsense or a joke because we tend to conflate aging with getting older. …
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An Old Man’s Lament
"My old friends are dead," he said, "and my new ones will never be old."
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Old Age and Study as Pleasure and Prophylactic
The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook…
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Life’s Preparation for Death
Life prepares us for death whether we prepare or not. One way it does so is by weaning us of any over-estimation of the significance of the things of this world. For this weaning to take effect, however, one must take care to grow old. Disillusionment takes time. The passage of time, and plenty of…
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The Aging Philosopher
Both animal and thinker, he faces two sorts of threats. Among the first, hardening of the arteries. Among the second, hardening of the categories. Which is worse depends on your categories. Either way, categories rule.
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Overheard Among Old Men
As we slow down, time speeds up!
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The Lonesome Death of an Old Australian Woman
Here (HT: Karl White) A ninety year old woman died in her home in Auburn. She had decomposed through the floor before she was found six months later. The diaries found in her belongings shed light on this lonely and brilliant mind. Watch the documentary above, and read further excerpts from her diaries below. Related…
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The Science of Older and Wiser
A worthwhile NYT piece and a good counter to Susan Jacoby's Never Say Die which I criticize in one of my better posts, appropriately entitled Never Say Die. An excerpt from the former: An impediment to wisdom is thinking, “I can’t stand who I am now because I’m not who I used to be,” said…
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What is it Like to be an Old Man?
Life in the Nineties There are a couple of old men on my street who have made it past 90. Shaky Jake, as I call him, is 91, except that there is nothing shaky about him. I encountered him the other day on the rocky trails of the Superstition foothills, upright, lucid, happy. Across the…
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Are You a True Boomer or a Shadow Boomer?
We boomers are one self-absorbed generation, further evidence of which fact is a post like this. You are a boomer if you were born between 1946 and 1964. Call the elder half of that cohort the true boomers, or the classics. Call the second half the shadow boomers, or the reboots. Take this test to…
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Old Carl
It must have been the fall of '72. Old Carl and I were sitting in his Culver City flophouse room drinking Brew 102 after a day's manual labor . He delivered himself of a line not to be forgotten. "Bill, once I was limber all over but stiff in one place. Now it's the other…
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The Old Man
He fills up quickly, but empties slowly.
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On Being 26 Rather Than 62
W. K. writes, You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope.…
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If the Young Will Let Them
As long as their health holds out and they avoid mirrors, the old can cultivate the illusion that they are still young. If the young will let them.
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On Living Too Long
Old age for some is a sort of afterlife in a foreign country. One has lived beyond one's own time and now finds oneself among strangers.