Retaining an interest in what happens next is important. It’s a good idea to spend time with young people. There’s always the danger that you may bore them, but not half as much as your coevals may bore you. There are certainly pleasures to be had from reminiscence and from nostalgia, but it’s better to look forward to the future than to dwell in the past. You should resist the shrinking of your world. You have entered a prison of old age when you no longer care about, say, the next Ashes series, or when, if you are a gardener, you have lost interest in next year’s crops or flowering.
Well, Massie's only three years older than I am. I'm still finding my way around the experience.
I'm not sure that it's "better to look forward to the future than to dwell in the past." I was listening to William Maxwell's conversation with Charlie Rose yesterday (it's online), and the writer emphasized that past, present, and future seem to blur and merge. Elsewhere, he said memories are like soup on a backburner of the stove – they get better and better.
ReplyDeleteI like this from Massie: "As Dr Johnson said, when a young man forgets his hat, nobody remarks on it, but when an old man does so, it’s taken as a sign that he is breaking up – or words to that effect."