Friday, October 02, 2015

Not so bad, once you get used to it …

… What Old Age Is Really Like - The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

[Penelope Lively] is among the first true anthropologists of old age, both participant and observer. Many of her attitudes seem almost unimaginable to the young: for example, she’s not envious of us, she is still as curious as she always was, she doesn’t miss travel or holidays, she has become used to physical pain; she still has “needs and greeds” (muesli with sheep’s-milk yogurt, the daily fix of reading), but her more “acquisitive” lusts have faded. Most surprisingly, she insists that old age is not a “pallid sort of place,” that she is still capable of “an almost luxurious appreciation of the world.”

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