new dilemma of the old age
“There’s a distinction to be made between dying and death. It’s not all uninterrupted dying. If one’s healthy and feeling well, it’s invisible dying. The end that is a certainty is not necessarily boldly announced. NO, you can’t understand. The only thing you understand about the old when you’re not old is that they have been stamped by their time. But understanding only that freezes them in their time, and so amounts to no understanding at all. To those not yet old, being old means you’ve been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one si as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it’s just an everyday fact that one’s life is at stake. One cannot evade knowing what shortly awaits one. The silence that will surround one forever. Otherwise it’s all the same. Otherwise one is immortal for as long as one lives.
Not too many years ago, there was a ready-made way to be old, just as there was a readymade way to be young. Neither obtains any longer. A great fight about the permissible took place here – and a great overturning. Nonetheless, should a man of seventy still be involved in the carnal aspect of the human comedy? To be unapologetically an unmonastic old man susceptible still to be humanly exciting? That is not the condition as it was once symbolized by the pipe and the rocking chair. Maybe it’s still a bit of an affront to people, to fail to abide by the old clock of life. I realize that I can’t count on the virtuous regard of other adults. But what can i do about the fact that, as far as I can tell, nothing, nothing is put to rest, however old a man may be?”
“The dying animal”, Philip Roth
