adapt to changes in light. As you get older, the corneal hue takes on a yellow tint, reducing your ability to discriminate among green, blue, and violet. Blues will get darker for you and yellows will get less bright. You’ll see less violet. As painters age, they use less dark blue and violet.
Sir Francis Chichester, after sailing around the world at age 66, said, “If your try fails, what does that matter? All life is a failure in the end. The thing to do is to get sport out of trying.”
Men and women over age 75 suffer ten times the incidence of strokes as do those between 55 and 59.
The professionally world-weary Gore Vidal said, apropos of having to sell his house on a hill in Ravello, Italy, because he was no longer able to climb the steps, “Everything has its time in life, and in a year, I’ll be 80. I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”
When you’re very young, your ability to smell is so intense as to be nearly overwhelming, but by the time you’re in your 80s, not only has your ability to smell declined significantly but you yourself no longer even have a distinctive odor. You can stop using deodorants. You’re vanishing.
“I think the old need touching,” says the social historian Ronald Blythe. “They have reached a stage of life when they need kissing, hugging. And nobody touches them except the doctor.” At 82, E. M. Forster said, “I am rather prone to senile lechery just now—want to touch the right person in the right place, in order to shake off bodily loneliness.” The last few years, whenever I hug my father hello or good-bye, he cries and cries, shuddering.
Voltaire wrote to a friend, “I beg you not to say that I am only eighty-two; it is a cruel calumny. Even if it be true, according to an accursed baptismal record, that I was born in November 1694, you must always agree with me that I am in my eighty-third year.” When you’re very old, you want to be thought even older than you actually are: it’s an accomplishment. At 67, my father purchased an annuity that he would have broken even on if he’d died at 76; having outlived the actuarial projections by 21 years so far, he tells everyone he meets how much he’s made on it. He buttonholes strangers and informs them that he’s only 3 years from the century mark.
At 83, Sibelius said, “For the first time I have lately become aware of the fact that the period of our earthly existence is limited. During the whole of my life this idea has never actually come into my mind. It occurred to me very distinctly when I was looking at an old tree there in the garden. When we came it was very small, and I looked at it from above. Now it waves high above my head and seems to say ‘You will soon depart, but I shall stay here for hundreds more years.’”
At 85, Bernard Baruch said, “To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”
At age 90, you’ve lost half of your kidneys’ blood-filtering capacity.
You grow increasingly less likely to develop cancer; the tissues of an old person don’t serve the needs of aggressive, energy-hungry tumors.
By 90, one in three women and one in six men suffer a hip fracture, which often triggers a downward spiral leading to death. Half will be unable to walk again without assistance. My father, on the other hand, walked a mile to and from the library—carrying books in each direction—until he was 95.
At that age, his moles were disappearing—a mole typically lasts 50 years—and in their place, a couple of “cherry moles,” which look like cherries and the technical name for which is “hemangiomas,” appeared on his chest. His doctor said he thought my dad’s hemangiomas (benign tumors composed of large blood vessels) were beautiful. Easy for him to say; he’s a whippersnapper of 67. My father found the cherry moles as distressing as if he were a teenage girl with an array of pimples on her chin.
At 97, a month before dying, Bertrand Russell said to his wife, “I do so hate to leave this world.”
Bernard de Fontanelle, a French scholar, who died at 100, said, “I feel nothing except a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.”
Aristotle described childhood as hot and moist, youth as hot and dry, and adulthood as cold and dry. He believed aging and death were caused by the body being transformed from one that was hot and moist to one that was cold and dry—a change which he viewed as not only inevitable but desirable.
In
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
John Donne said, in a sermon, “We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, of death. Nor was there any man seen to sleep in the cart between Newgate and Tyburn— between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep? But we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.”
Charles Lamb said, “The young man till thirty never feels practically that he is mortal.”
John Ruskin said, “Am I not in a curiously unnatural state of mind in this way—that at forty-three, instead of being able to settle to my middle-aged life like a middle-aged creature, I have more instincts of youth about me than when I was young, and am miserable because I cannot climb, run, or wrestle, sing, or flirt—as I was when a youngster because I couldn’t sit writing metaphysics all day long. Wrong at both ends of life…”
The eponymous hero of Chekhov’s
Edward Young wrote, “At thirty man suspects himself a fool; / Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan / At fifty chides his infamous delay, / Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; / In all the magnanimity of Thought / Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.”
Picasso said, “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”
At 62, Jonathan Swift said, “I never wake without finding life more insignificant than it was the day before.”
Leonardo da Vinci, who died at 67, said, “Here I thought that I was learning how to live, while I have in reality been learning how to die.”
Barry Hannah says, “The calamity is that we get only seventy-five years to know everything and that we knew more by our guts when we were young than we do with all these books and years and children behind us.”
At 78, Lord Reith, the first general director of the BBC, said, “I’ve never really learned how to live, and I’ve discovered too late that life is for living.”
The seventeenth-century moralist Jean de la Bruyere said, “There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.”
Regrets only:
My father came up from the Bay Area to visit for the weekend and my Father’s Day present, six days late, was box seats to a Mariners game. I was new to Seattle and this was the first time I’d been inside the Kingdome which, with its navy blues and fern greens, looked to me like an aquarium for tropical fish. The Kingdome reminded my father of “dinner theater,” and he wanted to know where John Barrymore was. My dad was turning 79 the following month; he wanted—at 80—to quit his part-time job and drive a Winnebago cross-country, then fly to Wimbledon to eat strawberries and cream.
The sixth-place Mariners were playing the last-place Tigers on Barbecue Apron Night. Watching batting practice, we folded and unfolded our plastic Mariners barbecue aprons, which smelled disconcertingly like formaldehyde, and we ran through all the baseball anecdotes he’d told me all my life, only this time—because I pressed him—he told each story without embellishment. He’d always said that he played semi-pro baseball and I had images of him sliding across glass-strewn sandlots to earn food money; it was only guys from another neighborhood occasionally paying him 10 bucks to play on their pickup team and throw his “dinky curve.” He used to say that he was team captain for an Army all-star baseball team that toured overseas, and as a kid I convinced
