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January 27, 2007

Best thing I read this week

That I have arrived at 70 without ever having golfed is one of the facts of my biography to date of which I am most proud.
. . .
I don't much mind being mildly out of it, just as I don't finally mind growing older. George Santayana, perhaps the most detached man the world has known outside of certain Trappist monasteries, claimed to prefer old age to all others. "I heartily agree that old age is, or may be as in my case, far happier than youth," he wrote to his contemporary William Lyon Phelps. "I was never more entertained or less troubled than I am now." Something to this, if one isn't filled with regret for the years that have gone before, and I am not, having had a very lucky run thus far in my life. At 70 it is natural to begin to view the world from the sidelines, a glass of wine in hand, watching younger people do the dances of ambition, competition, lust, and the rest of it.
. . .
If the game is to be decently played, at 70 one must harken back as little as possible to the (inevitably golden) days of one's youth, no matter how truly golden they may seem. The temptation to do so, and with some regularity, sets in sometime in one's 60s. As a first symptom, one discovers the word "nowadays" turning up in lots of one's sentences, always with the assumption that nowadays are vastly inferior to thenadays, when one was young and the world green and beautiful. Ah, thenadays--so close to "them were the days"--when there was no crime, divorce was unheard of, people knew how to spell, everyone had good handwriting, propriety and decorum ruled, and so on and on into the long boring night of nostalgia.

Start talking about thenadays and one soon finds one's intellectual motor has shifted into full crank, with everything about nowadays dreary, third-rate, and decline-and-fallish. A big mistake. The reason old people think that the world is going to hell, Santayana says, is they believe that, without them in it, which will soon enough be the case, how good really can it be?
. . .
I also grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon as possible, while today--the late 1960s is the watershed moment here--the goal has become to stay as young as possible for as long as possible. The consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer only means that they feel they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at least, into one's 30s, perhaps one's early 40s. At 70, I register with mild but genuine amazement that the movie director Christopher Guest's father played keyboard for the Righteous Brothers or that the essayist Adam Gopnik's parents, then graduate students, took him in their arms to the opening of the Guggenheim Museum. How can anyone possibly have parents playing keyboards or going to graduate school! Impossible!

"Kid Turns 70: And nobody cares," by Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, January 29, 2007

Turning 70 reminds me of something Benjamin Franklin said (paraphrasing):

If you would not be forgotten when you are dead and rotten, write something worth the reading or live the life worth writing.

Although I don't fit either of those categories, I do like the fact that as an editor and publisher I get to help others "write something worth the reading."

Mr. Epstein says that

At 70 one encounters the standard physical diminutions. I am less than certain how old I actually look, but in a checkout line, I can now say to a young woman, "You have beautiful eyes," without her thinking I'm hitting on her.

One of the things I like about being in my mid-50s is that I can now call every female over the age of 21 "dear" as in "Thank you dear" and no one gets offended. (I've also noticed that my teenage daughter has started calling her friends "Hon" - it's very Baltimorian and it strikes me as a very friendly greeting.)

Posted at January 27, 2007 08:17 AM | Categories: Fun

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