--H.J. Byron

["The older I grow the more I learn"]--Solon

"Years ago I said to myself: 'There's no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow.' I have learned with the passing of time that this, though true, is not the whole truth. The other producer of old age is habit: the deadly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be fought against if one is to remain alive." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward [preface]

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; and yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read (and, I hope, to write), a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in . . . the visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm my hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of old memories." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward [conclusion]

"Begun reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference; to give my brain a wider scope; to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm, etc." A Writer's Diary-Virginia Woolf

"Sophocles indeed said that he was glad to have escaped, now that he was old, from sexual love, as from a cruel and raging tyrant; but in public life one must escape, not from one tyrant, the love of boys or women, but from many loves which are more insane than that: love of contention, love of fame, the desire to be first and greatest, which is a disease most prolific of envy, jealousy, and discord. Some of these old age does slacken and dull, but others it quenches and cools entirely, not so much by withdrawing a man from the impulse to action as by keeping him from excessive and fiery passions, so as to bring sober and settled reasoning to bear upon his thoughts." --Plutarch, Old Men in Public Affairs.

[The good man] ". . . when he is old will not want either pleasure or pains to hinder him, or any earthly thing, pleasant or the reverse, so that he will not have to consider the body." -Plotinus, On Well-Being.

"I am 73 today. Oddly enough I feel younger than I did yesterday. Relief from the suspense of waiting to be 73 I suppose. I once read a book by Hugh Walpole where an author aged 70 sits down to write a story, and I remember thinking H.W. was crazy. How could a man write a story at that age? He would be doing well if he could walk across the room, but now I look on men of seventy as kids and am a bit annoyed by their juvenile exuberance." P.G. Wodehouse lettet to William Townsend

[Goethe] will, in a few years, be eighty years old; but he is not tired of inquiries and experiments. In none of his tendencies has he come to a fixed point: he will always go on further and further. Still learning and learning. Thus he shows himself endowed with perpetual, imperishable youth." Conversations of Goethe

"Losing daily all interest in the things around us, something else is necessary to fill the void. With me it is reading, which occupies the mind without the labor of producing ideas from my own stock." Thomas Jefferson, letter to Adams

"I just got excited about the things one can do in a rock-garden, which is a mild little thing to get excited about; but, after all, the point is not what you get excited about, but the fact that in middle age you can still get excited at all. There is nothing like gardening to keep one young. It is the most rejuvinating of all occupations. One is always looking forward to next year, or five years hence." Vita Sackville-West, In Your Garden

[Then Wilhelm spoke about the natural youth, middle age and old age of all things, including the world:] "he arrived at this: the men of our time, according to him, were intellectually inferior to the great men of the past, and Nature, now aging as it were, who used to bring forth not only finer bodies but more virile and gifted minds, now engendered pygmies whose mental equipment was no less poor than their bodies were puny." --Erasmus, The Antibarbarians.

[Jack Kerouac and company embody the] " . . . adolescent desire to cut loose, experience the forbidden and live outside the law [in search of ] a raw chunk of experience. [But Kerouac ended as an] exhausted old man of forty-five who spent most of his time at home drinking beer and watching daytime television . [I]n the eyes of the counter-culture he was a pathetic has-been --an angry young man who'd soured into a grumpy old reactionary." --Steve Turner [Kerouac biographer]

[On a visit to the aging poet Lord Alfred Douglas] "I urged him to write some more poetry, particularly one or two sonnets. He turned his head to the back of the arm-chair, almost crying, and said 'I cannot. I wish I were dead. There is nothing for me to do but die. I should like to die. My life is done.' I found myself hearing the high pitched, time-weary voice of Alfred Douglas invoking the ghost of Oscar Wilde and the days of the nineteenth century when he was a beautiful youth with the world at his feet instead of a broken down, impoverished old man." Conversation between Marie Stopes and Lord Alfred Douglas [with Keith Briant's reaction].

"Nothing proves better than this that the being who presides over the world is essentially benevolent, stealing from us, one by one, the faculties of enjoyment, stealing our sensibilities, leading us, like the horse in his mill, . . . round and round the same beaten circle. To see what we have seen/ To taste the tasted, and at each return/ Less tasteful; o'er our palates to decant/ Another vintage / until satiated and fatigued with leaden iteration, we ask our own Congé. I heard once a very old friend, who had troubled himself with neither poets nor philosophers, say the same thing in plain prose, that he was tired of pulling off his shoes and socks at night, and putting them on in the morning. The wish to stay here is gradually extinguished: but not so easily that of returning once in a while to see how things have gone. . . . There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth . . . . When all our faculties have left, or are leaving us, one by one, sight, hearing, memory, every avenue of pleasing sensation is closed, and athumy, debility and malaise left in their places, when the friends of our youth are all gone, and a generation is risen around us whom we know not, is death an evil? " Thomas Jefferson letters to John Adams

"The wise man will for reasonable cause make his own exit from life, on his country's behalf or for the sake of his friends, or if he suffers some intolerable pain, mutilation or incurable disease." --Diogenes Laertius, Zeno.

"Socrates: This is my first appearance in a court of law, at the age of seventy, so I am a complete stranger to the language of this place . . . . Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happiest propsect is unknown to any but God . . . [W]ith these words, quite calmly and with no sign of distaste, he drained the cup in one breath . . . . [A]nd he said--they were his last words--'Crito,we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don't forget.'" --Plato, excerpts from the Apology and the Phaedo.

"To my friends: My work is done. Why wait? G.E." --suicide note of George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak

--Dorothy Parker

"Oscar told us that he had a horrible dream the previous night- 'That he had been supping with the dead.' Reggie made a very typical response, 'My dear Oscar, you were probably the life and soul of the party.'" --Robert Ross, letter to More Ady, 1 December 1900.

"Toutes les choses de ce monde ne sont que fumée." -example of using the word French word for "dream" in Heath's Standard French and English Dictionary

Prospero:

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capt towrs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a wrack behind; we are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

--William Shakespeare, The Tempest