Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 81

On his sixty-first birthday, trial lawyer Clarence Darrow wrote:

I once thought that when the time should come that I could no longer play ball there would be nothing left in life . . . I used to wonder what people could do to have fun after they were twenty years old; then I raised it to twenty-five; then I raised it to thirty. I have been raising it ever since, and still wondering what people can do for pleasure when they are old. But we are there with the same old illusions and the same old delusions, with fantasies promising us and beckoning us; with castles that we begin to build, never stopping to think whether these castles will be finished; we get our satisfaction and we kill our time listening to the voices and building the castles.62

In Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants a man in his nineties says: “Age is a terrible thief. Just when you’re getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back.”63

He elaborates:

You start to forget words—they’re on the tip of your tongue, but instead of eventually dislodging, they stay there. You go upstairs to fetch something, and by the time you get there you can’t remember what it was you were after. You call your child by the names of all your other children and finally the dog before you get to his.

I think both the aging Clarence Darrow and the fictitious man in Water for Elephants speak truth. Age is a terrible thief “just when we’re getting the hang of life.” But we had best go into life’s final chapter “with fantasies promising us and beckoning us.” It is better not to stop building those castles—whether we finish them or not is outside our control and largely irrelevant.

I am all for being realistic about old age. Notwithstanding, season reality with a little hope. Getting old is like eating cabbage—it goes down better with a little salt.