Getting old...

[qcrisp]

... was meant to be a maudlin, candid thread started after a few pints.

The snow has fallen here in London today. It will soon be gone. As one grows older, mortality comes to seem as natural as the melting of such snow. The ranks of one's peers thin without especial drama, or sometimes with a sudden, strange, uncathartic drama...

Anyway, I suppose I must sleep now, before I've even really begun to lay out my intentions in this thread. Basically, it's about the changes that one never believes will happen as one ages, but which actually do happen, and which are, though real, not as described, because nothing ever is...

I might come back to this, if there is time and inclination...

[Kevin]

Pray continue. I'm older than you are, so I'm interested in what you might have to say....

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I'm only 30 but nobody told me about the desensitization process. I found it genuinely hard to come to terms with in my mid20s and I still haven't quite adapted to it.

[Druidic]

When you're young you run from death. When you're old you run to it.

It would be hard to die at your peak, feeling vital while the world around you is alive with possibilities. The pains and indignities of advanced age, the absence or death of friends and loved ones, are all a 'cure' for the fear of death in many.
Like Cohen said, "I'm ready to die."

[Nemonymous]

I am 69 but sometimes feel like 96.

[Nemonymous]

I wrote this recently in my real-time review of 'Central Station' by Lavie Tidhar -

"A sort of real-time Alzheimer’s as I even feel it encroaching today: a wistful carelessness and acceptance of real-times-a-changing – for the worse or better? This chapter is miraculously part and parcel of my own consciousness of death and laid-backness at dodgier health at the age of 69: not old, I know, but old enough."

I'm only 28, but I already feel more congeniality with the old world than I used to. More interested in old churches, ghost stories and 19th century literature. Less keen on atheistic materialism, science-fiction and anything sleek. I have become a classicist of sorts. Modernity for modernity's sake now bothers me as much as nostalgia for nostalgia's sake used to – and still does.

[Robin Davies]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

When you're young you run from death. When you're old you run to it.

I'm 58 and I disagree. When I was young death seemed unreal, something that happened to other people and could be safely toyed with in music, film, fiction and comedy. As I get older it becomes a reality breathing down my neck.

Quote

It would be hard to die at your peak, feeling vital while the world around you is alive with possibilities.

Agree.

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The pains and indignities of advanced age, the absence or death of friends and loved ones, are all a 'cure' for the fear of death in many.

Disagree. I'm much more scared of the pain, indignities and illness of old age than of death itself which is, after all, just oblivion.

[qcrisp]

http://www.mapping.com/words.shtml

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

http://www.mapping.com/words.shtml

Mine shall be: "And so the gestalt is clinched."