topic/growing-older

'Too old!' Paula said to me, sounding annoyed. 'What an idea! I've never felt younger.'

'One feels the way one feels,' I said.

That little spark of youth which had dazzled me for a moment fizzled out all too quickly. Glass mirrors are too indulgent; the faces of these women of my own age, that flabby skin, those blurred features, those drooping mouths, those bodies so obviously bulging under their corsets - these were the true mirrors. 'They're old, worn-out hags,' I thought, 'and I'm the same age as they.'

—Let’s pretend we’re old, Lou remembered saying back when they were young. They had been watching hurricane waves rip the outer beach. To walk back they aligned adjacent legs like a pair in a three-legged race.

—Those days will come soon enough, Maytree said. His gravity had startled her. Now those days were here. Lou remembered when his forehead’s skin stuck tight as an apple’s. She pressed a finger to her own forehead and drew a circle. She was loose in her skin as a rabbit. She felt French knots on her shins. Now she wanted a book not to knock her out but only to move her. And when will the days of wisdom come?

[...] In Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite of school, not because of it -- which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac. [...]

And the more Adrienne thought about it, about the poor bereaved Spearsons, and about Martin and all the ways he tried to show her he was on her side, whatever that meant, how it was both the hope and shame of him that he was always doing his best, the more she felt foolish, deprived of reasons. Her rage flapped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage—vestigial girlhood rage—inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think, where did you go?

Time, Adrienne thought. What a racket.

There is some poet—it might have been Lowell—who said about his writing, “I want to break your heart.” There’s an arrogance in that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone! But I do have faith that, anytime I’m sharing a moment of true feeling, it will be recognizable to the reader. What interested me most about the male mentor character in The Friend—far more than, say, the moral question of whether a professor should have an affair with a grad student—was what happens to the identity and self-esteem of such a person when he loses the power to seduce younger women, and when no one is interested in reading his work anymore. All of that contributes to that character’s not wanting to live. It’s much like the case of the very beautiful woman in What Are You Going Through whose identity is so wrapped up in what she looks like that her life is completely transformed when she becomes, merely by aging, not ugly but simply ordinary-looking.

I’m interested in what loss does to people. As you go through life, you lose so much, one thing after another. Some things are taken away from you, other things you’re forced to give up. And you lose loved ones. Parents, friends, animal companions. I’ve gotten a huge amount of mail from readers about the losses they’ve experienced.

But it gets harder and harder to enjoy facing the mirror. Who is that old lady? Where is her waist? I got resigned, sort of, to losing my dark hair and getting all this limp grey stuff instead, but now am I going to lose even that and end up all pink scalp? [...]

A cab took me to the Parc Montsouris, where I had an appointment with Martine. As I came into the gardens the smell of cut grass wrung my heart—the smell of the high Alpine pastures where I used to walk with André with a sack on my shoulders, a smell so moving because it was that of the meadows of my childhood. Reflections, echoes, reverberating back and back to infinity: I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me. I have not the leisure to tell it over to myself, but often, quite unexpectedly, I catch sight of it, a background to the diaphanous present; a background that gives it its color and its light, just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.