This brilliant article by Maria Popova was published in The Marginalian.
How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself
“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”
Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:
