The Wit's Guide to Aging
Or, unreverend disrepute
Aging is a devastating adjective. If the noun it modifies is a living person, it is invariably correct; it’s also an easy way to paint someone as lame, doddering, out-of-touch, and hobbling toward the graveyard. And they can't complain! All rockstars, politicians, and lotharios are aging, after all. But: Ouch!
“To what do I attribute my longevity? Bad luck.”
― Quentin Crisp
If you don’t wake up a day older, you’re doing it wrong. I’m looking at you, Benjamin Button. Embracing aging is the only sensible option, and yet the AARP’s slogan is Disrupt Aging. To quote aging humorist Dave Barry, I am not making this up. Do the aged want to be disrupted by business jargon that hasn’t aged well? Should those with brittle bones aspire to move fast and break things?
“I still go up my 44 stairs two at a time, but that is in hopes of dropping dead at the top.”
― A.E. Housman
Rage against the dying of the light, up to a point. Stay fit and attempt a growth mindset, but maybe not a toupee. In her book I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron divided anti-aging maneuvers into two categories: Status Quo Maintenance (“everyday things you have to do just to keep from looking like someone who no longer cares”) and Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back The Clock. Even the phrase “anti-aging” falls into the latter bucket, one that must eventually be kicked.
“Growing old gracefully, or serenely, or wisely, is the generally preferred denouement of life, especially among those who are not experiencing the process for themselves.”
― Jan Morris
The people who claim to really love getting older are spreading it on a bit thick. Except maybe Oliver Sacks, who said that to turn 80 was to be “freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”
Ephron was more honest when she wrote “I survived turning sixty, I was not thrilled to turn sixty-one, I was less thrilled to turn sixty-two, I didn’t much like turning sixty-three, I loathed being sixty-four, and I will hate being sixty-five.” But then she considers the alternative, shakes it off, and goes out to buy more bath oil.
“One should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.”
— Oscar Wilde
The best advice on old age comes from Don Marquis, which makes sense as he invented archy the cockroach, an immortal character.
“Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence and unreverend disrepute,” he wrote in the essay The Almost Perfect State in 1921. “In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred two.”
And that’s where he sketched out this brilliant and entirely feasible plan:
“Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheelchair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our chair will be a forty-five caliber revolver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings to which we have been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall — but we don’t wish to make anyone envious of the good time that is coming to us. We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored and disorderly old age.”
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Quote Vote
“Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.”
— Leon Trotsky
Except maybe for that ice pick in Mexico City, eh Leon?
Get Wit Quick No. 202 is nothing but a number. Don Marquis stayed useful to the age of 59, thus saving organized society from many ribald songs. Nora Ephron made it to 71, so she never found out if Oliver Sacks was right about how wonderful it is to be 80. Here’s hoping! A varicose vein of jocund malice runs through my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Fling a silver candlestick at the ❤️ below.
Whilmst reminds me of a favourite witticism.
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The pedantic owl calls through the darkness of the forest: "Whom, whom, whom."