Daily Dose

From Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

BEYOND

"Beyond her and a favorite old pointer he had, and between whom and himself an attachment subsisted during the period of his imbecility, the old man had not a single friend to mourn him, having indeed, during the whole course of his life, never taken the least pains to secure one."

From Chapter XLI, In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors

Daily Dose

From The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

THE GOOD

"There came the good years, grandchildren, then the slow decline, and the war came to him more and more and the other ninety years of his life slowly dissolved."

From Chapter 13

Daily Dose

From The Flying Inn, by G. K. Chesterton

IN A HAMLET

"In a hamlet round about Windermere, let us say, or somewhere in Wordsworth's country, there could be found a cottage, in which could be found a cottager. So far all is as it should be; and the visitor would first be conscious of a hearty and even noisy elderly man, with an apple face and a short white beard. This person would then loudly proffer to the visitor the opportunity of seeing his father, a somewhat more elderly man, with a somewhat longer white beard, but still 'up and about.'"

From Chapter XVIII, The Republic of Peaceways

Clerihew for Ancient Romantic

SAMUEL ROGERS

Among the estimable codgers
Banker/poet Samuel Rogers
By rights should be,
As he went right on 'til 93.

Daily Dose

From Poems, by Samuel Rogers

TO AN OLD OAK

Radice in Tartara tendit. ~ Virg.

Trunk of a Giant now no more!
Once did thy limbs to heaven aspire;
Once, by a track untried before, 
Strike as resolving to explore 
Realms of infernal fire.

Round thee, alas, no shadows move!
From thee no sacred murmurs breathe!
Yet within thee, thyself a grove,
Once did the eagle scream above,
And the wolf howl beneath.

There once the steel-clad knight reclin'd,
His sable plumage tempest-toss'd;
And, as the death-bell smote the wind,
From towers long fled by human kind,
His brow the hero cross'd!

Then Culture came, and days serene,
And village-sports, and garlands gay.
Full many a pathway cross'd the green;
And maids and shepherd-youths were seen,
To celebrate the May.

Father of many a forest deep,
(Whence many a navy thunder-fraught)
Erst in their acorn-cells asleep,
Soon destin'd o'er the world to sweep,
Opening new spheres of thought!

Wont in the night of woods to dwell,
The holy druid saw thee rise;
And, planting there the guardian-spell,
Sung forth, the dreadful pomp to swell
Of human sacrifice!

Thy singed top and branches bare
Now straggle in the evening sky;
And the wan moon wheels round to glare
On the long corse that shivers there
Of him who came to die!

Daily Dose

From Beneath the Lion's Gaze, by Maaza Mengiste

THIS

"There is this to know, she said. There is silence and no thought. All is carved away and swallowed in the dark. This is death, she told him each time she thought she'd breathed her last. It is like this, and I am leaving this way."

From 33.

Daily Dose

From Insurrecto, by Gina Apostol

THE OLD

"The old sluggards are all roused out of their homes. After siesta it's a goddamned reunion of the sloths."

From page 211

"So we might talk..."

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man: 
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly; 

Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 

-- Charles Lamb

I've been lucky in old friends. I don't mean -- or don't just mean -- the friends I've known the longest. I mean I've been fortunate all my life to know old people. 

I know, I know. This is not current usage. The old we now call other names: "seniors", and "ninety years young", and the like. Advertisements encourage us to think that "seventy is the new forty", and tell us that we are only as old as our last little blue pill made us feel, or the last time we ran a marathon and talked with our friends about "term life insurance" and reverse mortgages. (Does one ever speak of anything else these days?! I know I don't.) An eighty-year-old actress is insulted when someone brings up her new thirty-year-old's face, and a physician -- an actual medical doctor with a legitimate degree -- can describe an obese seventy-year-old with obvious intellectual challenges as being in "excellent health". We do not like that word, "old" and, by implication at least the faces, and by extension, the owners of those faces it might best be used to describe. 

This may well be the fault of unfamiliarity. We live now further from the old we may know. We see them less often or at greater distance. I grew up with the old. Two grandmothers I was lucky enough to have near, great aunts and uncles, friends, and what Truman Capote only calls, rather ominously, "relatives." I knew the old people my parents knew. I knew my grandparents' friends, and the people they knew from church, and the Temperance League, and fraternal organizations, and the auction-barns, and just to speak to in the street. The old, like the poor were always with us. Perhaps for that reason I saw nothing strange or ugly in old faces. Old hands held mine. I was rocked in old arms, and slept on the warmth of old breasts. All adults are old to small children. When I was a child and knew nothing of the distinctions between middle and old age, I learned to look for kindness, likeliest in old eyes and counted on the gentleness of those who seemed always where I'd left them last, "Seeking to find the old, familiar faces."

Every year for 12 years now, at just this time of year, I've read aloud a little masterpiece by Truman Capote. A Christmas Memory is, among many things besides, the story of the author's oldest friend, an old woman named Sook. Cousins of a kind, they were much together. She taught him what love looked like, what it meant, and that the memory of it may be all we sometimes have. He never forgot. Nor have I. Why I read the story every year, that we might not forget.

That said, we do forget. We never mean to, I'm sure, but we do. Another writer, himself not yet old when he wrote the poem, knew this too well. The English essayist and poet, Charles Lamb is another favorite of mine. The Old Familiar Faces is perhaps his only truly great poem. In that, quoted above, he mentions turning "abruptly" from the friend right with him to remember those not there. I know what it is to make such a turn; to forget that one might remember. What else do we owe the old but this, that we might remember them, and even be ashamed that we had forgot? 

I remember my Aunt Dolly, actually my grandmother's sister, who, at better than two hundred pounds and well over four feet tall, would dance a Charleston if someone hummed a tune, who laughed 'til she cried when my father would whisper a joke in her ear that he would not otherwise tell "in mixed company", and who liked nothing better than to play on the floor with even shorter people. She taught me that the attention of others need not be earned, but offered generously to those we love.

I remember Ernest Smithers, an old friend of my father who smelled of tobacco and beer and who always, in memory at least, wore a rough, checked, hunter's shirt that felt scratchy but but good to lean against. He was missing two knuckles on one hand and never seemed to mind a little boy's fascination with this or to begrudge that hand for closer examination. He taught me to not mind the difference in what might be a disability.

I remember my grandmother's friend Flora, who kept a beauty shop in her basement, as much for gossip as for business, and who made me my first cocktail, though really it was shrimp in a sharp sauce, served in a tall glass. So exotic and adult, that was. Those lunches taught me to listen for better stories than I was used to hearing.

I remember the way that same grandmother played the piano with a strong peddle, making every song into a march, and every hymn sound cheerful. From fury, as much as enthusiasm, we make art.

I learned love from my parents, but I learned how to love from the old.

And then, I forgot them, as it seems we are meant to do. We make our own lives. We make our own friends. We move on, and the past is left, but just there, where we left them last, that we might always find it again, love, when we may need it.

So tonight, may we remember and be again forgiven that we forgot. Remember with me the old, familiar faces. Remember Truman and Sook. Remember what Christmas meant, and what it still might mean. Remember the old friends, and thank you to the new ones here present. 

Daily Dose

From Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott

DAY

“Thou hast had thy day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old warhorse turned out on the barren heath; thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them.” 

From Chapter 24

Daily Dose

From Collected Poems, by R. S. Thomas

AN OLD MAN

Looking upon this tree with its quaint pretension
Of holding the earth, a leveret, in its claws,
Or marking the texture of its living bark,
A grey sea wrinkled by the winds of years,
I understand whence this man's body comes,
In veins and fibres, the bare boughs of bone,
The trellised thicket, where the heart, that robin,
Greets with a song the seasons of the blood.

But where in meadow or mountain shall I match
The individual accent of the speech
That is the ear's familiar? To what sun attribute
The honeyed warmness of his smile?
To which of the deciduous brood is german
The angel peeping from the latticed eye?

Daily Dose

From Journey to the End of the Night, by Celine, translated by Ralph Manheim

ALL OF A SUDDEN

"All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old."

From page 194 this edition

Daily Dose

From Essays After Eighty, by Donald Hall

MY FRIEND

"My friend Carole smokes cigarettes, the only friend who does.  When she visits we sit opposite each other, smoking and talking about death."

From No Smoking

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From How to Grow Old, by Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated by Philip Freeman

BUT SOME WILL SAY

"But some will say old people are morose, anxious, ill-tempered, and hard to please.  And when we look closely, some of them are miserly as well.  But these are faults of character, not of age."

From 65

Daily Dose

From New and Collected Poems: 1931 - 2001, by Czeslaw Milosz

I SLEEP A LOT

I sleep a lot and read St. Thomas Aquinas
Or The Death of God (that's a Protestant book).
To the right the bay as if molten tin,
Beyond the bay, city, beyond the city, ocean,
Beyond the ocean, ocean, till Japan.
To the left dry hills with white grass,
Beyond the hills an irrigated valley where rice is grown,
Beyond the valley, mountains and Ponderosa pines,
Beyond the mountains, desert and sheep.

When I couldn't do without alcohol, I drove myself on alcohol,
When I couldn't do without cigarettes and coffee, I drove myself
On cigarettes and coffee.
I was courageous. Industrious. Nearly a model of virtue.
But that is good for nothing.

I feel a pain.
not here. Even I don't know.
many islands and continents,
words, bazaars, wooden flutes,
Or too much drinking to the mirror, without beauty,
Though one was to be a kind of archangel
Or a Saint George, over there, on St. George Street.
Please, Doctor,
Not here. No,
Maybe it's too
Unpronounced

Please, Medicine Man, I feel a pain.
I always believed in spells and incantations.
Sure, women have only one, Catholic, soul,
But we have two. When you start to dance
You visit remote pueblos in your sleep
And even lands you have never seen.
Put on, I beg you, charms made of feathers,
Now it's time to help one of your own.
I have read many books but I don't believe them.
When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.

I remember those crosses with chiseled suns and moons
And wizards, how they worked during an outbreak of typhus.
Send your second soul beyond the mountains, beyond time.
Tell me what you saw, I will wait.

Daily Dose

From New and Collected Poems: 1931 - 2001, by Czeslaw Milosz

AT A CERTAIN AGE

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: "That's me."

Daily Dose

From The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb

ANTIQUITY

"Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing art every thing!  When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity -- then thou wert nothing, but hadst some remoter antiquity, as thou called't it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern!  What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert!  The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is every thing, being nothing!"

From Oxford in the Vacation

Daily Dose

From The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb

OF HIS OWN

"He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits."

From My Relations

Daily Dose

From The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb

AND THEN

"And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till I wished that sad second-chiildhhod might have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap.  But the common mother of us all in no long time after received him gently into hers."

From The Old Benchers

Daily Dose

From The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, by Tobias Smollett

MORE PROBABLE

“There is another point, which I would much rather see determined; whether the world was always as contemptible, as it appears to me at present?—If the morals of mankind have not contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity, within these thirty years, then must I be infected with the common vice of old men, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti; or, which is more probable, the impetuous pursuits and avocations of youth have formerly hindered me from observing those rotten parts of human nature, which now appear so offensively to my observation.”

From Page 503

Daily Dose

From Frederick the Great, by Nancy Mitford

CAN'T

"Frederick wrote to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha: 'I have lost all my friends and old acquaintances -- philosophy can't cure that.'"

From Chapter 18, The Great Frederick