Topical Guide 422
Mark Dorset
Aging
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 1:
Belinda washes her hands and looks herself over in the mirror, though she tells herself that this is probably a mistake. For the last year or so, whenever she looks in a mirror she feels almost sexless. She has been finding it difficult to imagine that she’s still attractive, or even interesting-looking, to men — or to women, for that matter. This isn’t exactly a problem of aging; in fact, it strikes her as funny that she sees her young self more and more in the mirror, that the face she had when she was a girl is there, with some not-so-welcome new details — wrinkles, lines, spots — but still there, the same girlish face, and it amuses her sometimes to notice how incomplete Leila’s face is, a pretty face, but characterless, like an apartment with white walls and no pictures, something like Matthew’s apartment.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, “Life with Albertine”:
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we spring come and bestow upon us in handfuls their treasures and their calamities, asking to be allowed to cooperate in the new sentiments which we are feeling and in which, obliterating their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
V. S. Pritchett, Midnight Oil:
I have before me two photographs. One is, I regret, instantly recognizable: a bald man, sitting before a pastry board propped on a table, and writing. He does little else besides sit and write. His fattish face is supported by a valance of chins; the head is held together by glasses that slip down a bridgeless nose that spreads its nostrils over a moustache. He is trying to find some connection with the figure in the other picture taken fifty years ago. He knows that the young fellow sitting on the table of a photographer’s in Paris, a thin youth of twenty with thick fairish hair, exclaiming eyebrows, loosely grinning mouth and the eyes raised to the ceiling with a look of passing schoolboy saintliness, is himself. The young one is shy, careless, very pleased with himself, putting on some impromptu act; the older one is perplexed. The two, if they could meet in the flesh, would be stupefied, and the older one would certainly be embarrassed.
See also: Aging; Youth and Age; Old People TG 395
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