Topical Guide 784
Mark Dorset
Death
Life: Stages of: Old Age
Folly
Hope
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 71:
The moment I seated myself across the dinner table from him, I could see that he was already in quite a state. He looked at me with wild eyes, thrust the usual rose toward me, and tried to speak, but couldn’t manage to say a word. His eyes grew wilder and wilder, until it was quite clear that he was completely out of control. I suspect that his mind was racing ahead of him, to a later hour in the evening, the two of us alone in his room—you get the picture—but the poor old guy was eighty if he was a day, and the anticipated pleasure must have been too much for the old ticker. He tried to get to his feet, grabbed at his heart, and collapsed onto the enormous slab of undercooked beef that covered his plate. To put it as he might have, I’m afraid that his desires got the best of him and carried the poor fellow off to his reward. I felt terribly sorry for him, of course, and then I became quite frightened by this demonstration that a vivid imagination can be a dangerous thing, that one can quite literally lose oneself in the glory of some passion,
Folly, in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s, Praise of Folly (1509), translated by Betty Radice:
Old age is a burden and death a harsh necessity; armies of disease close their ranks around him, misfortunes lie in wait, ill luck is always ready to attack. There’s nothing without its tinge of acute bitterness, quite apart from all the evil things man does to man, such as the infliction of poverty, imprisonment, slander, dishonor, torture, treachery, betrayal, insult, litigation, and fraud. […] However, I am here, and with a mixture of ignorance and thoughtlessness, often with forgetfulness when things are bad, or sometimes hope of better things, with a sprinkling too of honeyed pleasures, I bring help in miseries like these. And I do so with such effect that men are reluctant to leave life even when their thread of destiny has run out and life has long been leaving them. The less reason they have for staying alive, the more they enjoy living—so far are they from feeling at all weary of life.
Thanks to me you can see old men everywhere who have reached Nestor’s age and scarcely still look human, mumbling, senile, toothless, white-haired, or bald—or rather, in the words of Aristophanes, “dirty, bent, wretched, wrinkled, hairless, toothless, sexless.” Yet they’re still so pleased with life and eager “to be young” that one dyes his white hair, another covers up his baldness with a wig, another wears borrowed teeth taken from some pig perhaps, while another is crazy about a girl and outdoes any young man in his amorous silliness.
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