Late yesterday afternoon, having successfully completed module three of my home study Polish language course, otherwise known as washing the car, I was sitting on the sofa in that happy condition of not being fully here but not quite all the way there yet, when some words from the TV show that her the other end of the sofa was watching, which transpired to be a thriller about murders in a retirement home, crept through my perfectly sculpted but increasingly hairy ears and slowly, after a couple of replays in my head, brought me all the way back here and gave me pause for thought.
And those words would be? The preamble was something along the lines of, “These places are full of sad, lonely old folk...” and the attention grabbing words were, “...who’ve run out of life before they’ve run out of time.” How sadly true is that for so many elderly?
In an attempt to cheer myself up a tad, me being elderly an’ all, I reversed a couple of the words in that sad phrase and got wot I initially thought was a tad less sad phrase, “Who’ve run out of time before they’ve run out of life.” However, after running that through my head a couple of times, I came to the conclusion I didn’t have one sad phrase and one a little less so, I just had two equally poignant phrases stuck in my head and I was left wondering which one was the sadder.
I’m sure there are deep thinking folk who could work on the practical merits and/or lack thereof, for those two phrases from a philosophical angle. That is until such time they ran out of one phrase or the other.
Quote; Bernard M. Baruch.
“To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”
2 comments:
You could have quoted Conrad in this context as well:
"I remember my youth and the feeling that
will never come back any more--the feeling that I could last for ever,
outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that
lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort--to death; the
triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of
dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold,
grows small, and expires--and expires, too soon--before life itself."
It's a longish quote, but none the worse for that. Was there ever a finer description of encroaching old age? And remember that he was writing in his third language.
Weekend Yachtsman,
Thank you for that. It needs to go front of stage tonight.
Not sure it cheered me up too much though.
Thanks again.
Post a Comment