It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death--losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre. #AtulGawande

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The game of keeping one's clothes on tries to keep the interest of nakedness alive for a little longer by drawing attention to the privileges of permission. The game symbolises a poignant desire fully to savour the beauty of being, at last, allowed... #TheSchoolOfLife

Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us--which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced [...] by a declaration of that desire--a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous. #AlaindeBotton

A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. #YuvalNoahHarari