Age

I remember the year I became 44, every day I thought that I had become 44 years, almost like a pastiche of Montague's practice of learning to die ("Philosophy is learning to die") as more of an endeavor to overcome fear, by seeing death everywhere; I reminded myself of being 44 years, to try to remember how fast a year goes, or how slow, and not to think about dying, as I do every day, but to remember that I was that year 44 years, and it was in 1996.

opening of the annual meetings of the Norwegian Writers' Association begins with the rapture of dead members, then a minute's silence to honor our dead colleagues, and I always find that time is running very slowly, and I hear those coughing and standing up, just like me, and then it is strange that a mouthful is just the violent time of the moment, when this one minute snails away, and who is the time goes by for, it never says children, it is the adults who say it, and often those who have come the age and age of shells, and the addition is that time is only getting faster and faster.

How many of my ages sitting in my body, and I remember all the previous ages and their different styles, or the feeling of the different ages from when I was a child, schoolchildren, youth, half-grown on the way to growing up, as a twenty year old, thirty year old, forty and up to the age I am now, or have they faded away like blank pages in memory, if not, where do they sit; in the hands, in the arms or simply in the face, or what about the islands, which do not carry as much mark, only that which is around the islands, of aging – or, as with Falstaff, in the pommel?
My mother-in-law, who is now 92 years old, says she feels like an 18-year-old; where, I ask, and she says it sits in her head, not in her body, because it is characterized by her 92 years, but no more than other 92-year-olds, because she is crisp and clear in her head, although she has problems with the sight; so maybe our other ages are in our heads.

Could I feel reach me to my various ages, if they are still sitting in the body, as weak echoes of who I once was, or are they exploited, like the different ages are blown away, if not, how would I manage to lure them out, which whether they die in me, all the way back to when I was ten, and the rest of my life, if Sigurd Hoel is right, is just a rehearsal, all the while it's the first ten years where everything is new, like being 13 years, which I can always remember, was boring and just a sad routine, almost like an overused habit.

To a pressing question of whether nothing rests, Zenon replied: Yes, the flying arrow rests.

I study my hands and think how many ages there are in them; I've inherited my father's hands, how much of him is in my hands, and he ever thought of his many ages, he became an old man, almost 90 years, like his father again, and it's always nice to see photographs of my father as a young man; 30 years old, after the war, completely different to me, as I inherited my mother's complexion and her dark eyes.

In his diary Kafka writes that he is too weak to have a large body, and has too long legs, as the blood must reach past his knees and all the way down to his toes; he is uneasy about his body and the diary is written between 1909 to 1923; he dies in 1924; on November 17, 1921, he writes: "There may be a purpose behind the fact that I have learned nothing useful and let the body decay – these two things are interconnected. I do not want to be distracted, not distracted by a useful and healthy man's joy of life. As if sickness and despair would not distract at least as much. "
He is about to turn 40 and die at age 41, from tuberculosis in his throat, or as Walter Benjamin writes in his essay on Kafka: “But when the most forgotten of all strangers is our body – our own body – then one understands why Kafka called the cough that broke out of his mind for the 'beast'. It was the big deer's most advanced outpost "; on the way to being 41 years old and severely affected by illness, and stranger, as it stands, to his own body, and thus his age or his body age, and in response to his turmoil, I think, albeit many years before he dies, he writes a beautiful aphorism, almost close to a Zen Buddhist koan, December 17, 1910: "On an urgent question of whether nothing rests, Zenon answered from Elea: Yes, the flying arrow rests."
In his book Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir writes that Trotsky, so obsessed with working, dreaded growing old: “He anxiously remembered Turgénev's words, which Lenin often quoted: 'Do you know what is the greatest sin? To be more than 55 years. ' And just when he was 55, in 1933, he complained in a letter to his wife about fatigue, insomnia and poor memory »; then Lenin was dead, lying on the parade, like a wax doll behind thick glass, perhaps burnt out and tired of having revolutionized a poor peasant society, surrounded by terrified complainers; Lenin died in 1924, aged 53, that is, two years before he would have turned 55, so he did not have to commit the greatest sin.
Simone de Beauvoir also quotes Goethe: "The age grabs us as a surprise" and she quotes herself: "Even when I was 40, I became unbelieving in front of the mirror and say to myself. 'I'm 40 years old' »; it's almost like a robbery, and not just "a surprise," as Goethe writes, but as if someone had robbed her of her young years; who can you ask, or what is it about aging, and why is it so difficult, and why do we just want to be clothed with our young age and not the heavy and old age?
What is so cruel about getting old, and why is Simone de Beauvoir so scared to grow old, it is the bright peak's dwindling light she is afraid of, thus being rebuked by the body's decay and wrinkles that emerge and which she believes will make her less attractive, unless there is another status quo, in France, in 1970, when the book came out, than it is today, and it was the fear of being seen as something old, useless and powerless; unphilosophical, simply, as if all her legitimate strength were her appearance and body as young and not as older, like all arguments were not verbal, but unrealistic, and physical.

All the French after all, the intellectual opposition of the 50s and 60s was not educated to remain young; Sartre must have never been young, he must have been born old; squalid, picnic, full of heavy academic rhetoric, so where did this horror come from, and of all things not the fear of disarmament, civil war in the Third World, or hunger, if not inner French problems, and it was enough to take off, but fear of getting old, even, I think, was something embarrassing about getting old, as if the whole philosophical project was replaced with getting old; unargumentative, and quiet – de Beauvoir quotes Sartre about old age as he calls "the unrealistic", and she extends the quote: the unrealistic is "my being at a distance that limits all my choices and constitutes their backside".
At what age is not "my being at a distance"; which thus does not "limit all my choices" as we are in the middle of life as adults, having come through the precarious puberty, where everything is on trial, as if what is between puberty and old age is where our being is not is at a distance, unless the distance is also geographical and in time; Beauvoir's book came out in 1970, and what she writes about being old in France then, and being old in France now, or in the kingdom, are two different things, all the time age is also subject to cultural processes, so I think Undset was wrong when she claimed that "the hearts of men are changing nothing at all times".

In the 12th volume off On the trail of lost time, what was then called "The Found Time," the book's Marcel meets his old friends; he has not seen them in a long time and is simply amazed at how much time has passed since he last saw them: “At first I did not understand why I hesitated to recognize both the master of the house and the various guests, and why everyone seemed to wearing masks, in most cases powder wigs that transformed them completely. As he welcomed me, the prince still had his good-natured adventure ...
a real royal mine that I had noticed the first time I saw him, but this time it seemed that he was also submitting to the label he put on his guests and wearing a white beard. "

IM thinking of my deceased wife's place, not just in the grave, but around me, in a way, like death, and beyond all my reason, as a reindeer, or anything else that I don't know what is, just that there is something in my presence, at home with me, or something that I think is there, and sometimes I freeze when I hear a strange sound from the kitchen, or I see some quick shadows, and that something breaks the light from the windows, only a fraction of a second, to me that she is here, with no age, or with all the ages of the world.