It pains me to hear my age peers described as selfish. When they are called “greedy geezers,” my heart recoils.
This insulting phrase gets used, I am convinced, mostly because it’s cute. It also features alliteration, always an attraction to the phrasemaker.
To my mind, older Americans are no more selfish than people of other ages. Quite possibly less.
My late life mantra: The Mystery Deepens
“Self-publishing has an illustrious history. Milton published Areopagitica himself and Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. When he could not find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane published it himself. James Joyce in similar circumstances published Ulysses with the help of Sylvia Beach and her Shakespeare and Company bookshop. The Joy of Cooking was first published by its author and so were such recent best sellers as Richard Evans’s Christmas Box and Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence.”
Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2011, p. 30.
In later life I often appeal to the statute of limitations. These days I invoke it the way I never did when young or even middle-aged.
This legal expression usually means that, after a certain lapse of time, some crimes are no longer worth prosecuting. The sixteen-year-old pickpocket will not be arrested for that infraction when he or she is forty-five.
As the Academy Awards come near, the film “The Black Swan” reportedly stands a good chance of winning Best Picture. Or, at least, its star, Natalie Portman, may be in the running for best actress.
Lured, in part by these reports I recently went to see the film. Much in it I found easy to admire. The beauty and grace of the ballet sequences in particular gratified my desire for aesthetic pleasure. So did some of the interplay among those actors who had leading roles.
The miners climbing out of the rescue capsule, one by one, and emerging back into the world of light and joy – that’s my favorite image of 2010. This resurrection event last October brought out the best, not only in Chileans, but in the people of the world who helped or just rejoiced with the men and their families.
Each Christmas season, a friend from Kalamazoo writes me a letter that almost always raises my spirit. Frank lives up to his name and, beyond this, he also exhibits a certain quirkiness of character which stirs my ongoing interest in his writing. Faith remains important to him as it does to me.