Six Seeds of the Pomegranate

Thought many thoughts tonight on the way to dinner and had at least two epiphanies fit for paper but only recall one, that plastic surgery is an extension of anorexia, that economists should cite these two practices and their burgeoning as evidence of the inevitability of affluence. Because just as thinness will only be attractive to those who can afford not to eat, for whom eating is such an inevitability that it must be actively avoided, so too youth becomes a luxury commodity when old age is inevitable. No  longer prized for its rarity and wisdom, old age has become something to flee, to avoid, to recoil from in terror. It is no longer a golden time to look forward to and look back from but a terminus, an end to the pleasures and dreams of youth, which have become the only pleasures worth having. What of that character early in Plato’s Republic who says old age has done him good because the passions of the flesh have yielded to the passions of the mind? Who among us would embrace that ethos now? Each phase of life once served a purpose. No more. Now we serve only ourselves, our desires, our narcissism and our schizophrenia. On the one hand, the lifting of the phases frees us to pursue anything, at any time. On the other, we have nothing new to pursue. We have slipped simply from being creatures of duty to creatures of desire: once we were told to do, and we did; now we are told to want, and we want.

Even our mythologies have shifted from being to desire. Once there was the story of Eos and her grasshopper; she asked for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. And so in the nature of humans he grew old, he shriveled. Old age as prelude to death. Old age as preparation. Life as preparation for old age.

But it is not all so futile as that. There is so much to do, so much to be, and so much to contemplate too afterwards. If there is a divine being, a wisdom, then it was right to make us as we are, for old age is one inevitability that compensates for our other shortcomings. It forces us to confront our mortality and our fallibility. It enables us to give meaning to our experiences, our choices, to understand consequences. To what end, you ask? Why must there be an end? Why must we be served in any tangible way but to gain wisdom? What is more important or more sublime than truth?

Your life is written on, into, all over, your body. To be marked is to have lived. To live is to be marked. To seek to erase those marks is to deny that you have lived, to affirm that you wasted your life and think getting your wrinkles ironed out will buy you another one or to simply deny your experiences. But you cannot. No amount of collagen or toxins or surgery will change what you have done and who you have become. We make ourselves. The wrinkles are still there underneath the injections and the tightenings and the lifts. Only the superficial is alterable.

If I live that long I want to be engraved by my stories, for better or for worse. Maybe I will regret these words later. Maybe I will live to regret them. Indeed, what irony. I do not seek to tempt fate, but the simple wrinkles of living – old age, scarred hands, laugh lines, these do not frighten me. They are a promise of a full life. But to carry your whole life with you, to be able to look at each line and embrace what it signifies, be it folly or wisdom, sorrow or joy, to be able to embrace what I did and who I became – that to me would be the dream and the gift of old age, should I attain it. That anyone would seek to flee from such wisdom and peace baffles me.