Lucy Schiller at Literary Hub:
For the humors-focused, centuries ago, old age was “the age of phlegm.” Oldness was “about rot, meanness, avarice, cowardice, peevishness, irascibility, moroseness, whining, bad eyes, deafness, dripping noses, hacking coughs, baldness, loss of teeth, reeking breath, loss of libido, sagging flesh, forgetfulness, repetitive garrulity.” Opened at random, Simone de Beauvoir’s book on older age reminds us of Horace’s words toward an old woman: “Antiquity ploughs furrows in your ancient forehead…your breasts are as flaccid as the dugs of a mare…what a reek enwraps every part of her flabby limbs.” Centuries later, in the 1980s, one Illinoisan market researcher likened old age to a “Peoria winter,” a term that did, to some degree, make me shudder, having spent my adolescent years not far from Peoria, a city that has always stunned me for its riverine, post-industrial beauty, but where winter hits hard and icy and Spare.
From my pink couch in Pittsburgh, I read this hodgepodge of age-fear, the sunlight slanting down through the dark wood windows.
More here.
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