PROLOGUE
THE INFLECTION POINT

Ageing, quite simply, is growing old. There are many constructive, supportive descriptors of this process:

It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”, 1880¹

The day wore on, and all these bright colors subsided, and assumed a quieter tint, like young hopes softened down by time, or youthful features by degrees resolving into the calm and serenity of age. But they were scarcely less beautiful in their slow decline, than they had been in their prime; for nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy, that we can scarcely mark their progress

Charles Dickens, “Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby”, 1838²

There are equally many that are melancholic or even severely depressing:

And then there is that day when all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness.

Ray Bradbury, “Dandelion Wine”, 1957.³

What is longevity? It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is carrying the weight of seas and pyramids, of ancient libraries and dynasties, of the dawns that Adam saw. It is being well aware that I am bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be.

Jorge Luis Borges, In “Poems of the Night” 2010.⁴

¹ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Originaly published in Russian 1880, Translated by Pevear R and Volokhonsky L, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2002. ISBN 10.0374528373.

² Charles Dickens, Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby, Serialized 1838-39, Published by Chapman and Hall, London.

³ Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, Doubleday, New York, 1957. ISBN 9780394496054.

⁴ Jorge Luis Borges, Poems of the Night, Collection published by Penguin Random House, New York, 2010. ISBN 9780143106005.