AGING
Quotes from Jill Lepore's article Twilight in this week's The New Yorker:
The history of aging appears to follow this rule: the fewer old people there are, the more esteemed they will be. (p.32)
Darkness used always to follow day, too, but it doesn't any more: now we turn on the lights and day never ends. Fortune used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again, now it's a number in a ledger, a score. During the past few centuries, life,along with other things, stopped being a circle and became a line, as the historian John Demos argued. Narratives of progress changed that. If life is a line, it can be longer. When that happened, Gray argues, we forgot how to die: "The hope of life after death has been replaced by the faith that death can be defeated." Once Darwin said we were animals, we stopped being human. (pp. 32,32)
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