Being Seventy: One

I'm not quite five years late in reading this book. And it's a bit ironic to point out that I can't remember where or how I came upon it! I just know that somehow it got on my list of books to read and now I've done that.

The author was a Quaker and a Philadelphian. Those two things alone likely would have led me to find out more about her. 

I read the book recently and found parts of it to be very rich indeed. I really wasn't interested in the parts about her Japanese connection (she was tutor to the Crown Prince). What was meaningful to me was her reflections on growing old.

Growing old has been in my consciousness for the past couple of years, and when I learned that this writer intentionally pondered aging over the course of her seventieth year, I wanted to know more.

Interestingly, Mrs. Vining lived twenty-seven more years after writing this book.

I copied out ten little bits from Being Seventy. Bits I want to think more about. Here's one such bit:

Page 5: In younger years one said lightly, “I don’t want to live forever. I certainly don’t want to grow old the way Aunt Hester has.” And one quoted cheerily the Gaelic proverb, “Save when he comes too late, death is a friend.”

A friend he is, I truly believe, but a formidable one; a friend to be anticipated and prepared for as well as welcomed. And his harbingers — those officials who in Elizabethan days and earlier preceded the royal personage, conferring with the prospective host, preparing rooms, making demand — his harbingers are often weariness, illness, pain, and mental diminshment. We may, of course, meet him unexpectedly in the earlier years, but after seventy we are certain to encounter him soon, and his shadow often walks beside us in the new landscape.