THE OTHER SIDE OF 40

ACCORDING TO TIME, I’m going to live to be 89 years old. You remember that life expectancy quiz back last November? After I had assured Time that I’m female, earn less than $50,000 a year, don’t smoke two packs a day or weigh 50 pounds more than I should, they came up with that magic number: 89.

Eighty-nine is pretty good. On the other hand, Time suggested delicately that if I were to move back home to Pittsboro. Mississippi (pop. 190). get a job as a ditchdigger, jog 10 miles a week and give up wine at dinner. I could live to be 99.

I’m not really sure I could stand 99 years as a rural ditchdigger who jogs for fun and goes to bed stone sober every night by nine. I might prefer to die.

Anyway, inert, dissolute urban dweller that I am, I think I’m going to live to be 100. Just a hunch; nothing scientific about it. My model for this longevity is my great-grandmother Harlan, who lived to be 102 without ever wielding a shovel or donning Adidas. Great-grandmother spent the last 10 years of her life charmingly attired in starched, ruffled and lace-trimmed white cotton nightgowns, her thin snowy hair carefully arranged, receiving admirers, devotedly attended by my great-aunt Eva, herself close to 80.

A real saint. Aunt Eva never married. She “gave up a life of her own.” the reverent family story went, “to take care of Papa and Mama.” When Papa died early, as men will, she became Great-grandmother’s slave for half a century.

I have already informed my daughter of her role in the scenario, and 1 thought she wilted a little at the prospect. Never mind. She’ll perk up. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the poet wrote. Go gentle? We all believed Great-grandmother had decided not to go at all. 1 hope to follow her lead.

Not that Great-grandmother was really very interesting, as I remember her. Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony. Our boys were fine young men with good manners, and Yankees were-well, in 1944, for example, a banker in Winston County, Mississippi, where she’d lived since the end of the Civil War. drove out to the old home place to try to sell her a couple of war bonds to help the Allies. Great-grandmother directed one sharp eye at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the bonds, smoothed the starched ruffles over her ancient angry bosom and declared, “Young man, my husband, Cornelius, lost a leg in the War. and if you think I’m putting his money into everything that scoun’l Lincoln is mixed up in. you’ve got another think comin’,” And she didn’t.

I don’t want to be an old lady wedded to a lost cause. In fact, I want to live a long time but I don’t want to age. I shudder thinking of the Cumean Sybil, a woman granted eternal life by the gods. With their frequent sloppiness, Zeus and Company forgot a prime necessity: the eternal youth to go with it. So the poor Sybil lingered, unable to die but hardly alive. Wispier and weaker through the millennia, she became nothing more than a dry scratchy voice in a bottle. What a fate -to become, like Great-grandmother or the Sybil, a kind of vanilla extract of myself.

Now some things don’t age. If I were a cancer cell, I wouldn’t age. I’d just keep multiplying jubilantly until, like the Nazis, I ran out of Lebensraum, or till I was stopped by an Allied army. Certain germs don’t age either.

Neither cancer cells nor germs, we human beings are all, as a species, growing older. Human beings can have a life span of 115 to 120 years, scientists say, and we are on the way to achieving it. In the United States, the median age now is 30, as opposed to about half that in 1820. In 1900 the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; today it is 73. The whole country is growing old.

Actually, we would benefit the species if all of us were to die young. A species lives longer, apparently, when individuals die early and give rise to a new generation quickly. Somehow I don’t feel inclined to hurl myself off Reunion Tower for the good of the human race. I’d rather live out Time’s prediction.

But if I do, I will be old. Already, less than midway to the point I aspire to reach, my whole body seems to be moving southerly, various parts drifting below a sort of physiological Mason-Dixon line. Bit by bit, I can see myself succumbing to gravity. “I often stop, flabbergasted, at the sight of this incredible thing that serves me as a face,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote while in her 50s. “I loathe my appearance now: the eyebrows slipping down toward the eyes, the bags underneath, the excessive fullness of the cheeks and that air of sadness around the mouth that wrinkles always bring.”

Come off it, Simone. You may look sad to you, but the only expression around my mouth when I hit 50 is going to be a smirk of satisfaction at having made it. One summer of their crude prepubescence, my kids used to chortle over a favorite joke: Halitosis is better than no breath at all. Being an old lady is better than no breath at all.

There’s only one question remaining. What kind of old lady shall I be? From my observations, I have concluded that a successful old age depends on obeying three cardinal rules: Be daring. Be loving. Be tough.

I hope I will be shocking. Not that I am setting out to shock, that dullest of all approaches to life, which I think I’ve outgrown. But in a good old age things that lift the heart matter more than face-lifts, tummy tucks or designer derrières. I’d have a face-lift, sure, if I had the money and the interest. Why not? But nothing makes the spirit soar like doing things just because you damn well want to.

If “the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead a long time,” as Faulkner once wrote, I’m going to seize the day I’ve been granted. When I die, I want to be used up. It would show a real failure in flare if I never startled the younger world. I’ve paid my conservative dues; I deserve a radical old age.

And the contemporary scene is full of inspiring examples. My husband and I were shepherding 20 SMU undergraduates around New York last May when Lena Home’s one-woman show opened on Broadway. “My god, Lena Horne,” my husband said. “She was a beautiful woman.”

“But she’s a grandmother!” the students exclaimed. “Why, she’s over sixty years old, at least!”

“Let’s go for kicks,” I said, in the smugness of a two-decade margin, “and see how the old girl is holding up.” We drifted lackadaisically over to the Nederlander for tickets. Sold-out, for a grandmother- and even now, almost a year later, among the hardest tickets to get on Broadway.

“Being pretty got me a job,” Lena has said of her chorus girl beginnings at 16. “It took me another 40 years to get the talent.” At 64, she’s going off like a rocket, still a beautiful woman with a figure a 20-year-old would diet for.

Speaking of figures, I cite Vikki LaMot-ta, the former wife of boxer Jake LaMotta who was the subject of the film Raging Bull. Vikki recently adorned the pages of Playboy lying on a bed wearing only a fishnet body stocking and a wide grin. Maybe the grin was because of her age: 51.

The story ends with the LaMotta guide to continued vitality:

People walk around, crying, “Oh, what I’ve been through, what I’ve suffered!” Well, big deal. Years later, they’re still living it. I don’t mean that I didn’t suffer, that I didn’t feel pain. But so what? Next case.

“The key to remaining sexy,” Vikki emphasizes, “is to remain passionate; about life, people, everything. Age doesn’t matter.”

Posing nude for the American public in her fifth decade Vikki has described as “a message that life isn’t over at 30,” and in that fishnet body stocking she delivers her message pretty clearly. Shocking, absolutely shocking-and the more power to her.

My ambitions don’t lie in those directions, thank heaven. I can’t sing a note, and it would take more than a tummy tuck to sneak me into Playboy. I do have a few fairly modest shockers in me, however. In a few years, when someone blows a car horn behind me to rush me through an intersection, I’m going to stop the car, cut off the motor, get out, pad around to his window in my tennis shoes and quaver, “Oh, sonny, were you trying to tell me something?”

Or some night after a party, when everyone else is yawning and getting ready to go home to bed, I’m going to thank my hostess nicely and say, “Ta ta, all. I’m leaving now to drive to Mexico.” And do it. Alone. Once, years ago in Austin, I saw the indefatigable Terrell Maverick Webb, then 80-ish, do just that. It has stayed with me ever since as a positive emblem of radiant old age.

In my dotage, unlike Aunt Eva, I’m going to dote on myself: write a Harlequin romance, refinish all my furniture, execute The Unicorn in Captivity in cross-stitch, bicycle across Europe with a troop of Boy Scouts, begin a foundation for leprous virgins as Dame Edith Sitwell did, take up professional ballet, marry an 18-year-old as Maude did in Harold and Maude. I’m going to take chances.

In his old age, my quiet Granddaddy Reid, after years of the bucolic life, developed an absorbing interest in Mississippi industry, which nobody else knew existed. To the worry of his 50- and 60-year-old sons, he played the market. Like the Ancient Mariner, he loved to fix you with his glittering eye and tell you about his stocks in the pants factory at Calhoun City or the cotton gin at Olive Branch. He never made a cent as far as I know, but he lived to be 94, a tycoon all the way.

The zest and daring of these enterprises appeal to me. It’s a lot more exciting to hear Lena Horne swinging into Stormy Weather like a sexy torch singer than to watch Henry Fonda play an old man very much like himself in On Golden Pond. Oh, I know he’s good, but where’s the challenge in it? Is Fonda, as Stanley Kaufman has suggested, simply trading on our affection, “prematurely clouting us with his obituaries”? Better he should have a go at King Lear, a role that would involve some stretching, if he feels so old. As for Katharine Hepburn, she’s been playing the same old woman for 20 years. Let her play Lear, too; I think she’d be a better Lear than Fonda.

But for the most part women age better than men anyway. They have to, perhaps. As everyone knows, they just plain live longer, an average of eight to 10 years. Because of that fact, many of the problems of the over-65 group -the loss of a spouse, financial setbacks, even senility – must be faced and conquered largely by women. Aging is, practically speaking, a feminist issue.

Oddly enough, however, the difficult decade for most women is that from 45 to 55, when hormonal changes often cause depression that can set its sharp teeth in the jugular vein and its horny claws in the female heart. Surveys have pretty much exploded the myth of the once widely held “empty nest syndrome.” Maybe in the Sixties and early Seventies a generation of thoroughly conditioned homemakers despaired to see the children leave home, but many women today reveal a sense of freedom for themselves on seeing that last fledgling fly off.

True, some women may have deferred their own lives until that point and so lack resources. But I think that, far more often than is sometimes supposed even by women themselves, female depression stems from the dramatic physical changes in this decade of life and the psychological confusion that accompanies them. As my friend Pam commented, “My period was late last month, and I didn’t know whether to put it down to pregnancy or menopause. What a dilemma! Fortunately” – the key word -“it wasn’t either.” Wanting to hang-glide between fertility and infertility may replace that earlier fear of flying. If a woman can wait this hesitation out, nature solves it for her.

Depression usually hits men later, according to the Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, and may be connected with the loss of power that accompanies retirement. “Many elderly white men have really been at the center of the power base in this country,” Dr. Sanford Finkel told The New York Times. “The bigger you are, the harder you fall.”

Perhaps men have to learn something women have often of necessity experienced: the pleasure of “serial careers.” I spent 12 years at home as wife and mother, then the last 10 years as a university teacher. Because of this disjunction, I can imagine other lives for myself, a vital skill in aging well.

Recently, part of my teaching has been with adults, in the university’s Master of Liberal Arts program. I’ve been heartened to see the eagerness and savoir-faire with which these students, many of them older than I am, welcome new ideas and experiences. In a drama class, a 68-year-old retired engineer and businessman attended his first live play -Shakespeare yet. He loved it. A successful neurologist studied The Great Gatsby at the same time as his freshman son at Harvard.

A career pilot at Braniff for 33 years read Donald Barthelme’s zany parody Snow White, and wrote his own version of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, which I suggested he mail to Barthelme as a tribute. It was the pilot who said to our group, in the wonderfully calm, authoritative voice pilots have (“This is your captain speaking”), “You people don’t know what taking this course means to me. I’ve been more in the air than on the ground for nearly forty years. Now I’m seeing the world differently.”

Several weeks later on the phone he reported, “I got a letter from Barthelme. Listen:

Thanks for your letter and paper which I enjoyed, especially the Lone Ranger stuff (although it’s Zorro I take as a role model). As a pilot you have a special opportunity. You know something that a great many other people are intensely curious about. Write a book, write a story. It’s clear that you can do it; let’s get it done.

“What should I think about this?”

“Think it’s wonderful,” I said. “Then do what the man said.”

As Barthelme, who just turned 50 himself, told me at the Literary Festival last November, “Even when I wrote Snow White I realized that cursing the world is not a proper response to the world, and I wasn’t entirely pleased with the book. At fifty I keep thinking, ’Cherish that which thou must leave ere long.’ The best thing one can do with the world when one is fifty is embrace it.”

If I live, I’d like to embrace it for two more decades at the university. After that, who knows? Perhaps I’ll discover America.

Whether or not I discover America, I hope I will continue to discover love, because I don’t believe I could live very happily or very long without it. Not necessarily sexual love, although that’s okay too. One may embrace the world by embracing another person. “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace,” so I’ll take love while I can.

Does the sex drive last until death? I don’t know. Someone asked the tragedian Sophocles when he was 70 if he still desired a woman, and he answered cheerfully, “No, Aphrodite be praised, I’m free of that raging beast.”

But Simone de Beauvoir, not so cheerfully, regrets in old age a loss of libido:

Yes, the moment has come to say: Never again! It is not I who am saying goodbye to all those things I once enjoyed, it is they who are leaving me; the mountain paths disdain my feet. Never again shall I collapse, drunk with fatigue, into the smell of hay. Never again shall I slide down through the solitary morning snows. Never again a man. Now, not my body alone but my imagination too has accepted that.

Pardon me again, Simone, but I think that’s self-pitying nonsense. If you weren’t such a tough old bird usually, I’d say someone had been doing a number on your imagination, probably someone under 30. Why can’t you collapse into the smell of hay? Tumbles in the hay are possible at any age.

But it is shocking to young people, all the way along, to think of their elders as having sex lives. “Do you mean you and Daddy had to do that every time you wanted a baby?” the child asks, his nose wrinkled distastefully. When he feels the pangs of sex himself, he assumes, with Nabokov’s Lolita, that sex is “part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers.”

A youth-obsessed society perpetuates this absurdity. Centerfolds are young – that’s why Vikki LaMotta deserves mention. Movie queens are young. “It’s sad,” actress Barbara Rush was quoted recently as saying, “that American motion pictures and television… have a tendency to discard an actress at forty and then rediscover her beauty and talent at about age seventy, when she’s ready for a very predictable role.”

Brides are young, wear white lace and are given away by Dad. An older friend of mine, looking for the perfect dress for her romantic second marriage, was mistaken for the mother of the bride in shop after shop and was considerately steered toward limp lavender and discreet gray. “At a certain point I decided to wear shocking pink, if I could find it,” she told me ruefully, her face lit with ironic humor. “Those sales ladies – they were my age, some of them – but they just assumed that no one over sixty ever gets married!”

Yet it is a fact that in 1979 alone, 28,000 women over 65 in this country were brides, 1,180 of them for the first time. When Muriel Humphrey, the widow of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, married her old high school beau, the story made front pages. But that sort of thing happens to ordinary people all the time.

People are sexy in different ways as they get older. The young Robert Redford was a thing of beauty and a joy for a few years, but was he sexier in 1960 with his pristine factory-new look than he is today, his face now older, leaner, more lined? Not to me. Bo Derek is an engineering wonder. In 20 years, if she develops an expression on that dumb mug of hers, she may even be sexy.

Many young people, 1 suspect, are because of social conditioning so horrified by the specter of age that they’d rather the elderly not do anything to call attention to themselves. Beneath the aesthetic horror, of course, lies a craven fear: Will I be old, too? As a 17-year-old SMU freshman girl wrote in The Dallas Morning News Soapbox one Sunday in January:

I have been taught that I must conquer gray hairs, wrinkles, “unsightly” sags, age spots, coffee stains on my dentures. But how? Time touches us all, leaving visible fingerprints, and no amount of jogging, face-lifts, hair dyes, creams and lotions will halt the flow of time. So don’t think that I am taken in by TV commercials in which lovely 20-year-old women rave about the miracles of wrinkle-removers, hair dyes and age spot-vanishers. Nevertheless, I am afraid of that distant morning (a Monday morning, no doubt) when I glance into the mirror and meet the eyes of an old woman.

In a country that shoves aside the realities of growing old, we all feel obligated to stay forever panting and forever young. Yet how can that be?

When my daughter was about 14, I guess, we stood in line at the Magic Pan at NorthPark next to a large group of women all 60 or over, probably. They were well-dressed, out on the town, laughing and talking, putting their well-coiffed gray heads together to gossip or exclaim over pictures of grandchildren.

I glanced over at my daughter. Her face was aghast. “They’re so awful” she said. “What are they even living for?”

“Don’t be silly. Look at them,” I told her sharply. “They’re eating out and having fun, doing just what you’re doing. What’s your problem?”

“Oh,” she whispered fiercely, “I hope I never get like that.”

You will, honey, you will.

But those elderly women who seemed “so awful” to my unseasoned child had learned a primary lesson in aging well: They were friends. Love and affection, with or without sex, prolongs life. Love-lessness destroys. Take a lover, make a friend, get a pet and you’ll not only be happier, but you’ll live longer.

Bored with the shallowness of my blond baby, I watched the women as she prattled on. To each other, those grandmotherly women were anything but decrepit old wrecks, I could see. Lightly they praised hairdos, swapped wardrobe tips, supported various items on the clearly familiar menu, talked about the same things my daughter was talking about. I liked them, thought their humor and experience were attractive.

I couldn’t quite imagine myself being one of them, but on the other hand a serious chill had descended on my conversation with my daughter. Feeling a breath of arctic air, I realized as I turned back to her pretty, animated face that someday, maybe over a lunch like this one, she might decide that I too am awful, an old fool, a past person. Coldly I resolved: I’ve got to be ready.

To be ready I’ve got to be tough. Of the three rules for aging well -Be daring, Be loving, Be tough – being tough may be the hardest to accept. We live in a Christian nation, after all; we are loving parents, respectful children, loyal taxpayers, good people. Against whom do we have to steel ourselves? we may ask.

But a person who is growing old has, often unwillingly and even unwittingly, set himself against the whole tenor of American society. America is a young country, as the world goes, bred in revolution, born in independence, and Americans prize independence and productivity. The wave of crime abuse abroad in the land suggests that we resent the dependence even of our children. Woe to the man or woman who grows old being dependent and obsolescent. In some parts of the globe, presumably, the old are valued for their wisdom, their breadth of experience, their spiritual insight. “Thy young men shall dream dreams and thy old men shall see visions,” the Hebrew prophet sang. That’s not the American way.

“It’s basically un-American to get old,’ one ex-adman in his 60s told anthropol ogist Barbara Anderson in her clear sighted book, The Aging Game: Success Sanity and Sex after Sixty. Dr. Anderson sees the aging game as basically an Us Them situation.

“Every person younger than 60 is the adversary of every aging American unti proven otherwise,” she writes.



Every person. This is simply becausethey are not yet old. Nor should the oldpresume certain automatic exceptions:their children, employers, ministers,physicians. The closer the tie the greaterthe threat, for these are people in extraordinary positions to exert influence onthe future of the aged.

Of course the old love their children, may be staunchly devoted to an employer (if they still have one), regard their ministers as their spiritual guides and place their lives regularly in the hands of their physicians. In these relationships, however, the former primary statuses of parent, employee, parishioner and patient undergo a metamorphosis in late life. After 60, the critical status becomes OLD PERSON. And that dimension, OLD, takes precedence socially over everything and anything else. After 60, you are an old parent, an old employee, an old parishioner and an old patient.



A radical and disquieting thought.

I wouldn’t claim the situation is a purely American phenomenon, however. Take this: A top executive decides to take an early retirement and turns his millions and the family business over to his children -a couple of daughters, say. He plans to spend summers with his daughter in Long Island, winters with his daughter in Florida. In midwinter, he discovers to his dismay that neither child sees much use in having an old has-been around. He foolishly flees to Manhattan and gets soaked and frozen wandering the city streets – “just like a little child, running away from home,” the daughters commiserate sanctimoniously on the WATS line. He is last seen holed up in a doorway on Times Square, clearly a case of senile dementia, muttering nonsense like “Ripeness is all.” That’s King Lear, of course, or part of it.

At least Lear chose retirement. Old executives are often kicked upstairs or forced to retire, then shoved right on out the back door to the convalescent hospital or nursing home, bus stops on the way to heaven. But old age is not a disease to convalesce from or to be nursed through, and the wise person approaching it will take the toughest measures possible to prevent this pattern from being imposed on him.

What’s necessary? The same things that are always necessary in an imperfect world: Money. Power. Brains. The poet Robert Frost, who lived to be an old man himself, said it best:



The witch that came (the withered hag)

To wash the steps with pail and rag

Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.

Too many fall from great and good

For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.

Or if predestined to die late,

Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!

If need be occupy a throne,

Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew,

Others on being simply true.

What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred

Atones for later disregard

Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!



Another kind of toughness is also called for, one I have to confess a little more to my liking, eternal optimist that I am. That’s the toughness of self-discipline. 1 knocked Kate Hepburn and Henry Fonda earlier. Wash my mouth out with soap; at least they’re still working. And it seems to me looking at the scene before me from a strictly nonstatistical point of view, that the most self-disciplined, strongest old people among us, are in one form or another, artists.

The list is impressive: Michelangelo, still painting at 80; Toscanini, conducting at 80; Bertrand Russell, publishing philosophy at 90; Casals at his cello and Rubinstein at his piano in their 90s; Picasso, spreading paint on canvas well into his ninth decade; P.G. Wodehouse reaching 90, having published a comic masterpiece for every year of his life. And so on. What is there about practicing the arts that improves and lengthens life?

Maybe nothing, from a statistical point of view. But I like to think there are a couple of things, the most obvious being that no one forces retirement in a free-lance profession. If a writer has a paper and pen (some say a word processor) or a painter his brushes and paints, who’s to stop him performing, even making money at it? The writer V.S. Pritchett, a distinguished 81 this year, jokes that he’s still earning his living as a free-lance journalist.

There are no guarantees, of course. Death is as unpredictable as life. One can’t actually take up the arts as term insurance against mortality.

But if art doesn’t specifically lengthen life -and I can’t prove that it does -it does allow old people to express their fantasies in bold yet valued ways. Picasso said once, “It takes a long time to grow young,” and there is something of the loved and happy child in the sight of the aging artist or art-amateur, splashing around with paints, stringing pretty notes together or making up stories.

What am I saying exactly? I agree with Frost that as we get older we should lay up treasures on Earth, with moth, rust and burglary protection on them. But I think it’s just as important to lay up treasures in heaven, and the only heaven I know is reached through the human imagination. I’m convinced the old do see visions, and part of preparing for old age involves finding a way to express and communicate those visions.

Without an articulation, old people are not always fortunate with their fantasies. Many of them are like “the old fools” in Philip Larkin’s poem of that name:



Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms

Inside your head, and people in them, acting.

People you know, yet can’t quite name.Each looms

Like a deep loss restored.. .That is where they live:

Not here and now, but where all happened once.



I remember my mother telling me that just before my grandmother died, she began to live in her fantasies of the past. “I’d go in to see about her,” Mother said, “and she’d smile and tell me all the places she’d been that day and who all she’d seen – when really she was paralyzed, you know, and I had to care for her like a baby.

“But she was so happy. Sometimes she’d say she’d been riding old John across the fields and through the woods back of the farm. Or she’d gone to visit Grandmother Harlan, and Grandmother had been dead six years.”

My mother listened from love, but the discipline of an art form can create listeners for the visions of aging.

I’m a good way from 60, but I must be getting old because I have lighted rooms inside my head a lot of the time. My children comment on it, not too kindly. I walk around the house, talking to people I haven’t seen in years as I wash the dishes; my husband sometimes thinks I’m blessing him out for not helping. I walk across campus holding lively conversations with imaginary comrades -I’ve learned to talk without moving my lips so the medics won’t carry me away. When I’ve served my next two decades in the trenches, I’d like to sit down in a warm room behind the lines and write it all down as fast as my fingers will fly.

Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be, and that will be remembering. I’ve had everything in my life, it seems to me. I grew up in a town without a telephone – not a one in the whole town until I was a senior in high school, and then there was one phone on the town square for everybody. If you got a phone call, somebody ran down to your house and got you, and you talked with a circle of people standing around asking, What is it? We had a well in the backyard for water and a privy behind the chicken house and Aladdin lamps to read by.

But I had a fireplace in my bedroom, and I could ride the cotton wagon home at dusk and go to sleep with the dying fire. Chronologically I’m not really old enough to have lived like this, but I was lucky.

Then just last year in early spring, I flew for 18 hours, halfway around the world to the Far East. Bunked down in a Sky Bed four miles above the earth, 1 drifted off to sleep by the fires of the night sky. I’ve had it all, reality more marvelous than fantasy.

Maybe that’s why I can’t comprehend what Simone de Beauvoir means when she writes:

I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze toward that young and credulous girl, 1 realize with stupor how much I was gypped.

Simone, I have just one word for you. Piffle.