Aging and old age

Use in the book

Old age is the alternative to the application of white lead. It brings the same apparent colour to the hair, but now the hairs are said to have become white rather than merely to look white.

The noun supplies the example’s second manner of presence. The contrast does not require a claim that every natural process is genuine and every artificial one deceptive; its particular task is to show that something present can affect its bearer in importantly different ways.

Places to read

1. 217dὅταν δή, ὦ φίλε, τὸ γῆρας — But when, my friend, old age.

Use in the book

Its authority is historically qualified: old age must have been more honored when people could scarcely know more than they had personally seen. A later literary judgment contrasts age’s pursuit of taste and ease with youth’s fashion-following. Before eternity, however, even a centenarian becomes a child and old age a dawn. Another passage distinguishes a morally good maxim about growing old from the beauty of an elliptical maxim. Age here is also material for thinking about expression, not simply a series of autobiographical complaints.

Places to read

1. I, p. 333, entry 9, ¶1Experiential limits once gave age a special authority.
2. II, p. 476, entry 5, ¶1Literary old age follows taste and ease.
3. I, p. 469, entry 5, ¶1Old age is only dawn before eternity.
4. II, p. 736, entry 5, ¶1Two maxims about honoring age differ in literary construction.

Translation in this edition

The English translation keeps the comparison’s “before eternity” rather than treating the centenarian as literally young. The two quoted maxims remain distinct and are not merged into a familiar proverb. In the first witness, devoit is read inferentially as “must have been”; the alternative “ought to have been,” expressing deserved honor, remains possible.