Reading Colette this morning, I found this lovely passage about aging, thought it worth saving here, and so:
Setting the scene -- Colette is remembering her childhood and the magic of New Year's Day, her most special holiday. She is in Paris and has just returned from an evening romp in the snow with her two dogs. They are now warming themselves by the fire.
"Still under the spell of my daydream, I am astounded to find I have changed, have aged while I dreamed...I could repaint on this face, with a tremulous brush, that fresh childish face, toasted with sunlight, rosy with cold, the firm cheeks curving into a pointed chin, the mobile eyebrows prompt to frown, a mouth whose sly corners belie the short, ingenuous upper lip...Alas, for only a moment. The adorable velours of the resuscitated pastel brushes off and blows away...The dark water of the small mirror keeps only my image, which is quite, quite like me, marked with light scratches, finely lined at the eyelids, the corners of the lips, and between the stubborn brows...An image which neither smiles nor becomes sad, and which murmurs for me alone: 'One must grow old. Do not weep, do not join supplicating hands, do not revolt: one must grow old. Repeat this word, not as a cry of despair, but as the signal for a necessary departure. Look at yourself, look at your eyelids, your lips, raise from your temples the curls of your hair: already you are beginning to drift away from your life, don't forget it, one must grow old!
'Go away slowly, slowly, without tears; forget nothing! Take with you your health, your cheerfulness, your coquetry, the small amount of kindness and justice that rendered life less bitter for you; don't forget! Go away adorned, go gently, and do not stop on the irresistible way, you will try in vain to do so -- because one must grow old! Follow the road, and do not stop for rest except to die! And when you do lie down across the vertiginous undulating ribbon of a road, if you have not left behind you one by one your curly locks, your teeth, your limbs one by one worn out, if the eternal dust has not, before your final hour, weaned your eyes from the marvelous light -- if you have, to the very end, kept in your hand the friendly hand who guides you, then lie down smiling, sleep happy, sleep as one privileged...'
Joy and Paula
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