資料來源 From: https://nasmm.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/3483/
Growing Older: A Poet’s Perspective
Posted on
January 20, 2015 |
Food for thought this morning from Jane Gross of The New York Times. NASMM Senior Move Managers® are on the front lines of their clients’ losses. Sigh.
GROWING OLDER, NOT HAPPIER
Donald Hall’s Frank Collection of Essays About the Tarnish of the Golden Years
JAN. 19, 2015 By JANE GROSS
In 2001, Donald Hall, just 70 and yet to be named the nation’s poet laureate or to receive the National Medal of Arts, published a poem titled “
Affirmation” in The New Yorker. It began: “To grow old is to lose everything.”
At the time, Mr. Hall hadn’t lost everything — that was still to come.
The evidence rests in the latest of his 33 books, divided between poetry and prose, this one called “Essays After Eighty” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). It is a slim volume, alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny, in which Mr. Hall, now 86, describes the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of the very old, so unimaginable to his younger self.
In these 14 essays, Mr. Hall plumbs the indignities, condescensions and terrors of advanced age, along with musings on beards (he has had three), women (two wives, many dalliances), smoking (cigars, Chesterfields, Kents, marijuana), poetry readings, rejection letters, old houses and the creatures who take up residence there, bad food (Wonder bread, Spam), and the view from his window.
But mostly, these essays are about a “ceremony of losses”: giving up his driver’s license, eating Stouffer’s frozen dinners (“widowers’ food”), noting his many brushes with mortality. And the terrible twist that his beloved second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, should die of leukemia at 47 two decades ago, but in the book she remains, very much alive and still in the present tense......
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