What is this ‘old age’ which seems to have insensibly and sensibly crept into the recesses of my life, since about the age of 50? This grey eminence seems to be the result of a combination of factors which I will list below and as follows: a need for testosterone shots to compensate for failing energies back in '99 as I was about to retire; the loss of libido which was as strong as ever until my prostate gland needed reducing in size; putting on weight--some 80 pounds--from my 40s to my 60s; increasing quantities of white-and-grey hair; not feeling the heat of enthusiasm and desire for physical activity that once characterized my life year in and year out due to yet another medication package; the simple incremental advance of late adulthood those years from 60 to 80 according and one model of human development used by psychologists.

1. OLD AGE
Part 1:
What is this ‘old age’ which seems to have insensibly and
sensibly crept into the recesses of my life, since about the age of
50? This grey eminence seems to be the result of a combination
of factors which I will list below and as follows:
a need for testosterone shots to compensate for failing energies
back in '99 as I was about to retire; the loss of libido which was
as strong as ever until my prostate gland needed reducing in
size; putting on weight--some 80 pounds--from my 40s to my
60s; increasing quantities of white-and-grey hair; not feeling the
heat of enthusiasm and desire for physical activity that once
characterized my life year in and year out due to yet another
medication package; the simple incremental advance of late
adulthood those years from 60 to 80 according and one model of
human development used by psychologists.
And there is more:
Part 2:
the fatiguing effects of life’s inevitable repetitions especially the
massive quantities of talking that have been necessary in
classrooms as a teacher, and in any community of people one
associates with; a certain discouragement as a result of the same
sort of volunteer secretarial work that had occupied me for
decades; the meagre response on the part of the public to several
of my evangelical enthusiasms for several causes after forty
years of teaching and consolidation work within the context of
these group-enthusiasms; the rigors of many moves, many
towns, many jobs; and the residual effects from decades of
suffering from a bi-polar I disorder.
These and other factors play and have played a complex and, in
some ways, a quite indefinable role in bringing on the first
feelings, slowly and mostly unobtrusively, of old age. I took

2. some comfort in reading that the first existentialist, one Soren
Kierkegaard, said he felt old when he was born.-Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Five Epochs, Published Manuscript, 2014.
Part 3:
However personal and idiosyncratic my autobiography is, it
should be seen, in part at least, as yet one more of the multitude
of facets of the fascinating and world-wide process of the
emergence into old-age that occurs in the life of Everyman, a
process that has been taking place, arguably, since the
beginnings of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, if not before, as far back
as Homo Heidelbergensis, or in the half million years before
him, when the first proto-humans arrived on this planet.-Ron
Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, Published Manuscript,
2014.
I seek myself here, unquestionably,
a route toward expansion and awareness,
a road to creativity, a dialogue:
between innocence and experience,
past and present, child, adolescent,
young adult, middle adult, old adult
and old age, boy and man, father and son,
man and society, community and I---
in the storm of thoughts forever blowing
in my head, as they have for as far back
as I can remember: and don't talk to me
of meditation and making my brain empty.1
1
With thanks to Mark Twain and Robert Lee in First Person
Singular: Studies in American Autobiography, Vision Press,
London, 1988, p.93 and 79, respectively.
--Ron Price 2/4/'00 to 3/3/'14.
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OLD AGE
Some find in old age that the mind loses its edge from the long
habit of the same perceptions which no longer leave any

3. impression. This is the vanished freshness of the world, the
silence on the part of things. They lose their edge. Others
experience a swallowing up of the present by a too-strongly
experienced past, too many memories. For still others the past
becomes a desert, empty, little to draw on to make more of the
present. Still others find the dreaming mind, its memories and
its imaginations, enriching. Rousseau, the famous French
philosopher, found this enrichment in his long aimless walks.
It is by the light of our projects and our activities, writes Simone
de Beauvoir, a more modern philosopher, that the world reveals
itself, that fresh vision gives us life. Many find it hard to find
new interests in old age. Churchill found this. The preservation
of an intellectual appetite, or curiosity, into old age is crucial.
John Stuart Mill, still another philosopher between the early
modern age and the modern age, wrote that his curiosity
withered; whereas Andre Gide, a writer, retained his extreme
preoccupation with ideas until his last days when his spirit fell
into boredom with no goals left. Proust, another writer,
described his final months and days as possessing a kind of
physical gentleness, of striking detachment from the realities of
life. Jonathan Swift, a third writer, was reduced to a complete
inertia and indifference.-Ron Price with thanks to Simone de
Beauvoir, Old Age, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972, pp. 449-
460.
Will there be a scent of sadness
and despondency, a desolation
of hopes into a quiet solitude?
That's the way it was for Henry
Adams; I read once upon a time.
This is what all accomplishment,
all realization, leaves in one's heart;
at least that is the case for some, but
not for everyone. I find that there is
in this, the evening of my life, some
degree of ecstacy; I prefer to keep such

4. an experience quietly under my belt, &
not go around telling of my inner joy.
Who wants to hear about my inner joy
when so many never experience it at all
as old-age creeps upon them and as the
years go on in their petty-pace from day
to day until the last syllable of their time?
Ron Price
3/3/'14.