I recognize on OLD baby at
once,--with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of candy and a
porringer,)--so does everybody; and an old child shedding its milk-
teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it
were, of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his
late suppers now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen
stages at any rate, and that it would not be hard to make twenty-
five; five primary, each with five secondary divisions.
The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same
ingenuous simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as
the first stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The great
delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and
exceptional which is universal and according to law. A person is
always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man
for the first time.
Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on
board of vessels,--in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into
maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have
drifted far away from port before we awake out of our illusions.
But to carry us out of maturity into old age, without our knowing
where we are going, she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we
stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until snow
enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains out of
their stupid trances.
Pages:
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181