A Mathematician's Apology is a short book of twenty-nine numbered sections in which the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, at sixty-two and conscious that his creative powers had faded, sets out to justify a life spent on pure mathematics. Cambridge University Press published it in 1940.
Medical tag
Aging Senescence
Old age, bodily decline, longevity.
Works
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys is Nathaniel Hawthorne's first book of Greek myths retold for children. Six stories are set inside a frame: Eustace Bright, an eighteen-year-old Williams College student on vacation, tells them to a crowd of children staying at Tanglewood, a country house in the Berkshires, whom Hawthorne gives flower and plant names such as Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Squash-Blossom and Buttercup.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel about a real man who was born in Africa around 1710, enslaved in Massachusetts, and died free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Its ten chapters carry dates.
Animal Farm is a short beast fable about a revolution that turns into a tyranny. On Manor Farm near Willingdon in England, the old prize boar Major gathers the animals one night and describes a dream of a world without Man, who takes their milk, eggs and labour and sends them to the knacker when they are old.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie is the steel manufacturer's own story of his life, written mostly in summers at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands after his retirement and left unfinished when the First World War began in August 1914. His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, contributes a preface, and Professor John C. Van Dyke, who arranged the manuscript, adds an editor's note and footnotes; the book appeared in 1920, the year after Carnegie's death.
Beowulf remembers a northern heroic world through three combats that join glory to mortality. Hrothgar's hall Heorot, built as a center of gift-giving and song, becomes a place of terror when Grendel attacks the sleeping retainers.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
This Paine anthology gathers the pamphlets that made revolutionary argument feel urgent, portable, and democratic. Common Sense, published in January 1776, attacks monarchy, hereditary succession, reconciliation with Britain, and political hesitation.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon in 1753: what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau's essay did not win the prize, but it was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a preface and extensive notes.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one, is the clever, handsome and wealthy mistress of Hartfield, a house in the Surrey village of Highbury, where she keeps company with her fond, fretful and health-obsessed widowed father. When her governess and friend Miss Taylor marries the genial widower Mr. Weston, Emma credits herself with the match and resolves to arrange more.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Essays on Education in a Republic gathers the six essays on schooling that open Benjamin Rush's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, published in Philadelphia in 1798. Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote them between 1786 and 1791 to ask what kind of education a free people needs once it has made itself a republic.
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, is Isaac Newton's experimental account of light and colour, written in English and published in London in 1704. Newton opens by announcing that his design is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments, and the three books carry out that plan.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces. The stories are short, often only a few pages, and are among the defining works of American postmodern fiction.
Shakespeare's Sonnets is a sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems, nearly all in the form now named after him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg, in iambic pentameter. The sequence has no plot in the ordinary sense, but readers since the eighteenth century have traced a loose story.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
The Borrowers is told within a frame. A girl called Kate, about ten, sits crocheting with old Mrs May, who lives in two rooms of Kate's parents' house.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
Jonas is eleven and lives with his father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, his mother, who holds an important post in the Department of Justice, and his younger sister Lily in a tidy, enclosed Community where nearly everything is decided for its citizens. Families are assigned, each with one son and one daughter; babies are born to Birthmothers and given out at the yearly December Ceremony; children receive bicycles at Nine and jobs at Twelve; precise language is enforced with public apologies; everyone takes a daily pill once the Stirrings of adolescent desire begin; and those who break the rules three times, the old, and newborns who fail to thrive are "released" to a vague Elsewhere.
The Golden Bough sets out to explain one strange rule. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban Hills near Rome, the priest, called the King of the Wood, held office until a runaway slave broke a bough from a certain tree and killed him in single combat, becoming priest in turn.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
The Newburgh Address is the speech George Washington read to the officers of the Continental Army on 15 March 1783 in the Temple, a large log hall the soldiers had built at their winter cantonment near Newburgh, New York. The fighting had largely ended after Yorktown, and peace with Britain was close, but the officers had gone unpaid for months.
The Nicomachean Ethics asks what the human good is and how a life can be shaped toward it. Aristotle begins from the idea that every craft, inquiry and action aims at some good, and that the highest practical good is eudaimonia, often translated happiness or flourishing.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
The Practice of the Presence of God gathers four conversations with, and fifteen letters by, Brother Lawrence, a lay brother of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris who spent his days in the friary kitchen. The conversations were written down by a visitor, traditionally identified as Joseph de Beaufort, who first met him on 3 August 1666.
The Prose Edda is a handbook of Norse myth and of the art of skaldic poetry, written in Iceland around 1220 by the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. It was meant to teach young poets the old stories and the poetic names (kennings) that the court verse of Scandinavia depended on, at a time when Iceland had been Christian for more than two centuries.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Silver Chair begins behind the gym at Experiment House, a muddled modern boarding school where bullies rule. Jill Pole is crying there when Eustace Scrubb, much changed since his voyage on the Dawn Treader, tells her about Narnia.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
The Stranger is a short novel in two parts narrated by Meursault, a young shipping clerk in Algiers in French Algeria, who reports what he sees and feels in plain, flat sentences and seldom explains himself. Part One, in six chapters, covers about eighteen days.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
The Waste Land is a poem of 433 lines in five parts, dedicated to Ezra Pound and prefaced by a Latin and Greek epigraph from Petronius in which the Sibyl of Cumae, shrivelled in a jar, says she wants to die. Part I, The Burial of the Dead, opens with April as the cruellest month, stirring memory and desire in a dead land.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
John Adams's Thoughts on Government and selected letters present a founder preoccupied with constitutional balance, civic virtue, law, ambition, and the fragility of republics. Thoughts on Government, written in 1776, argues that new American states should avoid simple unicameral democracy and instead build mixed, balanced institutions with separated powers and independent courts.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Ulysses is a seventy-line dramatic monologue in blank verse that Tennyson wrote in October 1833, within weeks of learning that his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna. He published it in his two-volume Poems of 1842.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
Utopia is a dialogue in two books, written in Latin and presented as a true report. In Book I More, writing in his own person, recalls his embassy to Flanders in 1515 with Cuthbert Tunstall.
Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett, written in French as En attendant Godot between late 1948 and early 1949, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952, and first staged at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Beckett's own English translation, subtitled a tragicomedy in two acts, was published by Grove Press in New York in 1954.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life. During the luminous northern nights, he wanders the city and feels intimate with streets, houses and imagined lives while remaining isolated from actual human companionship.
Passages
- A Mathematician's Apology, Sections 1-5
Hardy treats writing about mathematics as a sign of exhausted creative power and argues that mathematics is a young man's game.
- A Mathematician's Apology, Section 29
Hardy's final self-assessment, including what he tells himself when depressed and his sense of steady deterioration since his forties.
- A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, The Gorgon's Head
The Three Gray Women pass a single eye from hand to hand and are helpless while Perseus holds it.
- A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, The Miraculous Pitcher
Baucis and Philemon share their last bread, honey and milk, and are later given renewed age as an oak and a linden.
- Amos Fortune, Free Man, Evergreen Years, 1794-1801
Amos's old age and death at about ninety-one.
- Animal Farm, Chapter 1
Major tells the animals that Man will send the old horses to the knacker and that he himself has lived long only by luck.
- Animal Farm, Chapter 9
Boxer's split hoof and failing lungs, his collapse at the windmill, and his removal in the horse slaughterer's van while Squealer describes a hospital.
- As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 3 and Act 2, Scene 6
Adam attributes his healthy old age to avoiding hot liquors in youth, then collapses from hunger in the forest.
- As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7
The seven ages of man, ending in second childishness and the loss of the senses.
- Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Preface (Louise Whitfield Carnegie)
Influenza and pneumonia after 1914 and the patience with which he bore old age.
- Beowulf, The mere and the second fight
Beowulf gives this tag concrete force through the medical interest lies in battle wounds, grief, aging kingship, and the social care owed to bodies that have been broken in public violence
- Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and The American Crisis, Rights of Man, social welfare proposals
Paine proposes public measures for poverty and old age, anticipating later welfare and public-health arguments.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop, Mission and encounter
Death Comes for the Archbishop gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes travel hardship, hunger, fever, aging, deathbed care, and the bodily cost of missionary life in an arid landscape
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
The barber dyes Aschenbach's hair and paints his face, echoing the painted old man on the ship.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, opening
Willy returns home unable to drive, describing how his mind drifted and he nearly went off the road.
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, the firing and Charley's office
Willy is fired after decades and remarks that he is worth more dead than alive.
- Discourse on Method, Part VI
Health as the first good; the mind's dependence on bodily organs; hope that medicine could cure diseases of body and mind and the debility of age.
- Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, First Part, on perfectibility
Rousseau asks why man alone is subject to dotage and answers that old age strips away the acquisitions of perfectibility.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, North of Boston, The Death of the Hired Man
Mary notices how changed and worn the old hired man Silas is; Warren later finds him dead.
- Emma, Vol. I, Ch. I-III
Mr. Woodhouse's dislike of change and marriage, his gruel and fears about wedding cake, and his reliance on Mr. Perry are introduced at Hartfield's evening parties.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. V, 'Upon Some Verses of Virgil'
Candid reflection on ageing, waning sexual vigour and the body's decline.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XIII, 'Of Experience'
Detailed personal regimen (sleep, diet, habits) and colic attacks, with the argument that long experience of one's own body outranks medical rules.
- Essays, Essay XXX, Of Regiment of Health
Self-observation as physic, gradual change, Celsus's alternation of fasting and full eating, waking and sleep; passions to avoid; choosing a physician of middle temper.
- Essays, Essays XLII–XLIV, Of Youth and Age, Of Beauty, Of Deformity
Stages of life and bodily appearance as influences on character; deformity as a spur to boldness and ambition.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, A Defence of the Use of the Bible as a School Book, argument VIII
The memory of old age recovering early learning, and Sir John Pringle's turn to Scripture at the close of his life.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Dinner after the daughters' quarrel
Bianchon reads the signs of serous apoplexy in Goriot's face and eyes and gives a poor prognosis.
- Faust, Part One, Scenes V-VI, Auerbach's Cellar and Witches' Kitchen
Conjured wine for Leipzig drinkers, and the witch's potion that takes thirty years from Faust's body.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 10
The Struldbrugs: immortal, decrepit, forgetful and legally dead at eighty.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4 and Act 3, Scene 3
Falstaff's tavern bill, his age and girth, and his jokes on Bardolph's burning face.
- John Adams, Part III
Adams's infirmities in old age and his death at Quincy on 4 July 1826.
- King Lear, The heath
King Lear gives this tag concrete force through lear is central for psychiatry and aging: cognitive vulnerability, rage, delirium, homelessness, trauma, blindness, caregiving, and unbearable grief
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 1
Time is treated as the one possession that must be reclaimed before life slips away.
- Long Walk to Freedom, Later imprisonment and illness passages
Mandela's aging and health problems, including tuberculosis history, become part of the political story of captivity.
- Meditations, Book 9.3; 12.36
Death as a natural process like birth and growing old; departing serenely.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 9, reflections on old age
Usama on the feebleness of extreme old age and his withdrawal from service.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Medea drains Aeson's blood and refills his veins with a magic brew, restoring his youth; the daughters of Pelias are tricked into killing their father.
- Metamorphoses, Book XIV
The Sibyl of Cumae, granted years but not youth, will shrink until only her voice remains.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXXVII
Impostors who promise prolongation of life, retarding of old age, relief of pain and the exaltation of the intellect discredit honest natural philosophy.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Carlson shoots Candy's old dog; Candy later wishes he had done it himself.
- Opticks, Book I, Part I, Axiom VII
The eye as an optical instrument; images on the retina conveyed by the optic nerves; presbyopia and convex spectacles; myopia; jaundice tinting vision.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. I, Ch. 8
Marianne mocks Colonel Brandon's complaint of rheumatism and his flannel waistcoat as signs of decrepitude.
- Sixty Stories, 'Florence Green is 81'
Portrait of an elderly rich woman and the hangers-on gathered around her.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XXVI, Aurora and Tithonus
Tithonus is granted immortality without youth and withers into extreme old age.
- The Borrowers, Later chapters, Great-Aunt Sophy's bedroom
The bedridden old lady sees Pod borrowing and attributes him to her decanter of Madeira.
- The Complete Poems, Late poems
Whitman's later work reflects aging, bodily limitation and spiritual persistence.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, close
The plant from the bottom of the waters, whose name means that the old man becomes young, is carried off by a snake, which sheds its skin as it goes.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 45
Marius, aged and drinking heavily, falls ill with pleurisy and in delirium imagines himself fighting Mithridates.
- The Giver, Chapters 4 and 7
Jonas bathes Larissa at the House of the Old and hears of Roberto's celebrated release.
- The Golden Bough (abridged edition), Chapter XXIV
Kings put to death when sickness or age threatened their strength, lest nature decline with them.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part III, VII: Jason and Medea
Medea gathers magic herbs and grasses, brews a draught and anoints herself so that the marks of age leave her; she then tempts the trembling old Pelias with the hope of restored health.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part I, VII: King Phineus
The blind, aged king is starved by the Harpies, who snatch or foul his food until the sons of the North Wind drive them off.
- The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, The Argonauts, Part VI
Medeia appears to make an old ram young in her cauldron and tricks Pelias's daughters; the songs say she restored Jason's father.
- The Homeric Hymns, Hymn V, To Aphrodite, ll. 218-246
Aphrodite tells how Eos asked immortality but not youth for Tithonus, and how he withered and was shut in a room.
- The Last of the Mohicans, Chapter XXXIII
Munro sinks into melancholy at Cora's funeral, and Tamenund, worn by great age, laments having lived too long.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1783 (Aetat. 74), letter to Mrs. Thrale on the stroke
His own account of a paralytic stroke that took his speech but not his hand, and his summons of Heberden and Brocklesby.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1784 (Aetat. 75)
Dropsy, breathlessness that forces him to sit up all night, and the last days and prayers before his death on 13 December.
- The Newburgh Address, After the address (as reported by witnesses)
Washington pauses while reading Joseph Jones's letter, puts on spectacles, and speaks of having grown gray and almost blind in his country's service.
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10
The final account of happiness links pleasure, contemplation and a complete life.
- The Old Man and the Sea, Eighty-four days
The Old Man and the Sea gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is practical and bodily: age, cramps, hand wounds, exhaustion, starvation, pain tolerance, and the dignity of care between santiago and manolin
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XX
Dorian's body, found beside the restored portrait, is withered and aged beyond recognition.
- The Practice of the Presence of God, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Letters, final note
Lawrence, near eighty and often near death, anticipates seeing God; he takes to his bed two days after the last letter.
- The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning XLVI-XLVII
Thor wrestles the old woman Elli and is forced to one knee; Utgarda-Loki explains that she was Old Age, who brings every man down.
- The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning XXVI; Skáldskaparmál, Idunn and Thjazi
Idunn's apples restore youth to the gods; when she is carried off they grow grey and old until Loki brings her back.
- The Silver Chair, Chapter 16: The Healing of Harms
Old King Caspian returns from his voyage, blesses Rilian and dies; on Aslan's mountain the dead king lies in the stream before he is made young.
- The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter XI
The body politic compared to a human body that begins to die at birth; the constitution of man is nature's work, that of the state the work of art and can be prolonged.
- The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VIII
Peoples, like men, are docile only in youth; aged peoples resist reform like cowardly patients who rave at the sight of the doctor. Revolutions are compared to illnesses that make individuals forget the past, after which a state may be reborn.
- The Stranger, Part One, Chapter 1
The vigil among the elderly residents of the home at Marengo and the funeral procession, in which Pérez collapses in the heat.
- The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1; Act 5, Scene 1
Prospero walks to still his beating mind, confesses his old brain is troubled, and says every third thought will be his grave.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book III, Chapter XX
Ascetics of India who live long on rice and milk and drink sulphur and quicksilver twice a month.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Aspern Papers, Juliana Bordereau scenes
Juliana's extreme age, guarded privacy and bodily frailty become objects of the narrator's archival opportunism.
- The Warden, Opening chapters
Hiram's Hospital is described as a charitable home for elderly men, establishing dependency, routine and institutional paternalism.
- The Warden, Bold's reform campaign
The bedesmen become subjects of legal and journalistic advocacy, raising consent and representation issues.
- The Waste Land, Epigraph
The Sibyl of Cumae, given long life without youth and shrunk to hang in a jar, says she wants to die.
- The Waves, Later-life sections
Aging, memory and bodily change alter the voices' relation to desire, ambition and language.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Works and Days, ll. 90-105
Before Pandora men lived free from heavy sickness; after the jar is opened, silent diseases roam by day and night.
- Thoughts on Government and Selected Letters, Late Adams-Jefferson correspondence
Aging, grief, memory, and mortality shape the retrospective friendship.
- Travels with My Aunt, Opening funeral
Henry's mother's funeral initiates grief, family uncertainty and a late-life identity crisis.
- Travels with My Aunt, Henry's retirement routines
Henry's dahlias and banking habits suggest emotional constriction, safe routine and underused vitality.
- Travels with My Aunt, Augusta's travel stories
Augusta's erotic and criminal memories challenge medicalized assumptions about sexuality and old age.
- Twelve Angry Men, Discussion of witnesses
The jurors test memory, perception, age, stress and inference in eyewitness testimony.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, personal habits section
Charlemagne's clothing, diet, moderation, exercise and swimming present health as part of royal discipline.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, health and death
Charlemagne's fevers, aging and final illness make the emperor's body a political and moral subject.
- Ulysses, Lines 49-53 and 65-70
Ulysses admits that he and his mariners are old and weakened, and insists that age still has its honour and its work.
- Uncle Vanya, Act II
Serebrakoff, sleepless with gout, fears angina and complains of old age; he refuses to see Astroff, whom he had sent for, and is soothed by Marina with linden tea; Astroff drinks with Vanya.
- Utopia, Book II, Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages
Care of the incurable, counselled voluntary death by fasting or opium, refusal of honours to unsanctioned suicide, and old age called a disease of itself.
- Waiting for Godot, Act I, opening
Estragon's struggle with his boot and Vladimir's urinary discomfort and anxiety about his hat.
- White Nights, Nastenka's story
Nastenka's blind grandmother pins her dress as supervision, blending care, disability and confinement.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game.”
“He that doth the ravens feed, Yea, providently caters for the sparrow, Be comfort to my age.”
Frequently cited
“Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
“a delicate self-mastery by which any inner deterioration, any biological decay was kept concealed from the eyes of the world”
“In the light of the sweet youthfulness which had done this to him, he detested his aging body.”
“we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age”
“I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases”
“Would he have long life? who guarantees to him that it would not be a long misery? would he at least have health”
“O Lord, if I am still necessary to your people, I do not shrink from toil: your will be done”
“For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”
“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”
“since here we have passed our lives in love and concord, we wish that one and the same hour may take us both from life, that I may not live to see her grave, nor be laid in my own by her.”
“supported life by the corpses of those who appeared useless for war on account of their age, and did not surrender to the enemy”
“There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.”
Frequently cited
“My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong; and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans.”
Frequently cited
“What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”
“But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near”
“If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything!”
“Most peoples, like most men, are docile only in youth; as they grow old they become incorrigible”
“The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction”
“Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra”
“Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”
Frequently cited
“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”