The Spirit is willing, the Body – not so much.

Marie-Berthe Paquette, 102 years old, Montreal, 2016. (Arianne Clément/GroundTruth)

Growing Old – Matthew Arnold

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath?
—Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more; but not
Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be!
’Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,
A golden day’s decline.

’Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are no more.

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

Unlike the poem states – dievca still feels flashes of being young. she has hints and memories of free movement, but she wonders if this poem applies to her Mother’s age when memories dim and movement is slim. Note: that dievca is saying this as she is elevating and heating a knee which was painful upon awaking -trying to remember her name.

Photo above from an article on aging and beauty at the Ground Truth Project.

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