The Body Would Like to Grow Old But We Aren’t Letting It Do So

An unpopular belief about living up to 100

Asceticism is in vogue. Don’t eat, don’t drink, abstain from life — to live longer.

Nowadays you can successfully preserve both youth and beauty. You may have already seen it since the production of such cans has been skyrocketing. If you could try them, you’d realize that those products are neither that kind of youth nor that kind of beauty.

The body would like to grow old, it has to — its time has come, it’s worn out and got tired, it’s not the body it used to be; now it is old age’s turn — it belongs to us as much as youth does, it is natural and unavoidable.

The fragile body would like to but we aren’t letting it grow old. We’ve climbed onto it, got it out on trim tracks and hippodromes, it feels hard but we are boosting its morale with a new religion of life without old age and death.

You cannot exercise or train youth, you can’t act young. Such feats of an old body seem unseemly and unpleasant. You always have the impression that it must have been tortured a lot…

There is some philosophical trash in the triumph of those sour, rancid ascetics who may be able with superhuman effort to live a few years longer than those who are carefree and cheerful — those wise men who don’t haggle with old age and death. As if the second ones were intelligent thieves: When the unavoidable gets to them, they smile, and shrug their shoulders, knowing that in the end, it had to be so.

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Source — Dušan Radović (1922–1984), Serbian journalist and author