American novelist, Edith Wharton, born on 24 January 1862, was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1921 for her novel “The Age of Innocence”
In 1934, when she was seventy-two, she published her autobiography “A Backward Glance”. [I’ll be seventy-two tomorrow as well.]
These are the introductory words:
A FIRST WORD
Years ago, I said to myself: “There’s no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow.”
I have learned with the passing of time that this, though true, is not the whole truth. The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
[…]
In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
[…]
Another advantage (equally accidental) is that I do not remember long to be angry. I seldom forget a bruise to the soul–who does? But life puts a quick balm on it, and it is recorded in a book I seldom open…
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