Only children understand the impulsive, impetuous, impelling urge to throw snowballs. Only wise adults realize that unless we throw them, it is unlikely we will ever manage to escape the traces that hold us down, hold us back, at any and every age. But that can only...

“Old age,” in Louis Kronenberger’s view, “is an excellent time for outrage. My goal,” he went on, “is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.” The future is a very sweet part of getting older. It is something to be grasped with fervor. It gets more...

W. Somerset Maugham wrote, “What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.” What we often fail to realize is that memory is a mental function, yes, but it is also a choice. We do get to...