Horizon recently did an episode on Growing Old, different theories on why it happens, how it might be slowed or prevented. It wasn’t the most interesting Horizon episode I’ve seen, apart from suggesting that studies had proved, or strongly suggested, that antioxidants have little benefit to slowing the aging process, as many products and adverts proclaim. It inspired a few thoughts within me though, like how I want to have a white beard when I’m old. I’ll probably wear tweed too, so I look like some old professor, and maybe I’ll even be one.

When you’re young, you feel your youth will last forever, you can’t ever imagine being old and achey and not able to do things. When you’re young, summer holidays last forever, at the start at least, six weeks is forever. Often, I feel, people, unless it’s just me, can’t imagine feeling any different to how they feel at a certain time. If you’re in the depths of a dark depression, you can’t imagine ever feeling happy again. When you feel happy, you wonder whatever you were so down about. For a few days before Christmas I was ill, some sort of flu or a strong cold or something. It was only three, maybe four, days, but when I was lying in bed all congested and nauseous, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not feel like that. Now I’m in my final year of university, Childhood’s End, and yet the days and weeks and months, what’s left of them, stretch out before me and I can’t imagine them ever ending, that there will ever be anything other than the house I live in now, and the people I live with now, and the course I’m on now.

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(this is a follow-on from my explanation of modernism)

Thinking about Modernism a little more, I’ve decided that a big part of the reason I like it is that it seems to extend beyond the story to encompass the whole human experience, rather than just how the characters feel during the events of the book.Now, with a lot of books, and films, this is something that’s always bothered me: books and films always have an ending. Usually they end with the hero saving the world and/or getting the girl. Sometimes they end with a life-changing revelation or an optimistic message for the future, but they do all end. Which is, of course, in sharp contrast to life. Life has only one ending. Rarely, of course, a film will end with the death of a main character, which is generally very climactic and poignant, but this is still in contrast with life: in life when people die they just die, and everything goes on as normal around them. (more…)