You know, when I watch old people, when I sit down with them, ease into a sort of quiet space, calm, homely, unadorned, I like to think of what they were like thirty, forty, sixty years ago. You find out that most people, when they get old, don't have pretension in them, they don't have that nervous self awareness, the sort of anxiety about their clothes and hair and how they carry their physical bodies. I mean yes they are very proper and decently dressed, but beyond that it's all just trappings, you get the sense. Old people have this calm, maybe which comes partly out of resignation, a sense that time, having passed them by, is thereby no longer urgent. But I would like to hope that that sort of resignation is not always in them a negative one.
And so I like to imagine what they must have been like, in their twenties, their thirties. Young, full of vigor, chasing the things we now chase. With time perhaps their handsomeness has faded, but I like to think of them returned with youthful faces, supple limbs, perhaps the impatience of their past lives. What they must have been like in the glorious old days, for I take for granted that everyone must have had something they were once proud of. It's not so hard to imagine, is it? That once upon a time this old lady might have been young, with I suppose some coquetry in her ... Once upon a time this old man wore a sharp suit and shiny black shoes. Once upon a time these people seated relaxedly at this table were young, chatty, happily active, listened to deng li jun, went to the opera together, worked as clerks and secretaries, nurses and accountants, lived, had lovers, married girls, boys, bought houses ... did all the things we hope to do, before growing old.
Old people aren't old man. We're the ones that are ... fools.
