Stages of Life
Why do so many people turn silly in their old age?
Why do people need others the more they get older? (That is, they have a greater propensity for loneliness.) If a young person lives alone, nobody cares, but if an old person lives alone, suddenly, it’s a tragedy.
Is it silly for an old person to love fairy tales?
Why are old people often undignified, paranoid, clingy, narrow-minded and set in their ways? Many of them live life very passively, watching everything pass them by, and a lot of them even just sit there, like flies. And they bore you to tears. They love to go off on monologues, especially on the most trivial, mundane things, and seem completely oblivious to the fact that they’re making your eyes glaze over.
In Untouchables (by Narendra Jadhav), the author’s mother, Sonu, comes from a small village in a rural part of India. She was raised 12 years in her home village before marrying and moving with her husband to Mumbai. Even though she was exposed to modern life and sensibilities in the big city, and especially through the efforts of her far more enlightened husband, she still insisted on hiring witch doctors even though she knew better. She also believed that witches and evil spirits in her home village would cast spells on her children if they visited, so why didn’t she think this would also happen in Mumbai? (p 252) She still believed that Shesha, the great snake, supported the world on its back. (p 283) My question is -- Why did what she learned in those first 12 years of her life stick stronger to her than everything else she learned in her lifetime? It was only those 12 years that counted in forming her whole worldview. Nothing else after that mattered, no matter how much more it made sense and correlated to reality or how much more of it she was exposed to.
Why do people need others the more they get older? (That is, they have a greater propensity for loneliness.) If a young person lives alone, nobody cares, but if an old person lives alone, suddenly, it’s a tragedy.
Is it silly for an old person to love fairy tales?
Why are old people often undignified, paranoid, clingy, narrow-minded and set in their ways? Many of them live life very passively, watching everything pass them by, and a lot of them even just sit there, like flies. And they bore you to tears. They love to go off on monologues, especially on the most trivial, mundane things, and seem completely oblivious to the fact that they’re making your eyes glaze over.
In Untouchables (by Narendra Jadhav), the author’s mother, Sonu, comes from a small village in a rural part of India. She was raised 12 years in her home village before marrying and moving with her husband to Mumbai. Even though she was exposed to modern life and sensibilities in the big city, and especially through the efforts of her far more enlightened husband, she still insisted on hiring witch doctors even though she knew better. She also believed that witches and evil spirits in her home village would cast spells on her children if they visited, so why didn’t she think this would also happen in Mumbai? (p 252) She still believed that Shesha, the great snake, supported the world on its back. (p 283) My question is -- Why did what she learned in those first 12 years of her life stick stronger to her than everything else she learned in her lifetime? It was only those 12 years that counted in forming her whole worldview. Nothing else after that mattered, no matter how much more it made sense and correlated to reality or how much more of it she was exposed to.
