WE DON'T NEED TO GROW OLD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 15, 18 January 1930, Page 8

WE DON'T NEED TO GROW OLD.

Two old men I have come across have a daily routine which consists of sitting in the sun from nine until eleven in the morning, or doddering down town after tobacco from one until two, of sitting in the sun all afternoon and sleeping from sundown to sunrise inside of their respective homes (writes G. Day in the Anglo-American Newspaper Service). These two decrepit bits of humanity have grown purely and simply old. Irrevocably. Inevitably. Their lips hang loose and trembly. Their eyes are like bits of paleblue gelatine. Their knees weakly face east and west simultaneously. And they exhibit interest in nothing in the whole wide world except the temperature of their own crumbling bodies. They are old. They are a sample of what every human being in the world, you included, if you live long enough, might become. But there are other people —they are rare, but they have existed and they exist to-day—in whom the fire of life burns so passionately, whose desire to get the fullest and highest out of their existence is so intense that they never grow old. They are consumed at the height of their brilliance by the flames of their dreams, grown at last too hot and too bright for this earth. Sarah Bernhardt was one of these. Eleanora Duse was another. The spark of genius, of real life, was within them. But it burned with a flame which the common, garden variety of.tiiiTrm.-n could not endure for half an hour —the absence of which permits man to live on and on and on, into weak, old age. I know that some people cannot grow old —simply because to taem life is too intense and vital an experience, too full too vivid to be stretched out in diluted doses | over a period of years;