"The Old Fools" by Philip Larkin (poetry reading)

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SpokenVerse
October 05, 2009

Larkin had a persistent terror of death and he wasn't looking forward to old age, either. He needn't have worried, it never happened. Larkin died at 63. Freud said that the unconscious mind di...

Larkin had a persistent terror of death and he wasn't looking forward to old age, either. He needn't have worried, it never happened. Larkin died at 63.

Freud said that the unconscious mind did not believe in death because it considered itself immortal: therefore repressed fear of death didn't exist or motivate decisions or actions - and fear of death is really fear of having your balls cut off because you fancy your Mother. Believe me, I don't make this stuff up:
"a secondary substitutive phenomenon of the castration fear which grew out of an inadequately resolved Oedipus Complex". If you feel the need to comment keep it relevant and impersonal, please.

The Old Fools Larkin describes are suffering from illness, not old age. Such illness is not an inevitability and some people live long active lives. However it is a strong possibility and that's a good argument for staying busy and eating a sensible diet, i.e. don't live on tea and biscuits, like so many old people do.

We live in a society that is most prejudiced against old age. People are so afraid of looking old that they have plastic surgery to look a freaky forty rather than a nifty fifty.

Palmerston was Prime Minister of England at 81, Gladstone at 84. Titian was still painting at 98. Chaucer didn't start "The Canterbury Tales" until he was 63. Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar" at 83. Cervantes finished Don Quixote at 68. These are not exceptions - most old men still have their faculties.

Plenty of old guys still have a happy fulfilled life with better sex than they ever got in their twenties: they're more likely to know how to do it properly because they've had more practice. Many old people will tell you they got happier with each decade. The other thing an older man can do better than a younger man is drive a car. Insurance companies think so and it pays them to know.

Also it seems that a man never gets too old to father a child. Charlie Chaplin did it at 73, Anthony Quinn at 81, Pablo Picasso at 68. Children of older fathers do have a higher risk of autism but Dad is more likely to treat them responsibly and more likely to bestow wisdom and wealth - and sooner.

"The Head of an Old Man", was by Peter Paul Rubens, 1610

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"The Old Fools" by Philip Larkin (poetry reading)

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"The Old Fools" by Philip Larkin (poetry reading)

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