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It is disagreeably unnecessary. Why should not the old fellow do his duty quietly, and tell off another year without such an outrageous uproar? Does he think it so pleasant to hear his increasing tally--forty, five, fifty, five, sixty, five? Peace! peace! Why not have it understood that the tally beyond--well, say fifty, is a gross impertinence? Let something be left to the imagination. Besides, what is the use of wigs and hair-dye and padding, and what not coloring and enamelling, and other juvenescent procedures of the feminine arcana, if annual proclamation of impertinent dates and facts is to be made?
The worst of it is that it is a positive interference with the just play of the fundamental truth that age is not justly measurable by the mere lapse of time. Some people are never young, others defy age. This, indeed, is due to temperament. But that is not all. Those gray hairs and wrinkles, that eyesight of less keenness, that disinclination to leap walls, and those fraudulent halts to survey the rearward landscape, are enemies whose assaults are by no means regular. They come at very different times to different people. Adolphus at sixty despises spectacles. Triptolemus at thirty is bald. The hair of Horatius at sixty-five is as affluent as Hyperion's, and as dark without unguents as the raven's plume. Let facts speak to a candid world. Why should that gray-beard Paul Pry called Time blare through a speaking-trumpet that the brave Valentine--
"As wild his thoughts and gay of wing
As Eden's garden bird"--is just as old as old, toothless, tottering, decrepit Orson?
Every well-regulated citizen of the world is interested, and more vitally interested with every closing year, that upon the point of age all men shall be left to their merits, and shall not be measured arbitrarily by that Procrustean standard of years. It is notorious that men grow wiser every year, and it is observable that the more years they have, the more they look with doubt and questioning upon the Family Record. Those leaves of births following the doubtful books of Scripture, registered with such painful and needless particularity of dates, partake of the doubtfulness of their neighborhood. They are mere intercalations, new books of the Apocrypha. Yet they often cause young fellows of seventy to be accused and convicted of being old men.
Since, then, we cannot stop the flight of Time, let him pass. But he must not calumniate as he passes. He must not be allowed to stigmatize vigor and health and freshness of feeling and the young heart and the agile foot as old merely because of a certain number of years. This is the season of good resolutions. The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows. So be it. But let our whitest vow be, after that for a whiter life, that age shall no longer be measured by this arbitrary standard of years, and that those deceitful and practical octogenarians of thirty shall not escape as young merely because they have not yet shown the strength to carry threescore and ten with jocund elasticity.
Then Happy New Year shall not mean Good-night, but Good-morrow.
"New Year" by George William Curtis originally appeared in the January 1887 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. It was reprinted in the collection Other Essays From the Easy Chair by George William Curtis (Harper and Brothers, 1893).
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/The-New-Year-By-George-William-Curtis_2.htm
"As wild his thoughts and gay of wing
As Eden's garden bird"--is just as old as old, toothless, tottering, decrepit Orson?
Every well-regulated citizen of the world is interested, and more vitally interested with every closing year, that upon the point of age all men shall be left to their merits, and shall not be measured arbitrarily by that Procrustean standard of years. It is notorious that men grow wiser every year, and it is observable that the more years they have, the more they look with doubt and questioning upon the Family Record. Those leaves of births following the doubtful books of Scripture, registered with such painful and needless particularity of dates, partake of the doubtfulness of their neighborhood. They are mere intercalations, new books of the Apocrypha. Yet they often cause young fellows of seventy to be accused and convicted of being old men.
Since, then, we cannot stop the flight of Time, let him pass. But he must not calumniate as he passes. He must not be allowed to stigmatize vigor and health and freshness of feeling and the young heart and the agile foot as old merely because of a certain number of years. This is the season of good resolutions. The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows. So be it. But let our whitest vow be, after that for a whiter life, that age shall no longer be measured by this arbitrary standard of years, and that those deceitful and practical octogenarians of thirty shall not escape as young merely because they have not yet shown the strength to carry threescore and ten with jocund elasticity.
Then Happy New Year shall not mean Good-night, but Good-morrow.
"New Year" by George William Curtis originally appeared in the January 1887 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. It was reprinted in the collection Other Essays From the Easy Chair by George William Curtis (Harper and Brothers, 1893).
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/The-New-Year-By-George-William-Curtis_2.htm