In my 80’s

Monday, January 29

“Philip Roth Is Still Here” is the title of an interview with the renowned novelist Philip Roth, appearing in the January 21 2018 Book Review of The New York Times. The interviewer was Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review and a contributing writer for The Times.

Wrote McGrath

I have interviewed Roth on several occasions over the years, and last month I asked if we could talk again. Like a lot of his readers, I wondered what the author of “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Plot Against America” made of this strange period we are living in now. And I was curious about how he spent his time. Sudoku? Daytime TV? He agreed to be interviewed but only if it could be done via email. He needed to take some time, he said, and think about what he wanted to say.

I found the “conversation” interesting enough to go to the library today to check out several of Roth’s books. Here in this blog I would like to quote Roth on McGrath’s question: “In a few months you’ll turn 85. Do you feel like an elder? What has growing old been life?”

Yes, in just a matter of months I’ll depart old age to enter deep old age — easing ever deeper daily into the redoubtable Valley of the Shadow. Right now it is astonishing to find myself still here at the end of each day. Getting into bed at night I smile and think, “I lived another day.” And then it’s astonishing again to awaken eight hour later and to see that it is morning of the net day and that I continue to be here. “I survived another,” which thought causes me to smile once more. I go to sleep smiling and I wake up smiling. I’m very pleased that I’m still alive. Moreover, when this happens, as it has, week after week and month after month since I began drawing Social Security, it produces the illusion that this thing is just never going to end, though of course I know that it can stop on a dime. It’s something like playing a game, day in and day out, a high-stakes game that for now, even against the odds, I just keep winning. We will see how long my luck holds out.

Roth expresses my own emotions and thoughts, even though I’m only 80.