. To be poor when one is old, is a great
misfortune. If a man is secure from that, and retains his health, old
age may be a very passable time of life. Its chief necessity is to be
comfortable and well off; and, in consequence, money is then prized
more than ever, because it is a substitute for failing strength.
Deserted by Venus, the old man likes to turn to Bacchus to make him
merry. In the place of wanting to see things, to travel and learn,
comes the desire to speak and teach. It is a piece of good fortune if
the old man retains some of his love of study or of music or of the
theatre,--if, in general, he is still somewhat susceptible to the
things about him; as is, indeed, the case with some people to a very
late age. At that time of life, _what a man has in himself_ is of
greater advantage to him that ever it was before.

There can be no doubt that most people who have never been anything
but dull and stupid, become more and more of automata as they grow
old. They have always thought, said and done the same things as their
neighbors; and nothing that happens now can change their disposition,
or make them act otherwise. To talk to old people of this kind is like
writing on the sand; if you produce any impression at all, it is gone
almost immediately; old age is here nothing but the _caput mortuum_
of life--all that is essential to manhood is gone. There are cases
in which nature supplies a third set of teeth in old age, thereby
apparently demonstrating the fact that that period of life is a second
childhood.

It is certainly a very melancholy thing that all a man's faculties
tend to waste away as he grows old, and at a rate that increases
in rapidity: but still, this is a necessary, nay, a beneficial
arrangement, as otherwise death, for which it is a preparation, would
be too hard to bear. So the greatest boon that follows the attainment
of extreme old age is _euthanasia_,--an easy death, not ushered in by
disease, and free from all pain and struggle.[1] For let a man live as
long as he may, he is never conscious of any moment but the present,
one and indivisible; and in those late years the mind loses more every
day by sheer forgetfulness than ever it gains anew.

[Footnote 1: See _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, Bk. II. ch. 41,
for a further description of this happy end to life.]

The main difference between youth and age will always be that youth
looks forward to life, and old age to death; and that whi