Not Just Yet 
Frank Kermode
In the opening pages of Plato’s Republic Cephalus tells Socrates that when old men of his acquaintance get together they tend to spend their time bemoaning the lost pleasures of youth. Since sex, feasting and other laddish benefits have been curtailed or withdrawn they feel they might as well not be alive at all. But Cephalus also reports that the poet Sophocles, asked how the sex was going, made this exemplary but prim reply: ‘I am very glad to have escaped all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master.’ Old age, he says, brings freedom from desire; the true cause for complaint is not old age itself but the way people live. ‘If they are temperate and contented, old age . . . is only moderately onerous; if they aren’t, both old age and youth are hard to bear.’
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
Here she is · Zadie Smith
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
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