Gender Readings. Top Ten. Ренц Т.Г - 71 стр.

  8           BERTRAND RUSSELL
              HOW TO GROW OLD

       In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow
old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My
first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully. Although
both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as
regards my other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was
cut off in the flower of his youth at the age of sixty-seven, but my
other three grandparents all lived to be over eighty. Of remoter
ancestors I can only discover one who did not live to a great age, and
he died of a disease, which is now rare, namely, having his head cut
off. A great-grandmother of mine, who was a friend of Gibbon, lived
to the age of ninety-two, and to her last day remained a terror to all
her descendants. My maternal grandmother, after having nine chil-
dren who survived, one who died in infancy, and many miscarriages,
as soon as she became a widow devoted herself to women’s higher
education. She was one of the founders of Girton College, and worked
hard at opening the medical profession to women. She used to tell of
how she met in Italy an elderly gentleman who was looking very sad.
She asked him why he was so melancholy and he said that he just
parted from his two grandchildren. “Good gracious,” she exclaimed,
“I have seventy-two grandchildren, and if I were sad each time I parted
from one of them, I should have a miserable existence!” “Madre
snaturale,” he replied. But speaking as one of the seventy-two, I prefer
her reci pe.After the age of eighty she found she had some difficulty
in getting to sleep, so she habitually spent the hours from midnight to
3 a. m. in reading popular science. I do not believe that she ever had
time to notice that she was growing old. This, I think, is the proper
reci pe for remaining young.If you have wide and keen interests and
activities in which you can still be effective, you will have no reason
to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you
have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.
       As regards health, I have nothing useful to say as I have little
experience of illness. I eat and drink whatever I like, and sleep when
I cannot keep awake. I never do anything whatever on the ground


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