Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

A terrible thing about getting "oldish" is the way it smuggles catastrophe in under a word that sounds almost comic. MacCaig’s phrasing refuses the grand, solemn door of "old age" and instead chooses a diminutive, a shrug. That tonal choice is the whole engine: it captures how mortality arrives in the everyday, not as a philosophical event but as an accumulating clerical fact. "Oldish" is what you call yourself to keep the room calm, to keep the self from tipping into melodrama. Then the sentence yanks that modesty into focus: friends start dying. Not might, not can - start. A process, a grim season.

The subtext is survivorhood without the heroics. "Seven or eight" is devastating precisely because it’s slightly imprecise, like the mind protecting itself by blurring the inventory. Grief becomes arithmetic, but the arithmetic is done by someone too tired to sharpen the numbers. Even "closest" trails off, unfinished, as if the sentence can’t bear to complete the thought ("friends", "friends to me", "friends I loved") because completion would make the loss too final.

Context matters: MacCaig, a Scottish poet known for clarity and moral attention, often wrote in a plainspoken register that lets emotion leak through the seams rather than spill theatrically. The intent here isn’t to offer wisdom about aging. It’s to register a specific, modern dread: that the social world you built becomes, decade by decade, a thinning network - and that the most honest way to describe it is with a half-joke that collapses into a ledger.