"If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life"
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Stoppard smuggles a quiet rebuke into what looks like benign advice. The line starts with a conditional bargain - if you spend time with older people who are still actively living - but its real target is the culture that treats age as either a problem to manage or a sentiment to monetize. “Stored away” is deliberately clinical, almost warehouse language, yoking elder care to logistics. Then comes the knife twist: “golden ghettos,” a phrase that fuses luxury with segregation. It punctures the upbeat brochure fantasy of retirement as endless leisure and names the underlying arrangement for what it can be: exile with better lighting.
As a dramatist, Stoppard is always alert to how societies arrange their characters offstage. Here, older people are too often written out of the main plot and relocated to a separate set. His prescription isn’t reverence; it’s proximity. “Associate enough” suggests this isn’t a single inspirational visit but sustained contact that re-trains perception. The payoff isn’t moral improvement but “continuity” - a long view of the self across decades, a resistance to the cultural habit of treating life as a series of disposable phases.
The subtext is practical and slightly cynical: if you want to believe in “the possibility for a full life,” don’t look to slogans about aging well. Look to counterexamples who disprove the narrative that late life is necessarily diminishment. Stoppard’s optimism is conditional, earned through observation rather than ideology.
As a dramatist, Stoppard is always alert to how societies arrange their characters offstage. Here, older people are too often written out of the main plot and relocated to a separate set. His prescription isn’t reverence; it’s proximity. “Associate enough” suggests this isn’t a single inspirational visit but sustained contact that re-trains perception. The payoff isn’t moral improvement but “continuity” - a long view of the self across decades, a resistance to the cultural habit of treating life as a series of disposable phases.
The subtext is practical and slightly cynical: if you want to believe in “the possibility for a full life,” don’t look to slogans about aging well. Look to counterexamples who disprove the narrative that late life is necessarily diminishment. Stoppard’s optimism is conditional, earned through observation rather than ideology.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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