Yesterday I lunch w/ a gaggle of guys and, Nikki, a women who is probably about 20 years younger than me. At one point, John - a marginal friend -was orchestrating the line at the counter and prompting me to move ahead of Nikki. His comment was "Come on, Meg, age before beauty." Admittedly, I was bothered by it at the time. John, for what it's worth, is about 20 years older than me. Fortunately, I was just checking out the KGB Bar website and found this lovely passage by Mary Gaitskill. There is something awesome that comes, if you're open to it.
"I think of age as breaking a patina. It's the youth that's the patina, and it gets cracked. There's something about the elegance of the human form that's quite awe-inspiring sometimes ... when you see a very beautiful person, not necessarily a model, just a very beautiful, elegant person, or aside from physical beauty, when you encounter beautiful, elegant speech, very beautifully formed ideas, very gracefully expressed thoughts, art. That falls apart too. The mind decays, the ability to express oneself decays, and there's a way in which you give way to the vastness. It's like you're this small container, and when that begins to crack, it's horrible in a way because you don't want yourself to crack, but on the other hand, you become helpless before something more awesome."
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