"Growing Old"

By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A prose poem that Solzhenitsyn wrote after he'd returned to Moscow, as quoted to David Remnick in 2001 and included in a profile in The New Yorker almost 7 years ago to the day today, called "Growing Old": 

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own … There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past – just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day's work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. Your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane … Growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent[1].