THE ADVANTAGE AT BEING 90

by Quentin Crisp

I'm 90 years old. The advantage of being 90 is that you can look forward to death. The world is getting noisier, sexier and more horrible by the minute, but at least I can comfort myself with the fact that the end is in sight. Or so I thought. Imagine my horror when I opened the newspaper and discovered they were going to make us live till 130. When you're 60 or 70 the thought of death crosses your mind like a shadow. It disturbs you, it worries you. But by the time you reach my age you are longing for it.My body is dying on me. I carry it like an old overcoat. It's horrible. You start to smell—the smell of death—and you can do nothing about it. I can no longer see properly. I need to wear glasses when I go out, but am far too vain, so I walk the streets blind. You go deaf, and people talk to you as if you're a non-comprehending child. Your legs give up on you. Nowadays I spend so much time working out how to avoid making the trip downstairs more than once a day. When I do get out, I can barely walk more than a few yards at a snail's pace—and according to those who know, I'm lucky; in good shape for my 90 years.Writers have often dreamed of immortality. Mr. Swift in Gulliver's Travels told us about the Struldbrugs, who devised a way of living long past their sell-by date. And what a pathetic sight they were. Then there was Mr. Shaw and his tragic Methuselah. If memory serves me right—and, of course, that is one of the first things to go—he lived for a thousand years, and what a curse that proved.This isn't a world for old people. Every few minutes there are adverts on the television telling you how to keep young, keep the lines from your face. When you're 90 you have lines all over your body, never mind your face. There is no work for old people. What, would we spend 65 years or more in retirement, remembering a time when we were useful?Everything today is geared towards the young. There's a terrible feeling of exclusion even for moderately old people. Where would we hide when 130? We'd become the Disappeared. And just think of the gadgets we'd need—every house with an elevator.Ah, but the world would be so much wiser, say the optimists. I'm afraid that's an illusion. As we get older, we lose our wisdom, our mind, our language. We would have a world in which no one could communicate because we'd have forgotten how to.No. The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to. If I discovered a potion to make people live until 130 the first thing I'd do is bury it.