Most people who live long enough to lose whatever charms might have belonged to them in their youth, so that they no longer have the power to effectuate some end by way of attributes that arrived to them through the accident of their birth, and that had a softening influence on their relationships and interactions, winning them the sort of attentions and loyalties that, while false, nevertheless gave them pleasure, and carried them up the social ladder, seem, by middle age, once they’ve recognized that they are just another mortal whose passions and egotisms have led them to overestimate their own allure and worth, and to ignore or undervalue others (or to value others for the wrong reasons), to want to ease themselves into a warm bath, and never be disturbed, rather than to bear reality in all its indifference, and to square themselves with the fact that one’s existence, in the absence of flatteries and consolations, is, despite its impoverishment, where the soul finds the battles for which it has been made, and through which it can achieve, even in this life, a condition resembling peace.