Are you astonished at the world going to pieces? You might as well be astonished that the world has grown old. The world's like a man; he's born, he grows up, he grows old. Old age is full of complaints: coughing, phlegm, bleary eyes, aches and pains, weariness, it's all there. So, a man has grown old; he's full of complaints. The world has grown old; it's full of troubles and pressures.
Miraris quia deficit mundus? mirare quia senuit mundus. Homo est, nascitur, crescit, senescit. Querelae multae in senecta: tussis, pituita, lippitudo, anxietudo, lassitudo inest. Ergo senuit homo; querelis plenus est: senuit mundus; pressuris plenus est.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Growing Old
Augustine, Sermons 81.8 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 504; tr. Edmund Hill):