When I look in the mirror, I see the ageing process at full pelt, the hairline in retreat, the bags under the eyes growing and darkening, that kind of thing. I suppose it would be easier if I weren't an actor, but I am fairly philosophical about it.
To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel.
Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.
To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.
If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn't function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically.
