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The United States had been a great nation when Los Angeles was a pueblo of five thousand people; the movies could set up in business elsewhere, Iowans find another spot for senescence, the country go on much as usual. One of the first results of the defeat of the grass was the building, almost overnight, it seemed, of a great city on the east bank of the Salton Sea.
Charles Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter is Mark Twain!
Only a race either in childhood or senescence, it would seem, could thus give itself over with undisguised delight to the enchantments of wooden horses, cattle, cats, and pigs; to the catching of wooden fish with hooks; to the shooting at targets that one could almost touch with the gun-muzzle, and to the grave observation of sideshow performances that would excite the risibilities of the most unsophisticated audience that could be found in the Mississippi Valley.
Occasionally he drank voraciously the juice of gooseberry fool from an inclined plate. Occasionally he removed from his lips the traces of food by means of a lacerated envelope or other accessible fragment of paper. What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent? The myopic digital calculation of coins, eructation consequent upon repletion.
It is like straining work on an empty stomach. For youth this embroidery of details is the precocious senescence that Nordau has so copiously illustrated as literary decadence.
It was the irony of fate that Bellini should have died so young, while a brother of his who was a fourth-rate church composer lived for eighty-two years. The virtues of senescence are seen in the case of Verdi, who did some of his greatest work at the age when most musicians are ready for the old ladies' home. His first love affair has been the subject of an opera, like Stradella's.
"Well, isn't that so?" the Easy Chair asked, tranquilly. "It may be so, or it may not be so," the veteran observer replied. "Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. But what I wish to enforce is the fact that before you begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening joints you are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senescence which I call getting stiff in the tastes.
And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive, scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in one of that class for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be longer than for other men, since for such a one it is void of promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent partition among his offspring.
And this gay paradox is less arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay.
I'm twenty-seven, by God! Three years to thirty, and then I'm what an undergraduate calls a middle-aged man." Anthony was silent for a moment. "You are old, Maury," he agreed at length. "The first signs of a very dissolute and wabbly senescence you have spent the afternoon talking about tan and a lady's legs." Maury pulled down the shade with a sudden harsh snap.
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