Remember when your definition of “old” kept changing as you grew from a child, through adolescence, through your 20’s, 40’s and so on? I thought old was my parents’ age. Then it was my grandparents’ age. Now that I’m 66, my definition is hardly based on age at all. Old is, inevitably, the unrelenting drift as your body and mind start to slow—the decline that’s hard not to see as indignity. Watching with dismay as the skin spots multiply, as your body slowly sags and bulges. F

Symbols are powerful because they’re a shortcut to the brain, to the soul. Few are as powerfully evocative in the modern western world than