“Whether life has a future for you beyond middle age depends, in the end, not on poetry but on the values of your life.  If your values are supremely those of body and sense, you may as well resign yourself to the fact that life after youth may be downhill.  If worldly achievement and the exercise of power are what you value most, middle age will be your life’s apex.  But if vision and self-understanding carry rewards equal to or surpassing these others, old age has its own opportunities and you can come to happiness at the time when the rivers of our lives flow gently.