溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
How Shall We Meet the Aging Body?
If old age, when the body declines, is not only to be feared — do I see the aging body only as loss, or also as another kind of fruit?
The foolish charge their own faults… to the account of old age.
Cicero's question — how to meet old age — sits within the lineage divided over aging. Cicero and the Stoics affirmed old age as a season when, in place of bodily pleasure, wisdom and calm arrive. The Eastern Confucius too drew growing old as an ascending stair — leaving confusion behind, knowing Heaven's decree, reaching freedom of heart. But an opposite gaze was strong. The Greek lyric poets grieved old age as the loss of youth and beauty, and modernity saw aging as decline and incapacity, even a disease to overcome. Is old age a season of other fruits, or a downhill of loss? Over the body's time, the lineage split.
The more an age idealizes youth and seeks to delay aging, the more this question — how to meet the aging body — asks after the fruits beyond loss.
Cicero wrote a defense of old age in the voice of Cato the Elder.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Cicero wrote a defense of old age in the voice of Cato the Elder. People fear that old age withdraws great works, weakens the body, strips away pleasure, and sets death near. Cato answers each in turn — old age gives a different kind of work and joy, and where bodily pleasure wanes, judgment and wisdom come. Only the foolish, he says, charge their own faults to age. I read this question as setting a balance against the gaze that sees the body's decline only as loss. Do I meet the aging body only with fear, or see other fruits with it? I stand before this question too.
✍️Your Answer
The lineage of the ancients ends here. Now it is your turn before the question. There is no right answer — only how you, today, would answer.
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This is not a museum of answers but a lineage of questions. All sources are public-domain texts; the lineage and reflection are 100% original ONGO content.
