Abstract
The compulsive jokiness with which so many modern Americans deflect the subject of aging can get pretty tiresome. But perhaps it’s not the worst way to handle the matter. But even great comedy has its limits. A joke may be a civilized way of coping, but it is not an answer to much of anything, and it may even be a veiled way of confessing to the dread that there are no answers to be had. Yet there is a grain of wisdom to be found in the ironic reversal these jokes perform. It points back to a deep and persistent insight of our civilization: the teaching that the structure of human growth is itself paradoxical, a startling play in which opposites trade places, and the loss of something ordinary becomes the path to the acquisition of something higher and rarer.