"The superior beauty of happiness"

I've done a lot of organizing of old photographs this year--so much so that it's been like watching a jerky movie of my life, back and forthing over my seven decades and before I was born.  I sent off a box of old photos and slides to a company called Southtree in Chattanooga,  and yesterday I got back a thumb drive half the length of my little finger with a thousand photos on it!

With "three score and ten" rapidly approaching and with almost everyone I know experiencing pesky reminders that the body is aging, it's impossible not to know that we have way less time ahead of us than behind us.

And yet: I feel very happy and peaceful most of the time, and I'm enjoying the luxury of learning new things and reading and being with people I love dearly.  My children and grandchildren have rented a lake house at LBJ next week for the nine of us to celebrate my birthday early. I can hardly wait to see them again all in one place, my camera poised to capture memories they will look back on with pleasure, I hope, when they are old,

The French writer, Andre Gide, was thinking similar thoughts as he wrote these words.  He wrote as if death were imminent, yet he lived another thirty years!

Age cannot manage to empty either sensual pleasure of its attractiveness or the whole world of its charm. On the contrary, I was more easily disgusted at twenty, and I was less satisfied with life. I embraced less boldly; I breathed less deeply; and I felt myself to be less loved. Perhaps also I longed to be melancholy; I had not yet understood the superior beauty of happiness.

Two weeks later, Gide examines the passage of time from another angle — one grimmer at first blush but deeply enlivening in its ultimate reorientation: 

The thought of death pursues me with a strange insistence. Every time I make a gesture, I calculate: how many times already? I compute: how many times more? and full of despair, I feel the turn of the year rushing toward me. And as I measure how the water is withdrawing around me, my thirst increases and I feel younger in proportion to the little time that remains to me to feel it.

Thanks to Maria at Brainpickings, these and other reflections on age showed up in my inbox this morning.