Essays After Eighty

Donald Hall—poet, essayist, and memoirist—devoted his life to the written word. Here, in his eighty-first year, he writes about the rewards of growing old: "Thirty was terrible. I never noticed I was inebriated until I wasn't anymore. Forty was unremarkable, except I had some money. Fifty was finest with a whole change of life. Sixty prolonged the ecstasy of fifty. At eighty and smeared testosterone on my chest, my beard raged like a lion and gained four inches. "