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Sixty Years Old - Woody Selbst
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Woody Selbst 60

Because he left every Sunday morning at seven to spend the day with Pop, he had forgotten by how many churches Selbst Tile Company was surrounded. He was still in bed when he heard the bells, and all at once he knew how heartbroken he was. This sudden big heartache in a man of sixty, a practical, physical, healthy-minded, and experienced man, was deeply unpleasant. When he had an unpleasant condition, he believed in taking something for it. So he thought: what shall I take? There were plenty of remedies available. His cellar was stocked with cases of Scotch whisky, Polish vodka, Armagnac, Moselle, Burgundy. There were also freezers with steaks and with game and with Alaskan king crab. He bought with broad hand – by the crate and by the dozen. But in the end, when he got out of bed, he took nothing but a cup a coffee. While the kettle was heating, he put on his Japanese judo-style suit and sat down to reflect.

Saul Bellow  ·  ‘A Silver Dish’ 

60

Ben Crader

More Die of Heartbreak

Saul Bellow

"... no Romeo and Juliet has ever been written for lovers sixty years old..."

60

Earl Angstrom

Rabbit, Redux

John Updike

"...he becomes one of the hundreds of skinny whining codgers in and around this city, men who have sucked the same brick tit for sixty years and have dried up with it..."

60

William Bankes

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

"Mr Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering his age, turned sixty..."

60

Isaac Braun

‘The Old System’

Saul Bellow

"He hated such objects, hated the stink of hospitals. He was sixty years old. He knew the route he, too, must go, and soon...."

60

M. Pierre

‘Handsome Is as Handsome Does’

V.S. Pritchett

"M. Pierre was a plump grey man of sixty, with a pathetic, mean little mouth, a monocle in his eye...."

60

Judge Henry Bissop

The Life and Loves of a She Devil

Fay Weldon

"The judge himself, even at sixty, was a wonderfully handsome man..."

60

Reverend Horace Pedrick

Couples

John Updike

"Reverend Horace Pedrick was a skeletal ignorant man of sixty. His delusions centred about money. He had never himself had enough..."

60

Mynheer Peeperkorn

The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)

Thomas Mann

"...malleable youth felt crushed beneath the weight of this broad-shouldered, red-faced sixty-year-old, with white flames that encircled his head, painfully ragged lips, and a long, narrow beard that reached down to his high-buttoned, clerical-style vest."