It has always seemed to me that the final state of education was the condition of being a freely self-educating person. In the end, you took the point, as it were: you continued the process for yourself.... The heart of the educated condition, I believed, was the habit of reference.

"You talk too much about being old," people said. I knew it, and understood that it was not an attractive thing to do. But I was simply struck by the discovery of this process, to which all human beings who'd survived youth and middle age had been subjected - and always to their outraged astonishment, whatever face they put on it - the process that took the thing you were and roughened it up.... It was a tragi-comic evolution not easily ignored.