(no subject)
If one is lucky, one's hair turns white early; if -- as in old Chinese poetry -- one is indulging oneself, one dreams of old age. For in old age the Whileawayan woman -- no longer as strong and elastic as the young -- has learned to join with calculating machines in the state they say can't be described but is most like a sneeze that never comes off. It is the old who are given the sedentary jobs, the old who can spend their days mapping, drawing, thinking, writing, collating, composing. In the libraries old hands come out from under the induction helmets to give you the reproductions of the books you want; old feet twinkle below the computer shelves, hanging down like Humpty Dumpty's; old ladies chuckle eerily while composing The Blasphemous Cantata (a great favourite of Ysaye's) or mad-moon cityscapes which turn out to be do-able after all; old brains use one part in fifty to run a city (with checkups made by two sulky youngsters) while the other forty-nine parts riot in a freedom they haven't had since adolescence.
Joanna Russ -- The Female Man
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