Alguns comentários a propósito da velhice (chamemos "a coisa" pelo seu nome)

feitos pelo poeta americano Charles Simic. Podem ler o texto na íntegra no site do New York Review of Books. Ei-los... e boa disposição: "On certain days I feel like a car with too many miles on its speedometer. There’s a knock in the engine, the radiator overheats, the oil leaks, the body is rusty, the upholstery is ripped and stained, one windshield wiper doesn’t work, and the muffler is full of holes. “Don’t worry about it,” my Doc says. He insists that I’m in terrific shape despite high blood pressure, old-age diabetes, and growing deafness in both ears. He sounds like a used car salesman to me, trying to get rid of a car that’s ready for the junk yard, but I lap up his words all the same, and speed away after the checkup singing at the top of my voice and trailing a cloud of black smoke from the exhaust. At four o’clock in the morning, after a night of tossing and turning, I’m not so cocky. I go and squint at my face in the bathroom mirror and don’t like what I see. Even Peter Lorre playing a child murderer in that 1931 German movie was more wholesome to behold. Recently a reviewer complained that my new book of poems is much too preoccupied with death. He appeared to suggest that I ought to be more upbeat, dispensing serene wisdom in the autumn of my life, instead of reminding readers every chance I get of their mortality. Just you wait, I said to myself, till you reach my age and start going to funerals of your friends. Nobody warns us about that when we are young, and even if they ever did, it goes in one ear and out the other. "