““Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome,’ he wrote. ‘The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that passes. The rhizome remains’ (MDR 18). The great secret is to embody something essential in our lives. Then, undefeated by age, we can proceed with dignity and meaning, and, as the end approaches, be ready ‘to die with life’. For the goal of old age is not senility, but wisdom.””
