The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, October 20, 2025

Diary: The other evening while I was covering the Flagler County Cultural Council’s annual meeting I was taking pictures not far from John Sbordone, the force behind City Repertory Theatre, when I saw his lips and heard them say to Leann Pennington, the county commissioner, that I looked old. It was mildly shocking to hear, but true. I have been looking at myself in mirrors like Cynthia Ozick when, as she wrote in The New Yorker in 1992 (she was 64 then, three years older than me now, and she is 97 now, still living in New York) “I am taken by surprise at the sight of a striding woman with white hair: she is still wearing the bangs of her late youth, but there are shocking pockets and trenches in her face; she has a preposterous dewlap; she is no one I can recognize.” I daily now as if in a Somme or Verdun of my own wade in pockets and trenches in my face. I didn’t know what dewlap means. I looked it up: “a fold or flap of skin on the neck of some animals.” I am the animal. It’s not just the face. “I pulled up my T-shirt and considered my stomach, finding again that I could no longer identify it as my own; it didn’t belong to the man I felt I was. I didn’t have what it took to get rid of it, for while I told myself at least several times a day that I needed to lose weight, start running and swimming, it never got to the stage where I actually did anything about it. The question therefore was whether I could turn it into something positive.” That’s from Knausgaard’s Morning Star, which I picked up the other day. I can’t say that I need to start running or swimming. I spend 350 minutes a week on the exercise bike at high intensity (the bike is rigged to my computer and those 350 minutes aren’t wasted, so it’s not as if FlaglerLive is suffering), but I’ve always thought exercise was for health, not aesthetic stomachs. It’s all very strange, because I also feel, like André Gide when he was 10 years younger than me, “How young I would still feel if I didn’t know that I would soon be fifty!” We have, Scott Fitzgerald would tell us, “reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise.” But our look can still make us (or our friends) gasp: the body we inhabit–that sack of treacheries, that sluice of deceptive pleasures–is alien enough to make us strangers in our own decay. Ian Kelly in his biography of Casanova imagines why one of Casanova’s women, Marie Anne Charpillon, distanced herself: “… perhaps she sensed what he had only begun to guess, that beneath his dazzlingly confident carapace something more vulnerable was emerging: a man who recognised the ridiculousness of his position, his self-aggrandised fantasy, the preposterous ness of male vanity and the evanescence of lust. And she sensed her power to mock his sexual prowess at the moment when it was turning from its full tide. ‘I knew,’ he declared melodramatically, ‘that aged thirty-eight, I had begun to die.”

—P.T.

“Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.

–From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

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