Essays After EightyRecommendations

Donald Hall devoted his whole life to the written word, amassing an illustrious career as a poet, essayist, and memoirist. His articles astonish, move, and thrill us here in the "unknown, unforeseen galaxy" of old age. "Thirty was terrible, forty I never noticed since I was inebriated," Hall writes in Essays After Eighty, "fifty was finest with a whole change of life, sixty prolonged the ecstasy of fifty..." "When I turned eighty and smeared testosterone on my chest, my beard raged like a lion and gained four inches," he says of his present. Hall writes about his lifelong love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and the literary life that keeps him going every day:  “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.”