At the age of sixty-one, Dominic Flandry reflects:
"...he wasn't yet elderly, he could still pace most men twenty or thirty years his junior, but a hundred variable cues kept him reminded that time was always gnawing, the snake at the root of Yggdrasil. Who was it had said once that youth was too precious to waste on the young?" (XI, p. 143)
We notice:
Norse mythological imagery in a hard sf novel;
an extremely meaningful interpretation of the snake gnawing at the root of Yggdrasil;
I thought that that quotation was from Oscar Wilde but googling reveals that it was George Bernard Shaw.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And besides the calisthenics that Flandry so ardently loathed, the antisenescence treatments of Technic medical science also helped to prolong his health and longevity. And I have wondered what WENT INTO antisenescence?
And I have heard of that line about youth being too precious to waste on the young, but not that it was coined by Shaw.
Sean
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