Saul Bellow

Talking with aunt Lois, 94, must be what it's like to live in the past.

Only when I show her old photographs, mostly black and white, does she really come to life and begin to remember everything--names and places, details of events that happened years and years ago.

Of the present she's less clear, and she has no interest in the future at all.

To be 94 and to live in a Christian Science 'home' in San Francisco is not a bad place to live, I think. Then again, I don't really have ideas anymore, not like I used to. If I do have an idea it doesn't feel like it used to feel, like something no one else has thought of before.

If I do have an idea now it's something I have to go down into, and not rise up toward.

And very often when I do have an idea it feels old by the time I have it.