Life is like that, always supplying thorns with the roses. Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, final survivor of the Founders' circle, died in Washington in 1854 in her 97th year. She had lived the entire life of the republic. So had the slave interviewed in Virginia during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, who recalled hearing cannonading at the Battle of Yorktown 81 years earlier. Someone who today is 60 has lived 26.6 percent of the nation's life.
Life supplies roses amid the thorns.
Perhaps it is just the result of immersion in journalism, which is the opposite of literature, which is writing that deserves to be read twice. Perhaps it is a consequence of living in an obsessively political city. For whatever reason, being 60 in Washington sometimes feels like having had one year's experience 60 times. However, age can confer a certain calm about the passing circus, a preference for understatement and for people with low emotional metabolisms. That's the spirit.