PolyArchive

“Twenty-nine’s Fell Shadow! O, inhospitably final year of any Pretense to Youth, its Dreams now, how wither’d away … tho’ styl’d a Prime, yet bid’st thou Adieu to the Prime of Life! … There,— there, in the Stygian Mists of Futurity, loometh the dread Thirty,— Transition unspeakable! Prime so soon fallen, thy Virtue so easily broken, into a Number divisible,— penetrable!- by six others![…] Fourth Decade of Life! thy Gates but a brief Year ahead,— tho’ in this place, a Year can seem a Century,— what hold’st thou for the superannuated?”
—Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon