Ancient Hindu texts wisely divide life into three basic stages of life: in the first, you study; in the second, you marry and become a householder; and in the third, you go and live in the forest. (It has similarly been said about dogs that in the first stage, they play; in the second, they eat; and in the third, they sleep). The texts say that, when you see your first grey hairs, or your grandchildren, it is time to take your wife or husband and head for the forest, where you live simply but not grimly, and have time to think about things. (Some texts also suggest a fourth stage, of total renunciation, all by yourself, but I am, like most Hindus, temperamentally ill equipped for that sort of thing.)

Forest-dwelling is not necessarily retirement; it is more a state of mind than a plan of action. It is the time in which things do not matter in the same way they did when we were younger, when we achieve the attitude prescribed in the Bhagavad Gita, “action without ambition” (nishkama karma). I still teach and write as I have done for almost forty years, more than ever, in fact, but without the all-consuming hunger for achievement that drove me for so many years. At last I am content with where I am in my life. Race horses usually keep on running after they pass the finish line, no longer running for the prize, nor running quite so hard, running just for the sheer joy of running. I feel like that sort of horse.

I’ve done most of the things I wanted to do, and I no longer want or need to do them again; I take satisfaction in having done them. I lived for a year in India, for a year in Moscow (in the Cold War!), for ten years in England, other places, too. But I am always happy to come home to my dog. Some years ago, I gave up riding Arabian horses, as I had given up ballet dancing many years before that. For each thing, its season.

I’m not ready to die yet. I still have wonderful students whom I want to see through the final writing of their dissertations, and to guide into their first jobs. There are still a number of books I want to write (a memoir of my mother, perhaps my own memoir) or rewrite (my novel, of which little but the title has survived massive revisions, but it’s a good title: Horses for Lovers, Dogs for Husbands) or translate (the ancient Indian textbook of politics, the Artha-shastra) or finish (my half-completed book on the mythology of circular jewelry). There are still places I’d like to visit—go on a safari in Africa, see the penguins in Antarctica—novels I want to read, films I want to see, music to listen to. But there’s something satisfying in the knowledge that, if I were to die today, no one could possibly say of me, “tragically struck down in her youth, so much promise unfulfilled.” There’s something liberating about living on borrowed time.

There are of course things about aging that I don’t enjoy. I hate it when various parts of my body stubbornly refuse to do their jobs. And it irks me that some of the younger generation of scholars in my field regard my work as vieux jeu; somehow I went to bed one night an enfant terrible and woke up an old fuddy-duddy. Yet I would not for a minute change places with the young scholars in my field, who must make their way with such caution, afraid that, if they say the wrong things, make the wrong enemies at this point, they might be kicked out, denied tenure, their careers blighted. I can say, and write, whatever I really think, one of the privileges of an éminence grise (or old fuddy-duddy).

Finally, it took me to my late 50’s to discover the pleasures of solitude, of sitting on the deck of a house overlooking a fresh-water marsh in Cape Cod, with the waves streaming in onto the beach of the Bay beyond, just sitting there, listening to the wind in the trees, looking at the sky, at the water, watching the red-tailed hawks cruising, and the otter making his way up the river, and the doe with her two fawns coming to the bank to drink. This is my forest-dwelling.