As we age we of course think about death, as well as about dementia and loss of independence and so on. I've had a string of illnesses within the last decade or so, and in each case have recovered, it seems, almost completely, and I find no reduction in my mental ability. I think it's like physical exercise, you have to use your brain to keep it functioning, and learning languages is my forte so now I'm learning one -- and one that turns out to be more difficult than I expected (like other Austronesian languages it is free of Indo-European case and tense and gender and number nonsense, but the vocabulary and pronunciation are a b****).
(As English has evolved it has lost a lot of this stuff too, and replaced it with scads of prepositions and verb helpers, which leads to the possibility of unbelievably subtle distinctions -- in this context I should also mention its supply of suffixes and prefixes -- not available to Asian languages -- which is where the massive vocabulary really comes from.) Austronesian languages are direct and succinct and verbosity is almost impossible. So is subtlety and ambiguity. I don't know which is better. At least Khmer lacks the tones that complicate Vietnamese pronunciation -- tones that came from Chinese influence (contamination).
Of course if you get something like Alzheimer's, then all this comes to naught, so I hope I will be lucky. There is such a thing as good and bad luck, and as the cliché goes, we have to play the cards we are dealt.
Being an intellectual type, I am of course by nature disorganized, but fortunately I have the money to hire a secretary, and he keeps me marvelously organized. My word what a stress reducer that is to know where things are!
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