So lately we have seen a parade of writers flourishing long past the age when their predecessors would have become enfeebled or taken the Drabble option.
But, symbolically, everything has.Even before his hospitalisation, Mr Chirac had become politically enfeebled after the French rejected the European Union constitution in May.
The one-sidedness cannot but have disturbing consequences in a poor, semiliterate country where national greatness has become dangerously confused with nuclear bombs and military strength, where rivalries of class, caste, region and religion have enfeebled democratic institutions in recent years.
As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those 'powers of observation' will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your 40s, by performance and not by promise".
But over the years, as I travel into and out of the city for work and pleasure, I've noticed how enfeebled those stereotypes have become.
Perhaps Loach is telling us the spirit of 1922 lives on and both Britain and Ireland have become Treaty-ite nations, at once enfeebled and aggressive, prepared to endorse and carry out violence in the shadow of a greater power.
What an enfeebled world we have become.
As a result, human beings have become disposable -- the old, the infirm, the enfeebled, the terminally ill -- they are "abandoned and uncared for".
That said, one suspects only trees enfeebled by old age, and walls that have become weakened as the pointing rots, are at particular risk.
And though the economy has recently regained consciousness, it is too enfeebled by corruption and instability to lift itself off the floor.In his better moments, Mr Wahid's way forward is to point out what the bad guys are up to; remind the public why the crooked have become so powerful; insist that things could be better; and encourage ordinary Indonesians to get more involved in reform.
