Yet we keep a hungry eye on old schoolmates

and everyone born in the year of our own birth,

and spend the nights in ranting over them,

their money, fashionable companions, pliant critics.

To live just a little longer than they do:

that would be triumph. Hence exercise and diets,

and the squabble over who will write the history

of this paradise of demons casting each other out.

A.F. Moritz, On Distinction