That Montaigne guy ...

... knew a thing or two. This comes courtesy of Ann Althouse:

Don’t be like those people who, in order to extend life, never actually live it. Life is not just about avoiding death; it’s about the active use of our powers while we are alive. To live like a human being, you must do all the things that human beings are capable of doing and should do; you must learn to suffer like a human being, and, finally, to die like a human being: “We must meekly suffer the laws of our condition. We are born to grow old, to grow weak, to be sick, in spite of all medicine. . . . We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid.”

It made me think of a number of women I knew growing up who lived their lives in denial. They were Catholic-school girls and the also hated, as one of them put it, being fetish objects for the men who looked at them in their school uniforms. Outside school, they resented men and the way men looked at them and resisted all efforts to dress and present themselves in a feminine fashion.

But one day, when they got older, some sort of switch flipped and they suddenly started rushing to get the very experiences they had denied themselves for so long.