Why do most writers fall off once they reach their older age...

Why do most writers fall off once they reach their older age? Their skills should be better but most of the best reach their heights in their 30s to 40s.

Because even aside from your brain starting to physically rot with age. Most people get so terrified of death and all the opportunities behind them they intellectually castrate themselves to survive, falling back on a pathetic contentment and maudlin sentimentality
This state is usually described as the "wisdom" of the elderly

Is that true? I find that the greatest works were written by writers in their later years: for example, Milton, Goethe and Dante. Literature isn't like math in that you need a lot of energy, and a sort of youthful quickness of mind to do great things. It has more to do with an inner honesty and slowly generating poetic sense that only ripens with age. Almost all the work by youthful authors is immature in once way or another, artistically or emotionally. I would say 50-60s is the sweetspot for a masterpiece, 30-40s for a classic, 20-30 for a solid book.

That's actually the opposite. Every major writer produced his greatest work at an older age: Cervantes, Goethe, Dante, Dostoiesky ...

I presume he means very old like late 60s early 70s at least

That's bullshit though. Artists (excluding pop musicians and genre writers who rely on luck and novelty rather than skill) practically always get better as they get older.

Wagner finished Parsifal the year before he died.
Beethoven wrote his 9th symphony in his 70s
Dante finished the Divine Comedy a year before his death
Milton finished Paradise Lost in his 60s
Malick released The Tree of Life around 70
Shakespeare's later works are superior to his earlier ones

>Shakespeare's later works are superior to his earlier ones
Suspicious.

>publish an experimental sequel to your most famous play on your deathbed
>tfw its the greatest thing you or anyone else has written

Tell me how the lessons realized by those near dear qualify for quotations around wisdom? Are you that blind to what life really is?

>200 years later, most readers still refuse to acknowledge it and only read the first part of Faust

Brainlet.
It's the opposite.
Young people write hack because they are striving for social status and seeking approval and money.
Old people can pursue genuine artistic vision because they literally don't give a fuck anymore.

near death*

Faust part 2 is a well-known pleb filter.

>pleb-tier: Faust Part I
>patrician-tier: Faust Part II
>living god-tier: both of the above + Urfaust

Have you met old people? If they're not half senile passive sheep they're usually bigger petty narcissists than infants in my experience. They absolutely do care about social status, infact with the clock quickly running out their idea of their "legacy" matters more than ever

...

>comparing geniuses with some guy who makes movies about people wandering around whispering

Malick is unironically comparable to the others I posted. He's film's Goethe.

Tarkovsky is "film's Goethe". Everything after Tree of Life is a self-parody.

Pynchon wrote M&D and AtD in his 60's and 70's respectively, argument invalid.

Tarkovsky is okay, but Solaris might genuinely be one of the worst widely-praised movies of all time. And post-ToL Malick is him experimenting with a particular style he cultivated with ToL. They were all filmed around the same time, and have the same themes of alienation and religious transcendence. It's a three film experiment that worked for some people and that Malick's moving away from with Radegund.

Not true. Wharton was working on The Buccaneers in her seventies when she died. And believe me if she had completed it would would have been her undisputed masterpiece.

Not the guy you're having the conversation with, but what's with the burst of productivity. Malick seems to be putting out films at a hell of a rate, especially considering how sparse his earlier career was

Jewish shill tactics orchestrated to denigrade the greatest filmmaker of our time who, sorry Moshe, is a Christian

Realized his mortality. Also, the 5 films he made in 5 years are so interconnected thematically and aesthetically that he was basically just mining the same creating vein for that entire time. It's a single, half-decade long experiment more than a series of movies.

>Tarkovsky is okay,
A guy who says this compares the hack Malick to Dante and Beethoven. Jesus, what a terrible aesthetic sense.

Fuck you bitch. I bet you like Goddard.

Would unironically put Eckermann's Conversations for bottom image desu

Maybe a less plastic brain, less energy. More erotic energy and drive can be displaced by cathexis into the creation of art. The young artist works tirelessly because he/she displaces the most basic infantile-erotic drive into his/her work.

Full Reichian: your old bones can't keep the orgones in.