Getting old. It isn’t all bad news. Mostly, it is. Sure. But not entirely. Past a certain threshold you get breaks on tickets at museums and concerts, etc., and you can collect Social Security, in the U.S., if the system hasn’t yet gone bankrupt.

Another significant advantage pops up on the “literature” side of things.

To wit: You’ve been around so long that you can read a good book again … and it’s like it’s new!

I have been doing this here in Abu Dhabi, the past couple of weeks, with two Hemingway books: “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and then “The Sun Also Rises.”

I had read both before. Maybe even more than once. But I hadn’t read them in at least 10 years, and maybe 20 and probably 30. And I no longer remembered entire story arcs.

For instance, in “Bell” … I had a notion that things were not going to end well for American protagonist Robert Jordan, anti-fascist volunteer and Spanish professor from Montana. But I wasn’t absolutely sure they would end badly, and if things were going to end badly I had no recollection of how they were to end badly.

For “Sun” … I had a fairly clear recollection of how the thing would end, because it is oft-discussed, but how Jake Barnes would get to that point where he is walking down the street in Madrid with Lady Ashley… no memory of it.

See? If you’re past a certain age, you are unlikely to remember how things end in all sorts of books. It’s a big break!

Hemingway wrote only seven novels (he was out shooting large animals, pretending to be a soldier and drinking himself into oblivion, the rest of the time), and apparently most of all of the books will be new to me, in 2012, decades later. That’s a break, if you like Hemingway, and I generally do.

I’m about to begin “A Farewell to Arms,” and I had a vague memory of a lake being involved at the end … but the rest of it? Pretty much not. (Until I read the “plot summary” on the wiki site. Man. Shouldn’t those things come with a massive “spoiler alert” warning?)

It occurs to me that most of the classics that I read during the Disco Era … I can’t clearly tell you how they turn out. “The Great Gatsby” … “Catcher in the Rye” … “Of Mice and Men” …

As an old person, I get a second crack at “new books.” If I become forgetful enough, and I presumably will, if I am spared … I may reach the point that I can just read the same book over and over, having forgotten the start by the time I reach the end. Making me the intellectual twin of a goldfish, for whom swimming around the same small bowl is, apparently, a new experience each time.

Being old. Not all bad. Not at all. Another year or two, maybe I can read “Lord of the Rings” as a whole new book, too.