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OLDER but wiser is a phrase not heard much anymore, as attention has focused on time's less-kind effect on the brain. But are there advantages to having lived a lot, seen a lot and — maybe — thought a lot?

Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, thinks so, though he is a mere 68. "The amount of information one has," he said. "And the varied experiences one has been through, which may include betrayals and abandonments, fallings in love and out of love and wars and lies. One is driven to some sort of synthesis just to try to make sense of it." In his opinion, the brain doesn't slow down that much in old age, except in "a trivial sense."

The following four distinguished octogenarians, none of whom seem to have considered retiring for even a moment, are cases in point. They are people whose force of ambition, personality and thinking defined slices of American culture for at least the last half-century. Despite their now-creaky bodies, they are still working. Their mental journeys have not slackened one bit.

But have they achieved wisdom?

Most agreed they have achieved a specific wisdom — mainly about what to expect from other people and themselves. All modestly suggest that wisdom, however — the Platonic kind at least — is still as elusive as their short-term memories, which are now pretty much shot.

SAUL BELLOW

"I avoid slabs," said Saul Bellow, chuckling quietly as he reclined in a chair in his brown-on-brown professorial office at Boston University, where he teaches a seminar, "An Idiosyncratic Survey of Modern Literature," every Wednesday afternoon. Though the 87-year-old Nobel laureate was alluding to a scientist's examination of the brain on a plate, the slab he's really referring to, of course, is the one at the morgue. Mr. Bellow, who has spent a fair share of his literary life writing about a certain type of American Jewish man's preoccupation with ambition, women, ideas and death, is still preoccupied with all of the above, and still writing about them daily, working on what he says are a number of unspecified projects.

Mr. Bellow acknowledges that his ambition has mellowed with age, as has his desire for self-improvement, which fled when he hit 60. Now, Mr. Bellow says he is "trying to find out what accounts for the things I carry around in my mind which have persisted for reasons of their own." He is not in a hurry for revelation. "I realize," he said of the process of discovery, "that there is a certain sort of persistent blindness in people, that they know much more. There is more knowledge than is apparent even to them. So that gradually they come to expect certain disclosure of something that's been concealed until now. You have to somehow cast off the restraints of the veil and you can see."

This is not real wisdom — "Nobody intelligent ever claims wisdom," he said — but a new understanding. Age helps nudge the process along.

"There's some important conclusions that you can reach," he said, "not through intense effort, but by being laid-back, as you tend to be as you grow older. The haste and urgency of youth give you some relief when they depart."

But Mr. Bellow's intellectual journey is still driven by a trait more common in the young — optimism. "Sometimes," he said, "you have projects that you carry around for many decades and, lo and behold, you've become an old guy and you ask yourself, `Will I still be able to do this?' I learned early that a man can do anything he wishes to do, regardless of his age. I suppose so much of your job is delusional, that you can as easily have delusions when you're in old age as in your youth."

Then, quietly, Mr. Bellow weaves another filament through the web melding memory with the future: "My mind is a storehouse of old wacky sayings, and one of them is `Dum spiro spero.' While I breathe, I hope."

DAVID BROWN

David Brown takes his coffee black and his Scotch on the rocks, at least at lunchtime. At dinner, he adds a dash of Pernod to his cocktail and lets his wife of 42 years, the former Cosmopolitan editor in chief, Helen Gurley Brown, sip it while he orders another. The alcohol is a fitting closure to the long workdays that Mr. Brown still puts in at his Midtown Manhattan office, where he burrows for the next blockbuster to produce either on screen or on the stage.

Mr. Brown, the 86-year-old producer of "Jaws," "The Sting" and "Chocolat," says that "life is no different than it was at age 30 or 25," except that now that he's old, "we don't have to please anyone except ourselves." But then, he readily admits, he is lying.

Speaking by phone a month before the opening night of his newest Broadway production, the musical version of "The Sweet Smell of Success," Mr. Brown is dogged by his decades-old demon, the aching need for critical acclaim. Age and experience have not helped him weather the emotional roller coaster one iota.

"Any time I have a movie or play or book coming out, I am as full of angst and dread as to how it will be received as though I couldn't pay the rent if it didn't work out," he said.

Occasionally, when he lets them, vivid, filmic memories of Mr. Brown's youth in Woodmere, N.Y., can crowd his consciousness. The day in 1927 he spent watching a total eclipse of the sun, while calculating how old he would be at the millennium, is one of them.

Nighttime is different. Mr. Brown says that when he is falling asleep, he listens to Joe Franklin's songs of the 20's on WOR-AM and contemplates. "I think about all the people who are no longer here," he said. "During the waking day, I think about the future." He takes that future in small chunks. "You can't really indulge credibly in long-range planning, you just go from day to day and year to year, astonished that you are still alive."

Still, Mr. Brown is not ready to stop working, even when circumstances suggest he may be pushing it. He recalled one moment of doubt: it is 4:30 a.m., dark and cold, and he is on location in France for the filming of "Chocolat." The questions start. "I wonder what the hell I'm doing there. And my conclusion is, who would have lunch with me if I weren't doing this sort of thing?"

Despite the anxiety that work still engenders, Mr. Brown's life has been nothing short of operatic, and he says he is not ready for the finale. "Life is more important to me now. I don't want to leave the party."

MIKE WALLACE

"Dead man walking," said Mike Wallace of Yasir Arafat, pausing between each word. Mr. Wallace, 83, was in his office at "60 Minutes" in Manhattan, four days from a trip to Ramallah to have, perhaps, one last conversation with Mr. Arafat. They have butted heads seven times in 25 years, and Mr. Wallace is rehearsing, planning to chalk up another point for high drama on "60 Minutes," where he has been a host since its inception in 1968.

Sitting below a shelf so crowded with Emmy Awards they look like a flock of birds, Mr. Wallace is the oldest news guy at CBS, ever. While he is known for his dramatic, confrontational style, he says that he no longer puts a high price on the drama. "When I was starting out, it was quite apparent that it was heat — `Are you after heat or are you after light?' " he said of the dirge he played to himself before each interview. Now, he says, he is after "illumination."

Though Mr. Wallace says he still works on 20 pieces a year, his style is different than it used to be.

By his own admittance, he is less of a "lone operator," depending more than ever on the researchers and producers at the show to help him prepare for interviews. He says he's content with the change, but sees it as a signal of the passage of time. Relying on others has led him to ask himself some uneasy questions.

"I don't have the same kind of psychic energy that I used to have, and I'm sad about that," he said. "I'm frustrated because I'm of a certain age, and I want to keep working, and you can say, `If you don't have the psychic energy and you don't do it the way you used to do, why not leave?' "

Just this year, Mr. Wallace says he has been asking himself that question, the first time it has really cropped up. But staying relevant is too alluring.

"Can you imagine Arafat at this moment?" he said.

JULIA CHILD

It's 1 p.m. in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Julia Child is already thinking about dinner. She's dining alone tonight, in the two-bedroom condominium she recently moved to from her home in Cambridge, Mass.

She donated the three-story house in Cambridge to her alma mater, Smith College, "as a tax write-off" — all except for the famous kitchen, which was dismantled, cabinets, stockpots, carrot peeler and all, to be rebuilt and displayed in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution this year.

Mrs. Child has donated most of her cookbooks to Harvard, let her nieces have their dibs on the rest of her cooking things and gotten rid of most of her possessions. For many other almost-90-year-olds (she'll be 90 in June), letting go of one's possessions is the beginning of the end. But Mrs. Child, whose condominium is located in a retirement community where breakfast, including "the best bacon," is served to her in a communal dining room, says the change is the beginning of her future.

"I don't think about it," Mrs. Child said, speaking by phone of her waning years. Nor does she spend much time thinking about the past. "I remember nice things that happened. I don't dwell on the past at all, I dwell more on what I'm going to do, the future and the present."

One month after an operation to remove what she called "nubbins" on her spine, Mrs. Child is 30 pounds lighter as a result of the painkillers that nauseated her and prevented her from enjoying food. Now, she is recovering more slowly than she would like to be, and talks of taking up golf again, a pastime she once enjoyed but which her late husband, Paul, did not. "I probably have to use one of those golf carts now," she said, as if this were as improbable a tool for a 90-year-old to use as an electric beater might have been when she began her TV career in 1961. (Mrs. Child, in fact, used a balloon whisk to beat eggs to make an omelet on her first TV appearance.)

Despite her plans to hit the links, Mrs. Child says retirement is definitely not in the picture. "What would I do?" she asked. In mid- February, she spent an hour writing an article, pleased that the words poured out with ease. She just sat down and got right to work at it. That has always been her style.

Now, Mrs. Child says she is "readying the decks" for her next project, a memoir. The book has been rumored to be in the works for at least two years. And she's still talking to chefs, learning new things. "I did learn something new just the other day, some dumb small bit of information I hadn't heard before." Mrs. Child couldn't recall what the tidbit was, and allowed that remembering the little things and names were not as easy as they once were.

As for her dinner? "A baked potato, a chicken thigh and maybe some asparagus I have from the farmer's market." Asparagus is in season in California, and Mrs. Child is busy enjoying the bounty and the sun, cooking and writing.

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