[ncarroll]

> Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even _old_ endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment.

I needed the whole sentence to parse that phrase. Here is what I understood: Ambitious persons who live to be old will struggle with the realization that although they remain ambitious (a certain type of stretching into the future this characteristic of _youth_), they lose the ability (energy, focus, commitment) to fulfil those ambitions. Matching those two conditions found inside one's self as the reality of one's self is a terrible struggle and out of that follows an inevitable sense of loss.