Chapter VIII Some Conclusions
The early decades of age—The deadline of seventy—The patheticism of the old—The attitude of physicians toward them—Fluctuations of youth—Erotic decline—Alternations in the domain of sleep, food, mood, irritability, rational self-control, and sex—The dawn of old age in women—Dangers of the disparity when December weds May—Sexual hygiene for the old—Mental effects of the dulling of sensations—Lack of mental pabulum—The tedium vitae—Changes in the emotional life—Age not second childhood—Women in the dangerous age—Need of a new and higher type of old age—Aristotle’s golden mean and the magnanimous man—The age of disillusion—Increased power of synthesis—Nature’s balance between old and young—The eternal war between them—Superior powers of the old in perspective and larger views—New love of nature and the country—Their preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and as judges—Looking within and without—Merging with the cosmos—The three ways of escaping the decay of civilization.
To learn that we are really old is a long, complex, and painful experience. Each decade the circle of the Great Fatigue narrows around us, restricting the intensity and endurance of our activities. In the thirties the athletic power passes its prime, for muscular energy begins to abate. There is also some loss of deftness, subtlety, and power of making fine, complex movements of the accessory motor system, and a loss of facility for acquiring new skills. In the forties grayness and, in men, baldness may begin and eyesight is a little less acute so that we hold our book or paper farther off. We are less fond of “roughing” it or of severe forms of exercise. We may become so discontented with our achievements or our environment that we change our whole plan of life. In the fifties we feel that half a century is a long time to have lived and compare our vitality with that of our forbears and contemporaries of the same age. Memory for names may occasionally slip a cog. We go to the physician for a “once over” to be sure that all our organs are functioning properly. We realize that if we are ever to accomplish anything more in the world we must be up and at it and give up many old hopes and ambitions as vain. Perhaps we indulge ourselves in certain pleasures hitherto denied before it is forever too late. At sixty we realize that there is but one more threshold to cross before we find ourselves in the great hall of discard where most lay their burdens down and that what remains yet to do must be done quickly. Hence this is a decade peculiarly prone to overwork. We refuse to compromise with failing powers but drive ourselves all the more because we are on the home stretch. We anticipate leaving but must leave things right and feel we can rest up afterwards. So we are prone to overdraw our account of energy and brave the danger of collapse if our overdraft is not honored. Thus some cross the conventional deadline of seventy in a state of exhaustion that nature can never entirely make good. Added to all this is the struggle, never so intense for men as in the sixties, to seem younger, to be and remain necessary, and perhaps to circumvent the looming possibilities of displacement by younger men. Thus it is that men often shorten their lives and, what is far more important, impair the quality of their old age, so that we yet see and know but little of what it could, should, or would be if we could order life according to its true nature and intent. Only greater easement between fifty and seventy can bring ripe, healthful, vigorous senectitude, the services of which to the race constitute, as I have elsewhere tried to show, probably the very greatest need of our civilization to-day.
In the seventies we often begin to muse on how our environment will look and what our friends will do when we are gone; and now the suspicion, hitherto nebulous, that there are quarters in which our demise would be welcome may arise to consciousness and perhaps take definite form. There are those who, also perhaps unconsciously, are waiting for our place or positions and so we grow hypersensitive to every manifestation of respect or esteem and not only resist being set aside or being superseded but seek to find new kinds of service that will be recognized as useful. The seventieth is the saddest of all birthdays and if we “linger superfluous on the stage,” we feel that society regards us as, to some extent, a class apart; and so we instinctively make more effort to compensate our clumsiness by spryness and gently resist the kindly offices and tokens of respect to which the young incline or, perhaps more often, are taught to render the old. We are a trifle more prone to lose or mislay things, perhaps almost resent the family’s solicitude for our glasses, slippers, cane, overcoat, diet, and quiet. We have to give ever-increasing time and attention to health and to nursing ourselves and in many exceptional experiences feel that we are seeing persons and may be doing things for the last time. All our plans and efforts and prospects directed toward the future have a new element of uncertainty and tentativeness. We can easily be spoiled by kindness or soured by neglect and our own personality requires so much attention in making the new adjustments that are necessary that we are in new danger of becoming selfish; while our nerves are liable to grow irritable and there is a new trend to depressive states as our activities abate.
It is not strange that one of our grievous dangers is patheticism. One who begins to suspect waning love on the part of those in his sphere may come to accept and even crave pity in its place and farther on in the infirmities of age a husband or wife may do the same and magnify to their partner ailments and symptoms to this end. A little farther yet in this direction lies what may be called the hysteria of senescents. We may come to love to be waited on more than is needful and thus grow into a fictive helplessness and dependence on the ministrations of others. We love to pour our troubles into sympathetic ears and may be spoiled by the too great devotion of our married partner, sons, or daughters, whom we sometimes permit to become slaves not only to our infirmities but to our very whims and notions. Who has not known old people otherwise excellent who almost seem to have lived by the precept of never doing for themselves anything they can get others to do for them. There are fathers who, with no thought that they are selfish, monopolize the love and services of their daughters, and mothers who do the same of grown sons, and these of the younger generation may lavish upon their parents the devotion that was meant for a mate or a family of their own. We know that marriage, when it comes to such people, is likely to be unhappy unless the wife is in the image of the fondled mother or the husband in that of the too much loved father. We are prone to forget that for the old, as truly as for the young, it is more blessed to give than to receive and that we must not insist on our rights and forget that each has its corresponding duties. The old are rarely oppressed by a sense of gratitude and may come to feel that because they have reared their children they have laid them under obligations of a return service that can never be fully discharged, forgetting that beyond certain limits they pay us best by rendering the same service not to us but to their own children. Most of us are or are destined to become a real burden and this we should strive to delay and lighten and not to accelerate or increase, and we should not come to make a luxury of our sense of dependence. Thus if the old have savings, however small, they should never expropriate but retain and use them wherever and when their help will be most serviceable. The fact that we have withdrawn from larger outside activities naturally inclines us to strive to be of compensatingly more account in the smaller circle left us but this must not make us arbitrary in this narrowed field for self-assertion and we should not feel that as we become less important to the world we must become more so within the family circle. We have, in fact, a new place and must exert ourselves to learn and keep it, without interference with those who are taking ours or making their own careers.
In his dealings with such cases the physician needs a special sagacity. He must realize the great satisfaction it gives his aged patients to have him listen patiently and sympathetically to all their ills and should encourage them to trust him fully and with no reservations. This not only shields others but by humoring the wise doctor can not only gain full confidence but may be able to bring such patients to see their own selfishness and thus effect a real cure even in their physical condition. I have known cases where such ministrations were a benediction to the family. Where old patients have thus built up a system of half-fancied ailments, placeboes may work wonders, the therapy being in fact chiefly mental. Such insidious dangers to which the aged are exposed cannot be reached by medicaments but rather by pithiatism in the sense of Babinski or persuasion in the sense of Dubois, Merchenowsky, Rosenbach, or Herbert Hall, who heal by prescribing activities, physical and mental, found possible after painstaking analysis. The old often feel a falsetto invalidism that may be cured by a vigorous appeal to their moral sense or, again by changes in their daily program or regimen or by exposing them to fresh streams of rich outer impressions that correct the mental stagnation to which they are prone or keep their attention from themselves by giving their minds a larger field and a far-off focus, as against their inveterate tendency to mental short-sightedness.
In youth erotic fetishes and pet, instinctive aversions are now known to play an important if half-unconscious rôle in love between the sexes. Eyes, hair, lips, cheek, neck, or any of her little ways of movement or speech may become a focus of special charm to the young amorist. Conversely, other or even the same features, traits, automatisms, or habits may mediate no less unconscious dislike.196 Some of the same rapports or repulsions exist between the old and the young. The former may even have their favorite children or grandchildren and dislike others in ways they themselves could only inadequately justify. This partiality is most pronounced between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. It is the chief factor not only in what is called love at first sight but of first impressions of strangers, which are proverbially so hard to efface. Thus what we deem trifles may loom large.
The old are particularly prone to develop peculiarities which, if they do not unconsciously alienate those nearest and perhaps dearest to them, are real handicaps to their devotion. Of this the old are rarely aware, and if attention is called to them they minimize their importance. These might be listed and weighed like their analogues in the erotic field. The roster of them on the negative side would be long. There are faults in table manners, modes of eating and drinking, using table utensils from the napkin on, etc. Mastication may be noisy or otherwise subtly disagreeable, or there is slobbering, clumsiness, or neglect of common conventionalities once observed. The toilet may be neglected, the attire soiled or spotted or imperfectly put on, and so a look-over needed before we go out. We do things or make noises in the presence of others that once we only permitted ourselves when alone and there is a new indifference to personal appearance. The voice is impaired in volume, richness of inflection, and articulation; our face or form are no longer æsthetic objects; we mislay things and invoke those about us to help find them; and are tediously slow in mind and body. If, in addition to all this, we become pryingly overcurious, fault-finding, exact, and forgetful, we give our friends more to put up with than we realize, and the best of them would be shocked if they became conscious of how much they repress in their psychic attitude toward, if not in their treatment of us. On all such matters we should make frequent self-surveys. On the other hand, if we cultivate not only order and control but, above all, the poise and repose of those seeking the Great Peace, striving always to do, be, and say only our best things, we may make ourselves not only respected but loved in a new way, so that we shall be turned to not only for advice but for companionship and help in emergencies and make some of even the most obtrusive signs of physical decay attractive by association with the higher qualities of soul, as the ugliness of Socrates came to be almost loved by his disciples. Art understands this and many of its masterpieces depict old age in its glory. The same is true of literature and even of the drama, despite the fact that actors who specialize in old women’s and particularly old men’s parts so often make age repulsive and ridiculous, for it has always been a most attractive field for caricature.
The old are subject to certain fluctuations, new in kind, degree, or both. Sleep is less regular. They have good and bad nights, one or more of each alternating, which make the next day clear or cloudy with dregs. If fatigue comes more quickly, so does recuperation by rest. They are often refreshed by a very brief nap or by recumbency, or even by a period of solitude during the day. Thus on the periodicity of day and night is superposed one of less amplitude or briefer duration, perhaps after one or each meal. Thus the distinction between the sleeping and waking state comes to be less sharp, slumber is not so deep or long, and the dreamy states of reverie invade mentation by day. The great restorer does not quite make losses good and the accumulation of these deficits explains very many of the phenomena of old age, which might be characterized as sleepiness for death, the rest that is complete and knows no waking. Capitulation to the siesta habit is marked in some by a distinct improvement of condition. They speak of a new balance between activity and repose and sleep all the better nights, while others resist such tamperings with nature’s rhythm and if they acquire the midday habit find themselves nervous or less refreshed the morning after. Some retire and rise with the sun and find a certain elation of spirits in this reversion to nature and praise the morning hour or even sunrise, of which the urbanized world about them knows little and ever less; while others find a virtue in lying abed late. While we know too little of the hygiene of the aged to prescribe, it is certain that they tend to break with the old regulations and really need some of the indulgences they are often too inclined to permit themselves.
The appetites fluctuate and may readily become capricious. Some would eat more and less often than before and love to experiment with new viands. Some think some items of diet once beneficial become harmful and so eliminate them, while some like and can digest things impossible before. Sometimes they indulge for days or even weeks in a favorite dish that at intervals they cannot touch with impunity, as if there were spells of immunity broken by intervals during which the same article produces deleterious results. One says that what is at one time a food becomes for him at another time a poison. This seems particularly true of certain fruits, while the acid balance seems very liable to upsets. Most tend to overeat and are always struggling with their appetite. Yet they often have periods when foods lose their attraction, as if Nature decreed a fast. Here she is often right and a day or more of relative or even entire abstinence may prove helpful. So the former diet periods do not need to be observed; nor need the old be coaxed at such times with tempting food.
Springtime is hard on the assimilative processes of all but especially on those of the old. This is partly because the tides of life everywhere set toward genesis rather than toward individuation but still more because the calorific elements of food need to be essentially reduced and also because winter’s supplies grow a little stale before summer ripens her produce. So, too, with the abated activity that years bring the need of food is reduced and hence the old can often thrive on a small percentage of what they formerly needed. Most, too, not only learn to avoid hearty meals at night but find it best to lay in most of their rations earlier in the day. Very many find in diet their chief center of interest and solicitude and the most active theme for theorization, so that in many cases more and more mentation seems to center about alimentary functions. There are very active inductions from experience and constant modifications of views hard to change in other fields. There does seem to be often a change toward either increased sensitiveness or torpidity of the alimentary tract. A few grow especially susceptible to seasoning, condiments, flavors, and even confectionery. They may become even connoisseurs in wine, tea, coffee, tobacco, while others grow indifferent and insist that they like and can eat almost anything. Nutritive ups and downs are thus more marked than before. Tendencies to decrease in weight are distinctly more favorable for prolonged life than the opposite tendency to obesity. Indeed, the former seems normal.
There are alternations of mood. Depression may be acute to-day and vanish to-morrow, depending not only upon sleep and nutrition but the weather and incidents, perhaps trivialities, in the environment. Irritability may alternate with apathy and the old may lose self-control and anon exercise a high degree of it. Some days they feel comfortable and even vigorous and on others are miserable. Now weak organs or functions, heart, stomach, bowels, rheumatism, or whatever be the besetting troubles, are much in evidence and symptoms may grow dangerous until the old have a new sense of the fragile hold they have upon life, which may end suddenly in some of these weak moments. Then these symptoms intermit and they feel well and take heart again till the next “spell.” A few never allow themselves to be caught without some one or more trusted drugs kept handy for immediate use in emergencies and much, too, might be written of “warnings” and their sometimes epochal effects upon both the inner and outer life. Thus the old may sometimes give way to their feelings and become stormy, lachrymose, perhaps even violent, and they may react from this to a state of almost philosophic poise, which passes upon even their own outbreaks with objective detachment and psychological interest, phenomena that we may call the “apologetics” of old age. Thus emotivity and reason may succeed each other.
The old are very dependent upon weather, climate, and seasons. Winter is hardest on them. Not only does it mean more indoor life and less activity but cold is one of the chief enemies of the old and winter is also supercharged with subtle and profound symbolisms of their own stage of life which deploy more beneath than above the threshold of their consciousness. What old person does not shudder at the thought of being buried in snow and ice. Even the autumn is for them full of somber analogies of the stage of the sere and falling leaves, of the ripening and garnering of the fruits of the earth, of the first blighting frosts. All the old long for the rejuvenation of springtime and perhaps daydream of it when nature is snowbound. Some keep diaries of wind, temperature, and storm and become weather-wise, while those who can, seek warmer climes, especially when winter begins to break, a season statistics show is most fatal for the old. The poet who sang that he could endure anything but a series of bad days must have had the psychic barometry of old age. Thus we draw nearer to nature, our source and our home.
Even sex often does not decline and die without terminal oscillations in its course and in extreme cases apathy and aversion may alternate with abnormal erotic outbreaks dangerous alike to the health of the individual, to domestic happiness, and even to public morals. Those who have led lustful lives may resort to unnatural and illegal forms of vice and thus illustrate the various perversions of this function. While only a few indulge in orgies, very few fail to note occasional spontaneous but transient calentures here suggestive of potency long after it was deemed “closed season.” Such recrudescences, though they seem to be nearly always only partial, are very prone to deceive and may lead to follies. Instead of being indulged, cultivated, or even welcomed, as by an inveterate fallacy too prevalent with the young they too often are, the old should rigorously ignore and suppress all such manifestations in this field. While the full realization of impotence brings a psychalgia all its own, it also has physiological and psychological if not conscious compensations, while belated and, especially, stimulated activity of reproductive functions not only can never result in offspring of value to the world but saps vitality and accelerates the decay of every secondary sex quality of mind and body, so that complete chastity, psychic and somatic, should be the ideal of the old. They should be not only embodiments of purity but the wisest of all counselors in this field. Only to those in whom asceticism and sublimation have done their perfect work will there come an Indian summer of calentures for the higher ideals of life and mind, while those who fail here can never know the true and consummate joy of old age.
For myself, I frankly confess that the longer I live the more I want to keep on doing so. Hence in the last two years of retired leisure I have given far more time and attention to personal hygiene, regimen, and diet than ever before and have mildly experimented with myself in many ways. I have tried eating two and four meals daily, going early and late to bed, forcing myself to lie there a fixed number of hours and at certain times again retiring and rising with no regularity as I felt like doing. I have tried systematic rub-downs, self-massage; cold and warm, frequent and infrequent baths, have equipped a modest gymnasium and taken mild but systematic exercises with various apparatus and then abandoned all this or done nothing of it without an inner prompting. I have followed prescribed diets and tried many special foods, interested myself in vitamines, beginning with Eddy’s manual and trying out vegex preparations, although no one has as yet studied the effects of any of the three species of vitamines upon old age, as has been done for other stages of life. I even used olive oil, which so many of my correspondents praise both for internal and external application, stopped smoking for a week, which seemed greatly to prolong each day after thirty years of mild addition to nicotine, corrected for a time and then yielded to the senescent’s tendency to constipation, experimented with alcohol in several forms, even with Pohl’s spermine tablets and minimal doses of phosphorus, etc. But out of all these moderate hygienic adventures I have so far found no topping specific. It would be interesting to try out the gland-grafting experiments which seem to have regenerated the famous Vienna surgeon, Lorenz, and others, and I think I would gladly offer myself as a corpus vile for the Steinach operation to study its psychological effects at first hand. Although I have found in the above experiences a few things that I so far believe helpful to me, I have derived from them all no advice to offer others except, if time and inclination favor, to try out all things for themselves. Plenty of moderate exercise out of doors, active intellectual interests, both just to the point of healthy fatigue but no more, are fundamental. One must have insight and considerable power of self-observation to profit therefrom. But the main thing is to develop and maintain at its highest possible morale a rigorous and unremitting hygienic conscience that will never let down but always enforce the doing of what we know to be best. Otherwise we may eat, sleep, work, and generally do or not do what seems best as we list. I am even skeptical about the almost universal counsel for tranquillity and against worrying, for more or less anxiety is not only the normal lot of man but it gives a tonic sense of responsibility which we all need.
Special forms of pleasure that have to be prepared for attract us less but we find soul-filling satisfaction in just living, contemplating nature wherever we happen to be, eating, sleeping, and in common converse. All these things acquire a charm unknown before, while “occasions,” events, and sights that are rare and afar lose their charm. Thus we come to love each hour of each day and the most wonted and commonplace experiences, while our work (for no one can be happy without some task) even though it seemed drudgery before becomes attractive because we can do it when and as we will and as much or little of it as our strength permits or inclination impels. Meanwhile friends grow nearer and dearer, enmities fade, and we enjoy converse with those toward whom we were formerly indifferent or even averse. Thus old age may become the most satisfying and deeply enjoyable stage of life. Hitherto the rest cures we prescribed have been more or less reversionary to youthful or even primitive scenes and activities. It may be that this is wrong and that for all such cases we should prescribe for the young or middle-aged the occupations, attitudes and regimen of the old and that this would be more therapeutic.
Sensations and movements are the basis of mind and when these are reduced, as in old age, we often have the phenomena of mental starvation because the supplies of mental pabulum are lowered. If the old have little society and do not read, their psychic powers of digesting their experience run down, not from any inherent weakness but because they are on short rations for data. The mills could often grind as fine and as much as ever, and possibly more so, but the grist is lacking. Thus there are two opposite trends in the old. On the one hand, their physical state demands attention to themselves so that they tend to have “too much ego” in their cosmos, grow subjective, and may become hypochondriacal or preoccupied with their own personal problems. The simple decree of nature is that we must give more care to our health and morale and it is excess, defect, or perversion of this deep instinct that causes so many of our pains and our ill repute. Here lies our chief need of personal study, psychoanalysis, and reëducation. The other trend is in the opposite direction, toward depersonalization. We need to look out, not in; to forget self and to be absorbed in objectives. We are impelled to escape our environment and interest ourselves in things that are remote in space and time, in nature, the stars, great causes and events, personalities, masterpieces, to escape from our miserable selves by their contemplation. We cannot see the countenance of things for their soul. It is this fugue from self that perhaps impels us to so many of our petty pastimes and diversions: solitaire, idle reveries, our predilection for amusements, fussiness about our things; as well as, on the negative side, to neglect our person, really of dwindling value in the great world and soon to be effaced. All these phenomena are outcrops of the tendency by which “the individual withers and the world is more and more,” for our fate is depersonalization and resumption into nature. These symptoms are anticipations of euthanasia or, to use a phrase now current in psychology, they are extrovertive and not introvertive, just as the old were meant to be.
Thus the old need a higher kind and degree of self-knowledge than they have yet attained. They need to be individually studied and analyzed to avoid the new, peculiar, and not yet understood dementia præcox now so liable to supervene upon the youth of age. This is all the more needful now that the intensity of modern life with its industrial and managerial strain compels earlier withdrawal from its strenuosities. We live longer and also begin to retire earlier, so that senescence is lengthening at both ends. Hence, again, the need of midwives to bring us into the new world of higher sanity now possible to ever more of us. Both we and our civilization now so checked, disoriented, and misled by immaturities are in such crying need of a higher leadership that is not forthcoming! We are suffering chiefly from unripeness. The human stock is not maturing as it should. Life is so complicated that the years of apprenticeship are ever longer and harder, so that we are exhausted ere we become master workmen in our craft and the rapid age turnover this involves robs us of too many of the choicest fruits of experience.
Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a new vitality, physical and mental. If we are normal and not too spent, we feel new hopes, ambitions, make plans to surpass our old selves and to at last be, do, say, enjoy something really worth while. As we pass our life in review, stage by stage, up to the present, it seems so incomplete, fragmentary, tentative, and altogether unsatisfying that we almost wonder whether it was we ourselves who really lived it or someone else whose career we are following with an objective detachment never felt before toward our own ego. Certain it is that a new veil falls between us and our past, gauzy and transparent though it be. Our psychic nature did not intend us for the rôle of reminiscence so persistently assigned to and so commonly accepted by us. Our juvenile memories are but the ragbag vestiges of a vaster experience that had to be forgotten to be completely incorporated in our personality and to ascribe too much significance to them is the fetishism of senility. If we write up our lives, we can make them interesting and valuable only by using our better information about and more sympathetic rapport with ourselves with the same impartiality that a close and discerning friend would do if he had all our data. It is for the things of the present and for the problems of the future that our mental vision becomes clearer than ever before. Our wish and will to achieve and make our insights known and prevail acquire new force.
How different we find old age from what we had expected or observed it to be; how little there is in common between what we feel toward it and the way we find it regarded by our juniors; and how hard it is to conform to their expectations of us! They think we have glided into a peaceful harbor and have only to cast anchor and be at rest. We feel that we have made landfall on a new continent where we must not only disembark but explore and make new departures and institutions and give a better interpretation to human life. Instead of descending toward a deep, dark valley we stand, in fact, before a delectable mountain, from the summit of which, if we can only reach it, we can view the world in a clearer light and in truer perspective than the race has yet attained. It is all only a question of strength and endurance. That is the great and only but, when we squarely face it, a staggering proviso. In all essentials we are better and more fit than ever before save only for the curse of fatigability, for age and death are nothing but fatigue advancing and finally conquering life. One single example of a hale old man dowered by nature and nurture, as immune from tire as youth is, would give the world a new idea of senectitude.
We were told that the days and years pass more quickly as we advance in age. What could be more false! Not only do the nights, of which sound sleep once made us unconscious, often drag slowly through their watches but each day is so long that we often find time hanging heavily on our hands; and when we have done all the work we can, we turn to our friends to amuse us and seek and perhaps invent pastimes or fresh occupations to kill it. Sermons, lectures, meetings of all kinds, even the drama, seem long. The winter lingers until we almost fear that spring will never come or out-of-doors attract us again. When we have to wait for things, the time stretches as if there were no limit to its elasticity, and when we turn to reveries of the past, it is a last resort from the tedium vitae. We really have time for anything and to spare. It is the demon fatigue that makes us so in love with diversion, for rest is more and more frequently sought and found in change.
They say our emotional life is damped. True, we are more immune from certain great passions and our affectivity is very differently distributed. But what lessons of repression we have to learn! If the fires of youth are banked and smouldering they are in no wise extinguished and perhaps burn only the more fiercely inwardly because they cannot vent themselves, as even the Lange-James theory admits for repressed feelings, inhibition of which really only makes them more intense. We get scant credit for the self-control that restrains us from so much we feel impelled to say and do and if we break out, it is ascribed not to its true cause in outer circumstance but to the irritability thought characteristic of our years. Age has the same right to emotional perturbations as youth and is no whit less exposed and disposed to them. Here, as everywhere, we are misunderstood and are in such a feeble minority that we have to incessantly renounce our impulsions. Marie Bashkirtseff has betrayed the secret of how the pubescent girl, and Karin Michaëlis, of how the woman of forty feels, but no one has ever attempted to explain the sentimental nature of aging men or women. Even Solomon and Omar Khayyam presented only the negations and not the reaffirmations of the will-to-live.
Thus it is no wonder if the old often best illustrate what Henri Bordeaux describes as “the fear of living.” René Doumic thinks that there is a new disease in our old civilization and that many in their prime only make a pretense of living. “We value our peace above everything and wish to keep it at all hazards, however dearly we must pay for it. We shun responsibilities, avoid risks and chances of struggle, flee from adventure and danger, seek to escape from everything that makes for the charm and value of life. We no longer have any faith in the future because we no longer have faith in ourselves.” How well this applies to those brought face to face with the last stage of life! The fact is, we must find and make new pleasures as well as new modes of escaping and mitigating the pains of body and mind and must learn anew how to love, hate, fear, be angry, pity, and sympathize aright. The serenity ascribed to us would pall and bring stagnation. It is a profound psychological truth that “out of the heart are the issues of life” and our heart is not dead; on the contrary, emotivity probably increases with years and most expressions of it, unless they become more sublimated, strongly tend to grow more crass and stormy. We were never more interested in things, persons, events, causes, in life itself. Slights rankle, neglect chills, attentions warm, affronts incense, and praise thrills us, and if we grow censorious, it is because our ideals of conduct and motive have become higher and purer and we are in a greater hurry to see them realized. We cannot help these gropings toward a new dispensation and their very persistence is the best reason for believing that they will sometime find their goal in a better stage of things and an improved race of men not in another world but here. Perhaps some of even what we now call the whimsies of the old will be seen to be the labor pains of humanity, which is striving thus to surpass itself, to improve the stock, and to really bring in a new and higher type of man.
Old age is called second childhood. This is all wrong for there is nothing rejuvenative about it. Childhood is the most active, healthful, buoyant, and intuitive stage of life; age, the least so. What is there really common to the morning and evening of life? We even lose much of the power we once had to understand children and if we love them, we want them at a distance, while they in turn understand and like us little by nature. They inherit far less of the results of experience with grandparents than with parents, for less of us have survived to see them and the latter often resent or even criticise our relations to them. We are nearly as immune to their prevailing faults as to their diseases. They listen to our stories but do not crave our cuddling, are jealous if we usurp the offices of their parents to them and are usually a little less free in our presence. Nature has established an old and close rapport between one generation and the next. Even young teachers get on best with young, old with maturer pupils. M. L. Reymert197 says that his general study shows him that teachers below twenty and over forty are of less influence than teachers between these ages. The most efficient man teacher is generally from 25 to 35. The best woman teacher has a little wider range—say, 20 to 40. But of course mental and physiological age are different. Helen M. Downey “Old and Young Teachers,” Ped. Sem., June, 1918, concludes, on the basis of questionnaire data, that the younger teacher has other interests that keep her bright and cheerful; the older teacher excels in mental and the younger in dispositional traits; the old are careless of appearance and this does not appeal to children; the older rule by discipline, not by love and kindness; the young teacher more often overtaxes her strength; the old are more set in methods, fixed in opinions, resent suggestions for improvement. Many suggest there should be an age limit of 60. Health and temper suffer. There are often negative psychic idiosyncrasies. Older teachers lose contact. Social traits are a very great factor in consideration of the period of rapid growth. Dispositional qualities are more impressive than any other. The favorite teacher is enthusiastic, energetic, young. Pupils’ estimates do not involve age when they speak of old and young. I know an old and successful professor, interested in his work to the end, who, when he retired with powers little abated and much work yet to be completed, found that in his speech and writing he imagined himself as no longer addressing minds in the student, even graduate, stage, but wished to be at home teaching and learning from those not under forty, for at that age real wisdom begins, the effects of special training having then faded. A refocalization took place in his mind that involved not only new methods but, yet more, new topics and subject matter. What student, however mature, would care for and what curriculum in any university in the world would include, for example, the theme of this volume. And who but a Greis would ever have found its preparation a fascinating task! No, the old are not childish but, if they are normal, have simply reached a stage of postmaturity that involves much of what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of all values.
But if we can no longer see over the crest of the divide that separates age from youth, if the acclivity is shut off, we do see more nearly and clearly each step of the declivity and find the catabasis of life no less zestful than its anabasis was in its time, while we have the great advantage that comes from the power of being able to compare the two and this itself opens rich mines of thought. The age of the sage has bid a final adieu not only to all puerilities but to the callow ardors of the ephebic stage. He is graduated from adulthood and turns, as by an eschatological instinct, to ultimate human problems, of which younger minds, though they may be attracted to them, can have only premonitions. To hear and heed this call is the strength and glory of those who are complete “grown-ups.” The trouble with mankind in general is that it has not yet grown up. Its faults, which we see on every hand, and the blunders that make so large a part of history are those of immaturity. Man has always felt the need of guardianship and because he lacked wisdom invented immortal omniscient gods—tribal, national, or cosmic—to guide him and as embodiments of what he felt lacking in himself. It is just this need of an all-wise providence that the old will come to supply if and as humanity slowly ripens.
If and so far as it is true that a woman is as old as she looks and a man as he feels, all this processional, especially its early stages, is, on the whole, probably much harder for her than for him. She feels not only that “the coming of the crow’s foot means the going of the beau’s foot,” but the first wrinkles about the mouth, eyes, or under the chin; the loss of fullness about the neck, to which folklore attributes such significance; the first sagging of the cheeks or the bust; the first signs of fading complexion; or the first gray hair, give her bitter food for thought. Her cult of the mirror, that man progressively eschews, increases. But woman commands far more resources against all such heralds of decay than man and gives vastly more time to compensating for them. Youth is her glory and she has more comeliness to lose than man, who can, however, never quite rival the hag in ugliness. She has also great powers of compensation by affecting girlish ways and has a stronger hold on her youth than man and old women do not feel as old as old men do. Throughout married life, if she is well, woman usually assumes the rôle of the younger mate, even though she be not so in years. Though sexual involution comes to her earlier she remains in far more sympathetic touch with the young than her husband, so that there is a half truth and not mere gallantry in the saying that a woman never grows old.
The woman just beginning to feel passé has a psychology all her own of which even the devotees of that science know little and she herself yet less, but of which Michäelis in “The Dangerous Age” has given us a few glimpses. Love, wifehood, and motherhood, as the world knows, constitute the very heart of woman’s life and as the chance of these supreme felicities begins to fade, something, which it is no extravagance to call desperation, begins to supervene. Its processes may and often do deploy so deep in the subconscious regions of the soul that even she is but little aware of the transformations that are taking place there. These she quite commonly ignores, camouflages, or honestly and resentfully denies. The psychopathologist sees most clearly the tragedies of aborted Eros as they are writ large in morbid symptoms. But with the same causes and conditions, the same processes are always more or less active, however repressed, and the unmated woman before the close of the third decennium has generally come to some terms with the death of the phyletic instinct within her, which is the core and mainspring of her life, and has dimly anticipated all the significance of old age.
Happily for her dawning senescence, it is one of the great achievements of our age that she has found a splendid vicarious function in culture and new social, vocational, professional, and political services, so that she can now give to mankind much that is best in her that was once confined to the narrower sphere of domestic life, and be little or none the worse but perhaps the better for it. This great emancipation is building a new and higher story to her life, so that as the amative, heyday charm of her youth begins to abate she need no longer despair. All her earlier occupational training that fits her for self-support, complete or even partial, is, thus, anticipatory of this third new stage of life that the senium now begins to reveal to her. This gives her now a certain advantage over man. Thus she has found a new call that means not only more safety but priceless service, to which all her superfluous energies can be devoted, and the world now waits with an eagerness that is almost suspense to see whether she will have the courage to grapple with the most vital problems that confront her sex and find the wisdom to solve them or, neglecting these, be content with the effort to do man’s work in man’s ways.
Thus, woman is older than man in the same sense that the child is older than the adult, because her qualities are more generic and she is nearer to and a better representative of the race than he and also in that she sublimates sex earlier and more completely, entering the outer shadows of senectitude in the thirties. But she is also, at the same time, younger than he in that she is less differentiated in tissues or traits, less specialized and in her early decades must learn better than he to conserve so much that is best in the physique and esprit of her youth. If her physiological change, when it comes, is more marked, abrupt, and datable, the psychic changes she undergoes are far more gradual and imperceptible, while her sympathy with youth and even childhood, and in general not only her moral but all her normal instincts, which are the best gift the adolescent stage of life has to offer, are keener and surer.
This critical age has its own peculiar temptations to which woman entering middle life sometimes succumbs. She, like man, is prone to ask of the future whether it is all to be like the present or past and, if so, what is to become of the unfulfilled dreams of youth. The Prince Charming never came; or perhaps her ideal has proven only a clay image; or her affection, or his, may have found another focus that seems worthier. Hence it is in no wise strange that some women, hitherto good by the old standards, now make a break with their past, impelled to do so by an augmented desire to taste all the joys of life before it is forever too late. Not only does it seem intolerable to go on to the end as they are but there is perhaps some tempter who detects and waters these seeds of discontent and helps the middle-aged woman on to feel that she has been a coward to life. Beaudelaire, who certainly thought he understood French women, said that for most of them at thirty-five who are married and perhaps for even more who are unwed, anything was possible. Even curiosity is a spur to adventure and fancy, if not conduct, may prompt to cast off all restraints. “Why not?” is a question that incessantly arises and every answer seems unsatisfactory. And how many of us can qualify, by being without sin, to cast the first stone at those who fall here. Such women are too old to enter upon a life of vice but often form secret and occasionally very happy alliances with, usually, older men, which may last for years without involving any abandonment of their stated occupation or leaving the ranks of respectability and with now, unquestionably, a growing disposition on the part of society to condone, even though it may suspect or even know.
Again, as we men grow old, we recognize that we have lost something of whatever attraction we have had for the other sex generally and often come to regard most of its members as somewhat trivial and to prefer the society of other men. Even the love of husbands and wives happily married takes on a different character; and they are fortunate, indeed, if the losses are balanced or compensated for by the gains, as they should ideally be, or if friendship waxes as erotism wanes. The old beau who devotes attention without intention to younger women can, at best, only amuse and rarely interest them, although they may feel subtly flattered. Sometimes they find delectation in cajoling him and playing upon his weaknesses and they may also come to indulge in a freedom of speech and manner with him that they would never permit themselves with men of their own age; while, conversely, friendships between older women and younger men are always more sincere. The case of the doddering dotard with the flapper is rare, save in the literature of senile psychopathology and medical jurisprudence, where it is by no means uncommon. But this we shall not here discuss.
Senescent men are also too prone to attribute the other manifestations of their own abatement of philoprogenitive energy to the lessened ardor of their wives and perhaps to invoke the abnormal stimulus of some wild love to sustain, or at least to test, their vigor, not realizing that such a course accelerates rather than retards the involution that comes with age. The jealousy felt towards young, ardent wives by their older husbands lest they be made cuckold constitutes probably a far less frequent triangle and involves, on the whole, less suffering than that experienced by wives who are growing frigid with years toward their still lusty spouses. The age disparity of the climacteric may open a door for suspicions, however groundless, which may secretly sap the foundations of conjugal harmony. In this connection one must always take account of the fact that there is not seldom in man an Indian summer, of months or occasionally years, of enhanced inclination toward sex before its final extinction, as returns elsewhere reported show. From personal confessions and medical literature, studies made in old men’s homes, and sporadic evidence from other sources, I am convinced that for a very large proportion of old men the progressive loss of potence, with all the complex phenomena attending it, is one of the chief, and in many cases the very most psychalgic, experience of all the changes involved in growing old. There is a very pregnant sense in which a man is as old as the glands that dominate this phase of life. Laymen, including most physicians, know very little of and find it hard to credit the devices that may be resorted to to retard this atrophy or often to conserve and even enhance the vestiges of this function, the excessive activity of which is the surest preventative of a happy old age. While there are those who late in life resort to vicious and even pathological modes of gratification, those who became debauchees in youth or middle life very rarely even attain old age and all should heed the motto to “beware the Indian summer of eroticism.” Who has not observed among his personal acquaintances, to say nothing of men conspicuous in public life, the tragic consequences to health, occupation, and even life, that follow when December weds May; and what shall we say, even from the eugenic standpoint, of women who prefer to be an old man’s darling to a young man’s slave. We know, too, that children born of postmature parents are liable, if they mature at all, to do so precociously and to show early signs of senility, just as children born of those of premature age often fail to reach full maturity. If contraceptive methods are ever justifiable, it is to prevent offspring of both but perhaps especially the former kind.
On the other hand, we have many clinical cases in which after years of impotence from psychic causes the removal of these latter not only restored the procreative function but relieved the patient of often grave symptoms and brought marked mental rejuvenation. This has been often recorded, especially for men. In some instances, apparently, children have been born after such a period of dormancy or latency that has lasted for years. Not only is the downward slope of this curve far more gradual than its pubertal rise and, as we have seen, attended by more oscillations but there is far more individual variation in the age at which decline begins and ends, so that one man’s norm would be another man’s disaster and perhaps doom.
The old should be able to think most dispassionately upon such themes and should feel it incumbent upon them to transmit the wisdom born of their own experience and observation to the younger generation. In certain primitive races and modern societies and communities the old, usually of the same but sometimes even of the opposite sex are expected to initiate the members of the rising generation in the mysteries of sex. We now know the dangers and sometimes even incestuous tendencies with which such a course is sure to be beset; and if parents attempt to discharge this function for their children, or wherever it is done personally, there are perils. Indeed, none of the methods of sex education, of which so many have lately been proposed, have been entirely satisfactory. Perhaps this kind of training really ought to be one of the special functions of grandparents and they should prepare themselves for it. At any rate, while we have learned much in recent years of sex psychology, pedagogy, and hygiene for the young, we have almost no literature, and indeed know almost nothing of it for the old; and this despite the fact that they are in the greatest need of it and have practically no help in the solution of the novel and intricate problems they must now face, as best they can, alone.
One reason why treatises on the climacteric are so few and so inadequate is that the importance of the subject has only lately been recognized even by psychiatrists, gynecologists, or gerontologists; while another and more important reason is found in the extreme reluctance of the old to tell. Psychoanalysis is impossible unless it can overcome resistance, which it is often put to its wit’s ends to do. Modesty and perhaps prudery have veiled the physiological and, far more, the psychological aspect of this function. This instinct of concealment is no less, and probably far greater, in the old. They balk, evade, and deceive the investigator at every step. Psychoanalysts have strangely neglected this theme and generally even refuse to take patients of over forty or fifty years of age. What can be learned in homes for old men is usually by observation, from attendants and from inmates’ talk of each other, and those who answer questionnaires almost always fail to note facts even remotely related to this theme. Still, in this terra incognita we occasionally come upon the naked truth, only to realize that the retreat of Amor is the counterpart of its advent, as autumn is of springtide. What nature gives so prodigally in pubescent and adolescent years she garners with no less circumstance and no less attention to details, so that we are left, in the end, with no less tendencies to “polymorphic perversity” than before these were constellated into the normal sex life of maturity. Even some of the proclivities to auto-erotism and homosexuality may arise. Amatory reveries may increase as dreams of this character decrease and there are often flashing recrudescences of desire.
Despite or after the long and sometimes acute perturbations of the vita sexualis as it draws to its close, there is very commonly a new and deep peace. We are glad that the storm and stress are passed and that we are henceforth immune to passion. This is doubtless the normal and, let us hope, increasingly common course. The sexes approximate each other in both traits and features as they grow old and thus if we can no longer love women sensually, we have a new appreciation of the eternally feminine, its intuitive qualities, and its more general and moral interests. Old women acquire a new power of sensing things from man’s point of view and hence companionship between old men and women may become a noble surrogate for carnal love. Happy the old who can enjoy comradeship on this plane with a congenial member of the other sex and thrice happy is the very rare case of well-mated couples who find, when the time comes, that they have qualified for this consummation of their union with each other!
Folklore, especially in its grosser forms, but also classical and medieval,198 and even modern literature—medical, psychiatric, and most of all the writings of psychoanalysis—abound in descriptions of the tragic results that ensue when husband and wife do not grow old together or when their age disparity is too great. Even in the purest, most loyal, and best mated pairs there is often a period of unspoken and perhaps half unconscious suspicion and jealousy, which each partner regrets and tries to banish from waking thoughts, outcrops of which often appear in dreams. Roués have always felt that the young wives of old men were their legitimate prey. The former seem more liable to fall before temptation than if they had remained single. Bitter, indeed, is often the lot of Senex who dotes on a young bride and seeks to atone by lavishing gifts and providing every kind of service and social enjoyment that infatuation can suggest for waning marital potency. While society austerely and even ostentatiously condemns such a wife who errs, it secretly judges her to be not without some excuse and has little pity, and often only covert derision, for such a husband.
Yet more pathetic is the converse case of the aging wife of a spouse yet young and lusty. The sense that she is losing her charm for the man she loves is gall and wormwood to her very soul. She, too, seeks to atone by making herself physically more attractive, not only to him but to others that he may see their admiration, by every kind of personal ministration and often by seeking literary, artistic, or other success outside the family circle. She becomes painfully conscious of the attractions of younger or otherwise more favored women whom her mate meets and easily grows suspicious, not only with but often without cause. She may feel the lure of incentives other women use to attract men which her pride will not permit her to cultivate, although she may make concessions to these more or less unconsciously. Tendencies thus repressed may find outcrops in other fields and may even take the form of symptoms, perhaps of fears for the well-being of her mate, even of physical harm, business failure, social disgrace, or perhaps religious heresy. In other cases she may be at last forced to admit infidelity on his part and then it is that she finds herself face to face with the dour problem of either trying to ignore or condone, and perhaps conceal or excuse, his fault to others and living a hollow life of sham and convention on the one hand; or of openly breaking and separating and living henceforth a more or less isolated life, on the other. She must thus very carefully weigh not only her own material interests but the future of her children and the chance of pitiless public scandal.
In the medical literature on the menopause (Kisch, who studied 96 cases; Laudet, 95; Tilt, Faye, and Mayer, 97 each; and especially the more philosophical Börner and Currier) we find very little save records of physiological and anatomical changes, so that it has remained for the Freudians to exploit the perhaps far more important psychic changes that characterize this stage of life. The love life in the new and larger sense in which this is now coming to be understood is the very heart and core of woman’s nature and it plays a vaster rôle in the life of man than had till lately been suspected. Whatever thwarts or diverts the vita sexualis from its normal course brings all kinds of disasters in its train. About all the transformations of senescence root in the fact that by this recession of the life tide we are gradually cut loose from the more vital currents of the life of the race and individuality now has its unique innings. The debauchee, who marries perhaps late and after long experience with women of easy virtue, often finds a modest wife disappointing and misses all the arts of allurement he had found in his orgies. So, too, when the happily married man finds the earlier ardors of his wife growing cool, he is only too liable to suspect waning affection, when in fact nature is only following her inexorable course. He may even wonder if, in the inscrutable ways Eros has, his wife’s fancy may have unconsciously strayed to some more engaging man or fallen a victim to some baseless suspicion of him, or at any rate grown weary of his advances and perhaps come to a new and deeper realization of some of his faults or limitations. Feeling that their present relations are not all they once were, he fails to recognize that it is the very nature of love to grow sublimated as years pass and to become more and more an affair of the soul, as it perhaps once was of the body; and that it is just at this critical point that it normally becomes richer, riper, and more truly devoted. The wife’s impulse to minister disinterestedly to her husband is never so strong or pure as at the moment when the power of giving complete physical satisfaction first begins to wane and it is at this epoch that it can so easily and naturally be transmuted into the impulse to serve, help, enter into closer and more sympathetic mental relations, to know more of his inner life, struggles, ideals, ambitions and even his business and in general to enlarge the surface of personal contact. This is thus the psychological moment for man to interest his mate in the affairs he has most at heart and to make her a partner, perhaps even of some of the details, of his own vocation. This golden opportunity, however, is brief, and if it passes unimproved it will soon be forever too late and each mate will, ere long, find him- or herself starting on devious ways that will lead them ever further apart.
Conversely, when a young wife first realizes that her husband is aging, she should understand that nature now impels him to compensate for physical by mental devotion and she may have even to face some form of the above choice whether it is better to be an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave. In him this is the nascent hour for becoming interested in her inmost wishes, aims, feelings, ideals, and to help her actualize them. In extreme cases he may come to devote himself to dancing attendance upon her wishes and even whims unless she herself has the good sense to restrain him from this fatuity, for by cleverly humoring and restraining him she can just now make him very plastic to her will. Thus her problem sometimes is to save him from an infatuation for her that might become ridiculous and that some wives are foolish enough to love to display. She must, however, learn to develop in and accept from him better succedanea for the more libidinous eros and to do this she must enter more sympathetically and intellectually into his life, as instinct now impels him to enter into hers. The impulse in the physiologically younger partner of every married pair to anticipate the age of the older one, if wisely met, may result in greater sanity and more true happiness for both. Who does not know fortunate cases where just this has occurred, rare though they may be and many as are the wreckages that have resulted from too great age disparity? If the wife tends to be in the mother image and the husband in the image of the father, a rich and rare blend of parent and mate love is sometimes seen. The feelings of the ideal bridegroom for the ideal bride are never without a strong ingredient of the affection he once cherished for his own mother, while one factor of her love for him was transferred from or first developed toward her father. At the same time each has a small ingredient of parental feeling toward the other, as if they were each child and each parent to the other. In all such unions the younger partner rejuvenates the older far more than the older ages the younger.
In all of us oldsters the problem of personal hygiene looms up with new dimensions. In our prime we gave little attention to health. The body responded to most of the demands we made upon it. If we were very tired, we slept the sounder. We paid no attention to minor ailments, which soon righted themselves. We ate or drank what, and as much as, appetite called for; exposed ourselves to wind and weather, heat and cold, wet and dry, with impunity. We could go without sleep a night or two if necessary and feel but little the worse for it; could abuse our eyes, nerves, heart, digestion, muscles, and more or less escape all evil consequences; could work at top speed and with an intensity that rung up all our reserve energies for days or weeks if need be, and could feel sure that our good constitutions would enable us to bear the strain and to more or less promptly recuperate. But now our credit at the bank of health begins to run low. We must husband our resources lest we overdraw them. Overdoing is a veritable bugaboo. There are certain symptoms we must never disregard on pain of days of lessened efficiency. We have had one or more signs of special weaknesses we must heed. There are some things that we must rigorously refrain from eating or doing. There is a weak organ, too, that must be humored. Appetite has perhaps been too keen and must be reined in. We must select the items of our dietary with discretion and self-restraint. A typical respondent says he can still indulge his love of hill-climbing, bicycling, swimming, and even skating, and exercises with diverse gymnastic apparatus that he has had set up in his garage, to say nothing of golf, which he holds to be best of all, and autoing, which has become with him a veritable craze. All these things at the age of seventy-five he still does occasionally but is becoming shy of doing so lest he be thought trying to seem young. He lately stole out alone at twilight to skate, when one urchin called to another, “Hey, Johnnie, doesn’t that old man skate bully?” He said he felt like cuffing him for calling him “old” and hugging him for praise of his performance.
One correspondent says in substance that he did his best mental work evenings, continuing usually until at least one o’clock in the morning and then tumbling into bed, perhaps after a half an hour spent on a novel as a nightcap or brain sponge, and falling at once into profound sleep undisturbed by dreams and with hardly a change of posture till nature’s demands were entirely satisfied. Now all his serious study can best be done by daylight and particularly in the early part of the day and he has a simple set of routine prescriptions for going to bed and to sleep. He occasionally awakes and even arises before morning, knows the sounds of all the night watches and is generally aware of the early dawn despite darkened windows, and is sometimes disturbed by troublesome dreams. He needs less sleep as measured by hours but is more dependent upon its soundness. Again, he sometimes feels moody, depressed, irritable, and wonders if anyone observes it. He has a new horror of nerves, of constipation, of age lapsing to dotage, anecdotage, and garrulity or taciturnity. If anything goes physically wrong, he recuperates more slowly and blesses his stars that his good heredity pulls him through, and nurses his weaknesses the more thereafter. He has a notion that by keeping at work all he is able to, he is conserving an energy that by letting up, if he is ill, will be drawn upon to restore him to condition; whereas if he were habitually idle this reserve would be thereby dissipated. With all the precautions and handicaps thus entailed he is still sometimes able to attain a high state of morale, to feel again the old youthful joy and exuberance of life, although it now has a new and unique quality. There are also certain new ambitions he dares not express. He even longs for new adventures before it is forever too late. He realizes that all his life he has been more or less repressed by “the fear of living” and would now entirely escape it. He is not content to grind over the old mental stores but would reach out into other fields and find new ones. He fears intellectual stagnation and routine as the senses begin to grow dull and that he is not well nourished mentally or suitably prepared for old age and the psychic marasmus to which it is so prone.
The old tend to grow stale and sterile of soul from two causes: lack of fresh mental pabulum and abatement of the power of creative ideation, and so their mentation lapses and they become fatuous about trifles and feel that just as they must live circumspectly lest their body suffer some sudden collapse so their psychic self may crumble into senility and the subtle processes of disintegration and dementia slowly supervene, a decline of which we are usually far less aware than of physical decay. All these considerations, however, may and together should constitute a splendid stimulus to activity. The very danger of decline or breakdown is a spur to develop the higher powers of man in this their time.
In such experiences we seem to have a condition of great interest and also of practical importance. Physical infirmity and accident which compel special attention to body-keeping often result in such added care to hygienic condition that we are actually better and more effective for the impairment. Just as an old man who takes special care not to fall or to take risks is often safer from injury than a stronger and less careful man, so in mental work consciousness of certain shortcomings may act as a spur to take more pains and so to do superior work. To this is added another stimulus. A senescent knows that his friends and enemies will be liable to ascribe any imperfections in his intellectual output to failing powers, and his horror of betraying this is an added incentive to do his very best. If his last product could be his best, he could die happier, and he cannot bear the thought of exhibiting signs or stages of senile debility. To be willing to accept the allowances that his hostile or even his amiable critics would be willing to make for his years is craven. His chief danger is lest the standards of self-censorship for his performances should unconsciously decline and that he should come to judge his own inferior work as superior. Of this the history of literature has countless examples, more perhaps than of the opposite tendency.
Unquestionably, too, there is a certain maturity of judgment about men, things, causes, and life generally that nothing in the world but years can bring, a real wisdom that only age can teach. But to observe and rely on this to compensate for thoroughgoing rigorism in demonstration or mastery of copious details is a fatality too often seen. Finally, we must realize that our own brain work must be done with less of the afflatus that often aided us in youth or in maturity. Once our best ideas came to us in heat after a warming up of our faculties, perhaps into an erethic or second-breath state. We found ourselves in the grip of a sort of inspiration that carried us on perhaps far into the night or impelled us to exceptional activities for days or even weeks and brought a reaction of lassitude in its train. But now, not only is this generally less or lacking but our mentation must be more stated, our hours of intense application must be kept within bounds, and there is the perennial danger of overdoing and its penalties are surer and more severe. Thus with age we must develop a new system or method that recognizes and comports with our true mental age. We must have safely passed the Scylla and Charybdis of affecting to be younger than we are and of aping or adhering too conservatively to the manners of thought and feeling characteristic of earlier youth, on the one hand; or, on the other, we must escape the opposite attitude that often supervenes later in the very old of vaunting their years and posing as prodigies of senescence. In a word, the call to us is to construct a new self just as we had to do at adolescence, a self that both adds to and subtracts much from the old personality of our prime. We must not only command a masterly retreat along the old front but a no less masterly advance to a new and stronger position and find compensation for what old age leaves behind in what it brings that is new. What, more precisely, is this latter?
Youth should anticipate the wisdom of age and age should conserve the spontaneity of youth, for this latter becomes not less but only more inward as we advance in years. As the eye dims and the dominance of optical impressions over attention declines, we see ideas clearer and follow the associations of thought rather than those of the external world with some of the same freedom as that which comes to dreams when we close the eyes in sleep. So, when audition becomes less sensitive, we turn to the voices of inner oracles. If current events impress and absorb us less, we can knit up the past, present, and future into a higher unity. As the muscles grow weak the will, of which they were the organ, grows strong to make the new adjustments necessary, while easy fatigue suggests renunciation and the acceptance of fate. Love that is less individualized may become not only broader but stronger. We worry because we feel we have not made the new adjustments necessary or unsealed all the new sources of wisdom and strength. Symptoms call upon us to develop hygienic sagacity and censoriousness may be only a negative expression of a higher idealism that longs for a better world. Schleiermacher199 developed this thought, insisting that age was not only conserved but renewed youth, that no one should feel old till he feels perfect, that age brings us into contact with new sources of life and gives a new sense of the independence of the soul from the body, not thus presaging a higher post-mortem existence but being itself an entirely new life.
If I were charged with the task of compiling a secular bible for the aged, I would include two great and historic sections from Aristotle.200 In the one he describes virtue as the golden mean between the extremes of excess and defect, as, for example, courage between timidity and foolhardiness; liberality between avarice and prodigality; modesty between bashfulness and impudence; courtesy between rudeness and flattery; vanity between solemnness and buffoonery, etc., in each of his twelve spheres of life. In the other passage he characterizes the magnanimous man as slow, dignified in speech and movement, forgetful of injuries, not seeking praise, open and not secretive because unafraid, attempting but few things but those things of gravity, neither shunning nor seeking danger, ready to die for a great cause, more disposed to bestow than to receive benefits or favors, inclined to be proud to the proud and kindly to the meek and humble, always animated by the effort to make his conduct in life as nearly ideal as possible—or, in a word, making honor his muse and striving always to be worthy of it. Now, most of these traits belong more to the ideal of old age than to that of any earlier period in life. The most advanced regimen and hygiene of to-day—personal, mental, moral, social, political, judicial, and even religious—have little better to suggest for old age, in which all the qualities here implied should culminate, bringing poise and philosophic calm.
This brings me to the main thesis of this book, which is that intelligent and well-conserved senectitude has very important social and anthropological functions in the modern world not hitherto utilized or even recognized. The chief of these is most comprehensively designated by the general term synthesis, something never so needed as in our very complex age of distracting specializations.
In the first place, it has been noted that withdrawal from biological phyletic functions is often marked by an Indian summer of increased clarity and efficiency in intellectual work. Not only does individuation now have its innings but the distractions from passion, the lust for wealth and power, and in general the struggle for place and fame, have abated and in their stead comes, normally, not only a philosophic calm but a desire to draw from accumulated experience and knowledge the ultimate, and especially the moral, lessons of life—in a word, to sum up in a broader view the net results of all we have learned of the comédie humaine. Taylor even considers the climacteric as not pathological but as “a conservation process of nature to provide for a higher and more stable phase of development, an economic lopping off of functions no longer needed, preparing the individual for a different form of activity.” Shaler, too, noted “an enlargement of intellectual interests;” and there is much in experience and literature to confirm this view. The dangers and excitements of life are passed. Normal men tend to become more judicial and benevolent and these traits suggest new possibilities for the race as vicariate for the loss of the power of physical procreation. Many think these phenomena are more marked in women but even men who seem to have crossed the deadline at fifty or even forty are sometimes later reanimated. Apperceptive data have increased facility for getting together, perhaps even into a new and larger view of the world and there may come a genuine psychic erethism or second-breath, half ecstatic, as the soul on the home stretch expatiates “o’er all the world of man a mighty maze, yet not without a plan.”
There is, thus, a kind of harvest-home effort to gather the fruitage of the past and to penetrate further into the future. It is especially interesting to note that this is a stage of life in which most of the Freudian mechanisms and impulsions fail to act or strike out in new ways and very different ones take their place, which as yet lack any adequate psychology, much as this is needed. This is the wisdom of Solomon and the Psalmists, the vision of the mystics, and it exists only in those senescents who have found the rare power of developing and conserving the morale of their stage of life, which, as always, consists in keeping themselves at the top of their condition. The Binet-Simon devotees have furnished us with no inkling of how physiological and mental age are related in the old. Only when we know this shall we be able to evaluate the mentality of real sages wise in the school of life. This kind of sapience has a value quite apart from and beyond the methods of our most advanced pedagogy. St. John thinks that there is a certain rejuvenation due to a change from a posteriori to a priori habits of mind and that subjectivity and perhaps introversion now have their innings. However this be, ripe old age has been a slow, late, precarious, but precious acquisition of the race, perhaps not only its latest but also its highest product. Its modern representatives are pioneers and perhaps its task will prove to be largely didactic. It certainly should go along with the corresponding prolongation of youth and increasing docility in the rising generation if we are right in charging ourselves with the duty of building a new story to the structure of human life. Thus, while old age is not at all venerable per se we have a mandate to make it ever more so by newer orientation, especially in a land and age that puts a premium upon its splendid youth, who are now often called to precocious activities that sometimes bring grief and disaster because we have been oblivious of the precept, “Old men for counsel.”
True old age is not, as we have seen, second childhood. It is no more retrospective than prospective. It looks out on the world anew and involves something like a rebirth of faculties, especially of curiosity and even of naïveté. Moreover, age is in quest of first principles just as, though far more earnestly and competently, ingenuous youth is. We have seen that Plato taught that the love and quest of general ideas was the true achievement of immortality because it brought participation in the deathlessness of these consummations of the noetic urge, for to him philosophy was anticipatory death because it involved a withdrawal from the specific and particular toward the vastness and generality of the absolute.
But to-day normal old age cannot be merely contemplative. True, our very neurons do seem to aggregate into new and more stable unities as if the elements of our personality were being bound more closely together, perhaps in order that we might survive some disruptive crisis or that our souls might not be torn apart by the wind if we chance to die when it blows. But now we must conceive the synthetic trend as chiefly in the pragmatic service of mankind. Our message must not be a mere morituri salutamus, however cheerful, but must have a positive and practical meaning and our outlook tower should have a really directive significance.
One outstanding and central trait of good old age is disillusionment. It sees through the shams and vanities of life. Many of the most brilliant intellectual achievements of youthful geniuses in thought construction are precocious achievements of the insights that more properly belong to this later stage of life. Even Carlyle’s Sartor, Hegel’s Phänomenologie, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, and many more, to say nothing of Jesus and Buddha, show premature age. Young men who occupy themselves with the highest and most abstract philosophical problems are unconsciously affecting or striving to anticipate the most advanced mental age and many of them who discourse so sapiently on “experience” are really those who have had very little of it. The ancient Hindus knew this for, as Max Müller tells us, the wise grandfather rises above all the superstitions of his progeny, who still worship the old gods while he has come to revere only the great One and All and to see all faiths and rites as but painted shadows that fancy casts upon the unknown, while he awaits the blessed absorption into Nirvana.
Fewest of all are those who ripen to senescence in religion and realize that there is no external god but only physical and human nature and no immortality save that of our offspring, our work, or our influence. All who fall short of this are arrested in juvenile if not infantile stages of their development. So, in all matters pertaining to sex, marriage, and the family, most remain slaves of the mores of their age and do not recognize the pregnant sense in which love and freedom, the greatest words in all languages, should somehow be wedded, even though we do not yet know how. Only when the age of sex passes can we look dispassionately upon all these problems and glimpse the ways that easier divorce, backfires to lust and prostitution, some of which current hypocrisy still taboos the very mention of, can bring. So, too, in other social and in our economic conditions we are drifting perilously near to wrecking reefs. The very basis of our civilization is in the greatest danger for want of the very aloofness, impartiality and power of generalization that age can best supply. We oldsters do see these things in a truer perspective and the time has now come to set them forth, despite the penalty of being voted pessimistic and querulent.
With all these problems so wide open by and since the war crying out for solution, surely senescents who have retired and enjoy a superacademic freedom, with no responsibilities to Boards, institutions, or corporate interests; with no personal ambitions, no temptations of the flesh, and leisure for the highest things, have here an inspiring function which they must rise to. Age, with a competence sufficient for its needs, freed from anxieties about a future state, with none of the dangers young men feel lest they impair their future careers, should not devote itself to rest and rust (Rast Ich, so rost Ich) or to amusements, travel, or self-indulgence of personal taste, much as the old may feel they have deserved any and all of these, but should address itself to these new tasks, realizing that it owes a debt to the world which it now vitally wants it to pay. Great founders of great institutions have acknowledged this debt and striven to pay it in the service the rich can render. We intellectuals cannot pay it in their coin, but we owe it no less and must pay in the currency we can command.
Thus, old age is not passive and peace-loving but brings a new belligerency. Many of us longed for the physical ability to enter the war as soldiers and we did our “bit” in ways open to us with as much zest as our juniors. We not only want but need spiritual conflicts and feel reinforced aggressiveness against ignorance, superstition, errors, the sins of cupidity, and lust. What a list of evils we could make which we wanted to attack in our prime but lacked courage to grapple with! One of these is the current idea of old age itself. We have too commonly accepted the conventional allotment of three-score-and-ten as applicable now, but the man of the future will be ashamed and feel guilty if he cannot plan a decade or two more of activity and he will not permit himself to fall into a thanatopsis mood of mind or retire to his memories or to the chimney corner because an allotted hour has struck.
If we have lived aright, nature does give us a new lease of life when passion and the bodily powers begin to abate and the very danger of collapse, as we have seen, is in itself a spur. The human race is young but most are cut off prematurely. It is ours to complete the drama, to finish the window of Aladdin’s tower, to add a new story to the life of man, for as yet we do not know what full maturity really is and the last culminating chapter of humanity’s history is yet to be written.
Never, then, was the world in such crying need of Nestors and Merlins. What a priceless crop of experience in these postbellum days remains unharvested for want of precisely the objectivity, impartiality, breadth, and perspective that age alone can supply! These were the qualities that enabled the venerable Joffre to make his masterly two-weeks’ retreat at the Marne. It was done against the will and wish of every one of his younger generals, who now admit that he saved Paris and the war and that he was, in a sense, a true superman. The world never so needed the wisdom, which learning cannot give, that sees the vanity and shallowness of narrow partisanship and jingoism, of creeds that conceal more than they reveal, of social shams that often veil corruption, the insanity of the money hunt that monopolizes most of the energy of our entire civilization, and realizes that with all our vaunted progress man still remains essentially juvenile—much as he was before history began.
What the world needs is a kind of higher criticism of life and all its institutions to show their latent beneath their patent value by true supermen who, like Zarathustra, are old, very old, with the sapience that long life alone can give. We need prophets with vision who can inspire and also castigate, to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Thus, there is a new dispensation at the door which graybeards alone can usher in. Otherwise humanity will remain splendid but incomplete. Heir of all the ages, man has not yet come into his full heritage. A traveler, he sets out for a far and supreme goal but is cut off before he attains or even discerns it. The best part of his history is yet unwritten because it is unmade.201
Now that the pressure of outer reality and its duties remit, attention tends more to focus on self and introspontaneity and mentation may take on a slightly dreamy character in that it is less under the dominion of the objective environment, from which there is a new sense of freedom. The demand for rigorous proof of one’s theorizations is somewhat less insistent and critics of them are felt to be lacking in insight. There is a slight shift from inductive to deductive thinking and as the senses begin to grow dim their verification of our speculations seems a trifle less imperative. Experience has furnished masses of data that yet remain uncoordinated and as we feel the need of a deeper synthesis we grope our way to a bed-rock of first principles that will explain the riddle of life better and give it more unity and give us new personal satisfaction. Tendencies that have been repressed during our active life revive.
Perhaps we take up fads or occupations that have hitherto had only a secondary place in our lives or indulge ourselves by giving them now the first place as centers of interest. Now at last we can do things we have long wanted to do but for which we have had no time or strength. We can also now indulge our taste in reading in fields we have long desired to know better, can abandon ourselves to the enjoyment of music or the fine arts; or we travel, collect, or occupy ourselves with horticulture, agriculture or farm life. Again, there are more reveries and these most commonly gravitate to things about us or especially to the remote past. Thus we often revive and idealize old situations and incidents. We think of things we said and did and supplement them by imagining what we could, would, or should have said and done and fill lost opportunities fuller of “might-have-beens.” Yet many as are the lost chances such retrospect brings to view, and imperfect as we realize our responses to circumstances and the environment have been, we are rarely oppressed by regret and still less often by remorse, so that the wish to relive our lives is never very strong. The flaws in our surroundings or our errors in judgment, even in moral conduct, are usually regarded with leniency and viewed with a certain detachment, however clearly they are seen and however impersonally they are judged. This is in part because we have to accept them as inevitable and are trying to make a virtue of so doing, but yet more perhaps because we are consoled by the fact that had our mistakes been very grave we should not have attained our advanced age in such good condition of body and mind. Thus we make our very age a kind of vindication of our course of life. We find yet more comfort in the fact that we discover so many points in which things might have been worse. We have escaped so many perils and survived so many trials that have overwhelmed many others that, on the whole, we deem ourselves among the fortunate of the earth.
I am inclined to think that the above, instead of being an optimistic should rather be regarded on the whole as a pessimistic view of old age. Fielding Hall tells us that in Burma, where it is purest, Buddhism teaches men to “die thinking on their good deeds.” I cannot believe this is final but opine rather that old age has its positive duties to the present and to the future as well as its privileges and immunities. To be sure, if sex love is the mainspring of the most and best in the human psyche, it follows that when this goes there is little worth while left in us. Hence, the implications of the new analytic psychology are most tragic for senescence and man is doomed to spend the shriveled remnants of life in the contemplation of its only real stage, which is now gone or fast vanishing. I urge, on the contrary, that the facts of the soul-life of the aged teach us very clearly that if the vita sexualis has been anything like normal, we graduate from it into a larger love of man, nature, and being itself which can never be complete till the urge of sex has waned.
What are these facts? First, the very incident that the old tend to develop more sharply their own individuality as the powers of genesis decline points in this direction. Senescents in the post-climacteric acuminate their personality, sometimes to the point of idiosyncrasy and eccentricity. The Ich-trieb now has its innings. This selfishness of the old, repulsive and unsocial as are now its commonest manifestations, expresses a deep instinct that is really groping toward a new and higher type of personality, evolving a new synthesis of the factors of life when the chord of sex shall have passed in music out of sight. It means man’s reaffirmation of the self and of the will-to-live, although this points not, as the immortalists would argue, to a post-mortem rehabilitation of the ego but only expresses again the fact that man is as yet incomplete here and that even the old now die prematurely because they have not yet learned how to build the last story of the house of many mansions.
Again, as sex love declines friendship takes its place. Old lovers, and husbands and wives if happily mated, become friends and find new joys in these new relations. How we prize old friends and feel closer even to those of our contemporaries we have known but slightly! A fine old man of my acquaintance made a systematic effort by many letters to get into touch with all his old schoolmates who were living and to learn all he could of those who were dead. Another felt wronged whenever a friend of earlier days died and he had no word of it. Yet another wrote to a venerable colleague whom he knew but slightly, but whose career he had followed, exhorting him “not to die yet a while” because he would feel more lonely in the world with him out of it. There is a unique loyalty of veterans of war toward each other, although they are little together and do not always get on well with each other if they attempt intimacy. Moreover, there is a new type of interest in young people and in children, whom even grandmothers do not so much fondle and pet as indulge and serve in ways mothers do not always sympathize with. The “Borrowed Time” clubs of old men and young people’s associations are both based chiefly upon the gregarious instinct which is strongest among adolescents, before woman has taken her place beside man, and among senescents when the charm of sex as such abates. Most of the scores of associations and fraternities of men of mature years are for material advantage and the typical clubman has failed to find, or else has lost, the normal anchorage of the true home. The homosexual friendships of the old are not chummy and do not demand close contact. These have been far too much neglected and their cultivation, which is greatly needed, is possible under modern conditions as never before. It is interesting to know that an old people’s journal is projected.
Love in the aged also tends to broaden into the higher and more sublimated form of interest in the subhuman world, in animals, plants, trees, gardening, and country life generally. The charm of a rural contrasted with an urban environment increases. How often the old take pleasure in planting or setting out trees they will never see mature or bear fruit and in building homes they know they can at best live in but for a short time. Burbank knew and Burroughs felt this and Cato said that all the aged should dwell in the country, as so many of the old Romans did. The aged rarely have animal pets but they do feel a new dread of destroying life. They love scenery and commune with forests and mountains; revisit their rural boyhood homes and find deep satisfaction in reënvisaging old landmarks.
They are, as we have seen, very susceptible to climate and to weather changes, which they often become sagacious in predicting, and sometimes keep note of rain, snowfall, temperature, wind, the phases of the moon, etc., and are not only accredited oracles in weather wisdom but are appealed to as local weather bureaus with amazing memory for exceptional climatic phenomena for years back. Thus it is that their sympathies often widen until they become almost animistic for things without life and may come almost to personify ships, vehicles, and machines. What takes place within the soul of an old man alone with nature our imperfect psychology cannot tell; nor does he yet know. It is something resumptive, preparatory for mingling with the elements, as he will ere long do. His consciousness is a poor witness of what transpires in the depths of his soul, for he only knows that the experience of such influences gives him a new poise and calm that is sweet if it is also sad. It is in such experiences that our nature points the way to the chief palliative of the ghastly death thought. In this direction lies the true way back to the all-mother of life, to the great womb of existence whence we come and to which we must all return.
By various devices nature tends to keep the number of males and females nearly equal. But when long periods of hardship, especially wars, reduce the relative number of males, this inequality is rectified by an increase in the number of males born; while in long periods of tranquillity females tend to outnumber males. This is well established by the statistics of natality. Whether nature would thus make good any such sharp reduction in the relative number of females is less demonstrable, because there is no such cause of sudden decimation of this sex. Women do not go to war with each other. This suggests the question whether nature also tends to regulate the proportion between the old and the young where this has been abnormally disturbed. We have already seen that in new communities opened up and settled by vigorous younger men the relative number of old men, though not of old women, soon increases because it is the most viable who respond to the call of adventure and pioneering and who thus, barring the effects of hardship, tend to live longer than the less enterprising who remain behind. Selection was less operative for women who went because their men did. So far as we may identify youth with progressiveness and age with conservatism, we may safely conclude that nature does exercise the same regulative function here as in making good sex disparity. At any rate, radical new departures always bring reactions. Now, young communities and countries have short, old ones long, memories. In the former, experience counts too little; in the latter, too much. The one tends to act perhaps too precipitately, the other to deliberate too long. In one, precedent and tradition have but little, in the other excessive, weight. The one tends to make the most and best of their present opportunity, while the other is chiefly concerned that no good thing of the past be jeopardized. Thus, the tide of progress, which is always marked by alternating waves of reform and stabilization, is regulated and the most fundamental moral basis of all party distinctions is age. In this sense there are always two, and only two, sides to every question; two, and only two, parties in every state, town, and family: the old and the young. Their harmonious action and reaction constitutes the most favorable condition for real progress. Age is far-sighted and synthetic, youth myopic and analytic; but public and private welfare need both, just as science needs both the microscope and the telescope.
All sciences, most of all those that deal with man, are liable to lack the perspective that only age can give to orient them to direct their researches toward problems of most value and hold them steadily to their true course. Even the ablest and most ingenuous of our young sociologists are most prone to lose sight of wider relations and come to focus in partial and extreme views, for extreme opinions are always easiest and in trying to cope with theories too vast for our powers even sane and vigorous minds show the same traits as feeble, neurotic, and infantile ones, which find even the problems of their limited personal lives too hard for them to solve.
In the field of psychology we have now perfected a methodology of introspection that seeks to be as exact as physics or chemistry in going back to elemental sensations as if they were elements from which all higher forms of mental activity were to be evolved by logic as rigorous as mathematics itself and that ignores evolution. We also have a behaviorism that focuses upon activities and physiological processes and would evict the term consciousness, which is the muse of introspection. The psychoanalysts, again, are most genetic and would evolve nearly all psychic phenomena from sex by mechanisms that are as sacred to them as were innate ideas to scholastics and philosophers before Locke, and their work is still taboo to most orthodox psychologists. Fourth, we have the testers who are intent upon applying psychology to the grading of intelligence and the standardization and calibration of abilities. All this work is valuable but how grievously we just now need the broader synthetic view that only age and experience can fully realize and really ought to supply. Age sees more clearly than youth that studies of the brain, of children, of instincts, animals, prehistoric man, the insane, defectives, the sexes, intellect, will, feelings, and even of the history of philosophy and religion are essential for a sound knowledge of man. For to the real anthropologist nothing human is alien. He alone sees that the real value of all such special work is what it contributes to enable us to make our lives fuller, better, and more worth living.
In religion, most of even our authorized leaders show symptoms of dementia præcox in clinging to juvenile attitudes that should have long since been sloughed off. They still antagonize Darwinism, the higher criticism, and the great philosophies of pantheism, which, rightly interpreted, constitute the religion of mature and normal senescent souls. In this oldest of all culture fields the world has suffered most grievous arrest. The fact that in this direction the old have generally so often been most reactionary, if not infantile, is one of the most grievous of all their shortcomings. Here they should lead, as in more primitive times they often did. The church has too little use for its aging teachers but prefers young clergymen. Happily, however, a few of them are now helping to build this higher story of the culture temple of the race and have bid adieu to the mad immortality quest born of the age of sexual potency and which should decline and die with it. In this, as in perhaps no other field, old age should thus be constructive and build mansions for itself and it will never attain the dignity nature suggests for it until it does so. This does not mean that its verdicts should be authoritative for other periods of life since, as with each of these, its findings are not absolute but true only for its own stage. But when senescence has found and accepted the faith that fits its nature and needs, this will at least serve to mitigate the fanaticism of young converts, rebuke ratiocination, which has so long impelled immature minds to make dogma out of religious literature, and check the intolerance of intellectual orthodoxy.
So in all departments of life the function of competent old age is to sum up, keep perspective, draw lessons, particularly moral lessons. Homer, tradition tells us, was an old man who synthesized many legends before unorganized, somewhat as Moses was said to have done in composing the Pentateuch. The dialogues of Plato that deal with the deepest problems are, by general consent, ascribed to his old age. Most of the prophets were old and even the Gospel, which represented the terminal phase of apostolic inspiration, is ascribed to the very aged John. The Confucian system is preëminently a product of the senium that had seen the vanities of the world; and especially of all cults of the transcendental. Herodotus, Thucydides, and Strabo were said to have been old. Wells’ synoptical history not only meets the needs of the old but is something a wise old man might well have undertaken. The popular lectures of not a few leaders of science—DuBois-Reymond, Helmholtz, Huxley, Haeckel, and many others—are products of fertile minds unifying their life work, as befits scientists, before their powers fail, subjecting it to the supreme test by acceptance of the consensus of competent contemporaries and thus affirming the influential immortality of the authors.
The late James Bryce, at the age of 84, said words of supreme wisdom on national and international affairs at the Williamstown conference. Who is not heartened to know that Ranke wrote his famous Weltgeschichte—I think in five volumes—beginning at the age of 85; that Michelangelo was drawing the plans of St. Peters at 90; that Cornaro wrote his last version of The Temperate Life at 95; that W. S. Smith made his memorable trip around the world alone at the age of 80; that Durand edited a volume of his at 110. And it is satisfying to find not only scores but hundreds of such records, ancient and modern.
Again, if youth creates, age not only conserves but organizes. Both these functions are essential in human society and are related somewhat as are reproductive and connective tissue, as we saw in Chapter VI. Both youth and age seek truth and thrill when they feel a deep sentiment of inner conviction. But age lays more stress upon the pragmatic sanction of working well and can better understand even Loyola and Machiavelli. Thus it came that while men in their prime conceived the great religions, the old made them prevail. Thus, too, instituted and dogmatic religion owes its existence chiefly to men past the meridian of life. The old did not invent belief in supernatural powers or persons but needed and used it to sustain their position when physical inferiority would have otherwise compelled them to step aside and so they made themselves mediators between gods and men. They directed and presided over rites and ceremonies and took possession of the keys of the next world, enforced orthodoxies for the sake of order, and established and equipped the young to aid them in this work. They were behind the scenes and held the secrets, realizing the utility to society and also to themselves of much for which they had lost the primitive ardor of belief. Thus the revivalist and the reformer have always found the old arraigned against them. Perhaps they resent “new bottles” even more then they do new wine.
In the domain of sex, so vitally bound up with religion, the Hebrew race first taught the world and most of this wisdom came from the old, against whom the rise of romantic love was one of the greatest revolts in the history of culture. In many primitive societies the old, as we have seen, initiate the young of the same and even of the opposite sex into its mysteries, and in modern mores, as for example, in France, the counsels of the old are still of influence in the matings of the young. It is they who insist on prudential considerations and warn against venery and the follies into which blind Eros may lead. They have seen and know each scene in the stormy drama to the fall of the curtain. Thus to-day, though less only in degree, the sharpest phase of the eternal warfare between the old and young is just where it was in the ancient tribes in which the old barred the young from the females. Youth seeks indulgence and resents the restraint and control for which the old stand.
This eternal war between the young and the old begins at birth and increases with every restraint and prohibition imposed on the former by the latter. The infant would subject its mother’s life to its service and the psychoanalysts who urge that we begin life with a sense of omnipotence are quite as near right as those who, like Schleiermacher, found this stage of life characterized by a feeling of absolute dependence, of which he thought all religions are formulations. Both are always present and in incessant conflict, now one and now the other predominating. The child revolts, yet must submit and obey its elders. It asserts its freedom by defiance, evasion, running away, by deceits, by fancies of escaping all control and doing all it wishes. It seeks to lead its own life and to live out completely its present state regardless of all the claims of the future and of all domination by adults, whose very existence much of his play ignores. The father especially is a tyrant and is often hated as well as loved. Younger children are always bullied by older. Every school grade seeks to dominate that below. The teacher is always imposing a wisdom that is not yet demanded by the child and that is accepted by it unwillingly, cramming the memory pouches with things that can be only imperfectly appreciated, picking open buds of interest and knowledge before their time, imposing standards that are too grown up, checking natural expressions of instinct and insisting on discipline, training, the often painful acquisition of skills and conformity to manifold conventions. There is always a sense in which the school is an offense to the nature of the child. Older minds prescribe what must be learned, and how, and when, and the scholiocentric still predominates over the paidocentric method of education.
The state also subjects youth and enforces rights of property and person to which the young have to be broken in. All kinds and degrees of apprenticeship and the age and meaning of attaining majority are prescribed. In many lands the parents control the marriage of their offspring as they do property and the older make and administer laws for the younger. After all these forms and degrees of servitude of the younger to the older it is no wonder that the former not only very often show symptoms of revolt all the way from the cradle to complete maturity but, along with gratitude and respect, also cherish, if more unconsciously, an enmity that they can neither entirely express nor control against all kinds of masters, perhaps especially when their power and authority begin to wane with age. The push of the advancing upon the retiring generation is not consciously to feed fat such ancient grudges by subjecting elders in their turn as they were once subjected and yet there is a deep and persistent sense, which even psychology has but little realized, in which every advance in history, every insurrection or rebellion, every protestant movement against the established order or custom, and every reform in religion, politics, or life generally is only an expression of the eternal revolt of youth against age, of which the extreme reaction of parricide is the symbol but which is the deep psychogenetic root of every degree of failure in care and respect. LeBon202 sees and well presents the insurrectionary tendencies rife in the world to-day but does not realize the extent, nor does he find or seek the ultimate cause, of the present universal “revolt.” Thus the aged everywhere still suffer from the imperfections with which they and even their remote forbears exercised the parental function.
On the other hand, it should not, of course, be forgotten that there is always the more obvious and countervailing tendency to respect parents as age brings the insight that in what they compelled and forbade they were wiser than we, and to feel grateful that they did not leave us to follow our own sweet wills. Just so far as we come to realize not only how they lived for their children and did so wisely and well we both love them more for all they did for us, and, if we are wise, we realize that their counsels may still be helpful and we draw the moral that there is always somewhere a wisdom superior to our own, an experience from which we may profit, and an authority somewhere to which we must always remain docile and toward which our proper attitude is that of a loyalty that is essentially filial. It is of this impulse that all kinds of ancestor worship are belated expressions, while at the same time it is compensatory for all ill wishes and treatment directed toward them while they lived. In a finished civilization the old will enjoy their full meed of reverence while they are yet alive and every sort of post-mortem canonization will be seen to be only the symbol of a devoir present.
Perhaps in the large Aristotelian sense of the word politics is, par excellence, the work of and for old age. Statecraft must look not at the transient fluctuations of current and popular opinion but must look beyond the present or the next election, must rise above the selfishness of party interest and look to the far future. It must think not in terms of the exigencies of the hour but of decades and generations and not of local or partisan but of national and humanistic interests. From the patriarchs down the old have been the wisest shepherds of the people and if young men have succeeded in diplomacy it is because they have been prodigies of precocity who have also devoted themselves to the intensive study of history, which is at best only a proxy for experience. To have read ever so exhaustively of a war of a century before, for example, can give the young student no such sense of its horrors, nor of the urgency of using every honorable means of averting it, as to have actually lived through it with a vivid personal memory of its incidents. Veterans of old wars would be cautious about entering new ones.
Thus it is well that the old are with us “lest we forget” and in exigencies we often turn to them if living and read and quote them with respect long after they are dead. Great statesmen are those who have not only identified themselves with the past, present, and future of the nations they serve but beyond this have felt themselves charged with the interests of mankind as a whole. We surely need all possible ripeness of knowledge and maturity of judgment in this field and if the span of experience personally demanded by leaders could have been a full century, many of the great disasters that have befallen the race might have been avoided.
The fact is that, as the Athenians seemed to the old Egyptian priest who had known of Atlantis, we are all children who have to play the rôle of real adults because the latter have not yet arrived, so they we have come to think ourselves really mature.
Again, if the young are the best advocates, the old are by nature the best judges. They can best weigh facts and ideas in the scale of justice. The moral faculties ripen more slowly. Thus the old can best supplement the technicalities of law by equity and give ethics its rights in their verdicts. They should be the keepers of the standards of right and wrong and mete out justice with the impartiality and aloofness that befit it. Even in private life we have a judicial function, which, though often ignored and even resented, is also often sought and respected if we have the tact to praise and do not become censorious. Our approval or disapproval, even if mild and unspoken, may count for more than is admitted or even realized by our family and friends.
Such philosophy as my life and studies have taught me begins and ends in the thesis that the supreme criterion of everything, including religion, science, art, property, business, education, hygiene, and every human institution and everything in our environment, is what it contributes to make life longer, fuller, and saner, so that each individual shall live out more completely all the essentials in the life of the race. If the best survive, it is not the good but the bad and unfit who die young. To have lived long but narrowly is just as bad. Both have really only half lived and it is just those who have failed of realizing their full humanity in this life that most feel the need of another and imprecate the cosmos as having cheated them if it has not provided one. A rich old age is thus the supreme reward of virtue. Thus what is education but fitting us for a more advanced stage of life. It consists largely in giving to the young the products of older minds and thus advancing our mental age beyond our years. Childhood longs to die into youth and youth into maturity and so the latter in its turn should long to pass away into age. And how childish much in the adult world seems to those who have achieved the true sagehood of age; and how unripe, full of folly, vanity, error, and passion! How little the world has realized its debt in the past to aging men and women in whom knowledge has ripened into wisdom and how much more age owes and will yet give to the world when human life becomes complete and realizes its higher possibilities!
Now, too, many of those who attain advanced years are battered, water-logged, leaky derelicts without cargo or crew, chart, rudder, sail, or engine, remaining afloat only because they have struck no fatal rocks or because the storms have not quite yet swamped them; or, to change the figure, because they have withered, not ripened, on the tree. How many of us really ought to be dead because we are useless to ourselves and to others. It is because there are so many such that the rôle assigned to the best of us is often so hard and so repugnant to our nature and to our needs. Hence it comes that we are not only handicapped but are sorely tempted to accept a sham old age that is false to all the best that is in us, instead of justifying and illustrating a better one.
Thus, in fine, all not later than the fourth decade or whenever they note that their youth has fled or that any of their powers have begun to abate, should not only boldly face the fact that they are aging but begin serious preparations for old age, so that this stage of life be not only happier but more efficient than it is and that it render to the world a service never so needed and never so possible to render as now. Men and women in all the earlier and often in the later postmeridional phases of life are cowards in facing for themselves and arrant tricksters in deceiving others about their physiological and psychological age. If all the psychic energy now directed to concealment, pretense, and the maintenance of illusions here were put to better uses, then health, prolongation of life, and efficiency in later decades, to say nothing of happiness, would be greatly increased. The dawn of adolescence, like that of senescence, has its peculiar possibilities and its very trying probationary years before the age of nubility; but youth always has the advantage, if it will only utilize it, of the counsels of those who have weathered its storm and stress. There is a vast amount of wreckage from which puberty often suffers. The old, however, have no older initiators into the last stage of life and must find or make their own way as best they can. But they should realize that all the fluctuations and circumnutation phenomena they experience in the middle decades of life are gropings toward new adjustments in the domain of hygiene and morale that are necessary when their income of vital energy does not quite balance its expenditure. All these phenomena are really only labor pains by which nature is trying to bring into the world a new and higher and more complete humanity. To repeat, our function is to finish a structure that still lacks an upper story and give it an outlook or conning tower from which man can see more clearly the far horizon and take his bearings now and then by the eternal stars.
The old who are really so, who are not merely spent projectiles, relics, vestiges, or ruins that time has chanced to spare, do sometimes attain vision and even prophetic power, and their last real words to the world they are leaving are not like the inane babblings of the dying, which friends so often cherish, but are often the best and most worth heeding by their juniors of all their counsels. Some have told us that if the long-awaited superman ever arrives, he will come by way of the prolongation of adolescence and others have said it would be by the fuller maturity of man in his prime. No doubt both these stages of life would be enriched and potentialized, but his first advent and his greatest improvement over man of to-day will be in the form of glorified old age. Nietzsche was right in making Zarathustra old and he himself was the overman whose message he brought to the world. He was intent on the future of man and not on his present, still less on his past. Thus the ideal old man will be chiefly concerned for what is yet to be. Whatever he knows of history, he is more concerned with the better history not yet written because it has not yet happened. If he thinks of his childhood and his forbears, he thinks still more of posterity. His chief desire is to see the young better born and better provided for so as to come to a fuller maturity.
In fine, it cannot be too strongly urged or too often repeated that at present we know little of old age and that little is so predominantly of its inferior specimens, its unfavorable traits and defects and limitations, that the old have been prone to repudiate their years. Some even in the seventies and eighties to whom I ventured to send my questionnaire resented it as imputing to them an age they denied all knowledge of, while others had come precociously to not only accept a padded life but to even crave services and sympathy and demand privileges and immunities to which they were not entitled, thus growing querulous because of a helplessness more affected than real. The fundamental passion of the normal old is to serve, to subordinate self, and, if in some ways they must be served, to help others in turn in such ways as they can. This instinct of expropriation of self is the voice of nature pointing to the effacement that awaits them. The fact that age is so often selfish should not blind us to the fact that in its true nature it is altruistic and thus in its later stages often finds its greatest trial in the progressive abatement of its power of actually benefiting others. Its greatest bitterness is that it must be so much ministered to, and one of my correspondents regretted that he could not die at sea or his corpse, when he was done with it, be left to nature so that his relatives might not have the fuss of a funeral and burial. Indeed, he seemed to have grown morbid about the trouble he was thus to make them. Even the new love of the country and of inanimate as well as animate nature into which they are soon to be resolved may be another outcrop of the deep but blind and groping immolation motive. It is love disengaging itself from persons and special objects and perfecting itself by attaining its goal, which is nothing less than the love of, and the resolution of self into, the cosmos from which we sprang. Hence there is a sense in which chemistry and physics, and even the Einstein doctrine of relativity, are studies of man’s immortality.
Old age and death are eloquent of voices that call us to come home or back to nature, the all-mother, and to the earth from which we sprang and which is the terminal resting place of all who have gone before, with whose remains our dust will mingle. The more we know of the chemistry and physics of matter and energy, and even of the history, constitution, and contents of the earth’s crust, the less dreadful do the grave and the processes that take place in it seem, and the less prone are we to become cowards, slackers, or malingerers in facing the Great Enemy. What we know of what is still often called brute matter shows it to be so much more dynamic and lawful than life and life is so much more fecund and complex than mind that there is now a new and most pregnant sense in which the way of even physical death is upward, not downward. Who, too, yet knows just how much of the charm of æsthetic contemplation of inanimate nature or even the urge that impels science to know ever more of it is due to what it does and will entomb. At any rate, as we realize far more clearly that none of the sons of men ever did or ever can come back, we can now find some compensation in the ever clearer understanding of the immortality of our somatic elements and see the meaning of the deep instinct that inclines the old to the country and to closer communion with nature as they withdraw from life.
The greatest influence of the old upon the young has, from time immemorial, been near the dawn of puberty, when almost every race initiates youth into manhood. This, too, is still the age of most conversions and church confirmations. Here education culminates and here, too, in a sense, it began and extended slowly upward toward the university and downward toward the kindergarten as civilization advanced. The age of nubility, which follows, is the period of the greatest break with the preceding generation for young couples generally set up for themselves and the increase of the interval between generations generally means a prolonged period of subjection and docility. When a third generation was added and grandparents became common in the families, conservative influences were increased, and if four living generations ever become common in the same family progress would probably be retarded and great-grandparents would think grandparents more or less radical or innovative, so that it is well that the former do not linger superfluous on the stage for this would make the tension between the past and the future too great. Thus the Great Silencer’s work of oblivion is benign for the race.
Such excessive contemporaneity of generations is not the goal of eugenics, for while it tends to prolong life it also increases the average span of years between generations and the longer-lived are also more fecund. Should it ever come that ancestors of half a dozen or a dozen generations live together, the advance of the world would probably be greatly retarded, perhaps to the point of stagnation. Therefore, for both their influence and for our love of them it is fortunate that they are well dead and live only in our memory, in the vitality they have bequeathed to us, and in the works that follow them. As it is, it is old minds and those that they have mainly influenced that have kept evolution, which is more charged with culture stimulus than any influence in the modern intellectual world, so largely out of our educational system. It is due to them that so large a part of Christendom has repudiated the higher criticism, another great achievement that has reanimated all scriptures and made them glow with a new light and has given insight and zest where before there was a confusion and indifference that kept religious consciousness so medieval and ultra-conservative. It is psychological age that makes statesmen suddenly confronted with new and vast world problems too large for them take refuge in the counsels of Washington, which were wise in their day but utterly inadequate for meeting the issues of our own time.
The World War was not primarily a young men’s war, for most of them were sent by their elders and met their death that the influence of the latter might be augmented. Men may be made senile by their years without growing wise. Thus the world is without true leaders in this hour of its greatest need till we wonder whether a few score funerals of those now in power would not be our greatest boon. A psychological senility that neither learns nor forgets is always a menace and a check instead of being, as true old age should be, a guide in emergencies. Thus we have not grown old aright and are paralyzed by a wisdom that is obsolete or barnacled by prejudice. How often is it said of reforms great and good that they are earnestly needed and entirely practical but must wait for their accomplishment until certain venerable but obstructive personages of a generation that is passing are out of the way, because they are prone to think the old good and the new bad, and that every change, therefore, must be for the worse. Thus many live too long and undo the usefulness of their earlier years.
In fine, not only has the Western world now lost the exhilarating sense of progress that has for generations sustained and inspired it but civilization faces to-day dangers of decay such as have never confronted it since the incursion of the barbarians and of the Moslems into Europe. Other more disastrous wars are possible. Class hatred and the antagonisms of capital and labor, national and individual greed, race jealousies and animosities, the ferment of Bolshevism, the ascendency of the ideals of kultur over those of culture in our institutions for higher education in every land, industrial stagnation and unemployment, the crying lack of leaders and the dominance of mediocrity everywhere, the decay of faith and the desiccation of religion, the waning confidence in democracy: these are the prospects we must face if we are not to flee from reality and be cowards to life as it confronts us. If men still believed in an omnipotent all-wise god they would expect him to now intervene by a new, perhaps a third, dispensation such as Renan believed in. But the good old All-Father that saved a remnant and drowned the rest in the days of Noah and that sent His Son later to save the world when it seemed lost is dead and survives only as a memory, and we realize to-day that man must be his own savior or perish.
There seem at present three and only three ways of escape, each of them radical, arduous, slow, and perhaps desperate, and which only those who have the supreme power of presentification or the genius that sees all problems in terms of the here and now can clearly discern. The first of these is (1) eugenics. We must learn to breed a better race of men. This is, indeed, a religion and already has its apostles and martyrs and a growing body of disciples who are propagandists of its new gospel. But the obstacles of ignorance and prejudice are appalling. The fact remains, however, as poor Nietzsche realized, that if man cannot surpass his present self he is lost.
(2) Others, like H. G. Wells to-day and like Comenius in his day, see our chief hope not so much in nature and preformation as in nurture and epigenesis and would reconstruct, vastly enlarge, and unify our entire educational system, reversing many a present consensus to the end of ultimately obliterating all national boundaries and racial prejudices and organizing a world state, “a parliament of man, a federation of the world.”
(3) Others, like Metchnikoff and Bernard Shaw, look for salvation in the prolongation of human life that man may have the longer apprenticeship he now needs in order to wisely direct the ever more complex affairs of civilization. Compared with the task it now imposes, the wisest and ablest are only children and the disasters of our day are because young Phaethons have thought they could drive the chariot of the sun when in fact they were “nicht dazu gewachsen.” If man could live and learn, not seventy but two or three times seventy years, and could begin to be at his best when he now declines and retires, he might know enough to guide the world in its true course. He must absorb more knowledge, and of a different kind, and assimilate it better in order to secrete the wisdom now needed. As the adolescent decade prepares for maturity, so the senescent decades must prepare for old age and look forward to it with all the anticipation with which youth now looks forward to maturity. The limitations of old age must be made spurs to its greater efficiency just as so many in middle life have had to do with the chronic handicaps of poor health. Two prevalent traditions must be ruthlessly broken and destroyed. The first is that old people’s hold on life is so precarious that medical care is less likely to be rewarded with success than at earlier stages of life. The fact is that normal and healthy age is not only immune to many diseases common to middle life but often has exceptional recuperative powers, while even under present conditions the percentage of deaths is not so very much increased at seventy. Physicians who specialize in gerontology could do very much here. The other vicious tradition is that retirement or marked abatement of activity should occur at a certain age. This ought to be always a personal matter and all who can really “carry on” should do so with all the powers they possess as long as they are fully able.
An “Indian summer” should be both expected and utilized to the uttermost for this is a precious bud of vast potentialities. In it we already glimpse the superhumanity yet to be. We can already guess something of the soteriological functions that now lie concealed and are yet to be revealed in it. It brings a new poise and a new perspective of values and hence a new orientation and new and deeper insights into essentials. The very fact that the old who have approximated ever so remotely this ideal have so far been exceptions and, in a sense, “sports” should at least open our eyes to the fact that the great all-mother can still show her original wish and intent.
The old are remarkably and uniquely suggestible in all matters that pertain to the suppression or augmentation of life. They give up and die prematurely as victims of a tradition that it is time for them to do so and they survive no less remarkably not only troubles and hardships but even surgical operations if they feel that they can do so. We need not be faith-curers but must be vitalists and believe in some kind of élan vital or creative evolution, as opposed to materialistic or mechanistic interpretations of life, to understand the true psychology of age. It is the nascent period of a new and unselfish involution of individuation which is impossible under the domination of egoism. The new self now striving to be born is freer from the dominion of sense and of the environment and has an autonomy and spontaneity that is reinforced and recharged with energy from the primal springs of life, and man may well look to this as one of the great sources of hope in his present distress.
With the sublimation of sex in the Indian summer of the senium, thus, comes normally a higher type of individuation than is possible before. It is freer from passion, sense, selfish interest, clearer and farther sighted, but sees the identity of the individual and the race with which it is becoming incorporate. This is the first step toward the final merging into mother nature. The isolation from the outer world that comes with dimming senses, the abatement of erotism, and the reduced vocational activities are compensated for by a new noetic or meditative urge that comes straight from the primal sources of all vital energy and gives a new and deeper sense of these and, if we are philosophical, brings a new sympathy with vitalistic theories like those of Lotze, Samuel Butler, Fechner, and Bergson, to say nothing of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, or the long line of evolutionists before Darwin, which goes back at least to Heraclitus. This final rally of powers just when the processes of bodily decay are accelerated, which in times past sometimes took the form of outbreaks of prophecy, admonition, or clairvoyance as to the meaning of present tendencies for the far future of the race and the further development of which is one of the great present hopes of a world in which the processes of degeneration are now being greatly accelerated, can be nothing else than the birth throes of a new and higher stage in the evolution of man. The task now rests upon us to intensify and prolong this stage and to assure it to an ever larger number. We already see that we here escape from many, and must learn to escape from more, of Metchnikoff’s disharmonies in life. Sometime we shall both breed and educate for it, make it the ideal and goal for the young, and look for and heed its deliverances in the favored old. Having attained it, although death will seem all the darker by contrast with its regenerative light, man can meet it with less regret because he will not feel that he must be consoled by the sequel of another life. All forms of belief in the latter are, in fact, only surrogates expressive of a deeper faith and these symbols of it have served the precious purpose of keeping alive in his breast the sense that his life here was an unfinished fragmentary thing. The true Indian summer of life, when its possibilities are developed, is all that they mean, for in it all man’s belated powers will ripen and the final harvest of his life be garnered.
As to death, normal old age loves it no better than do the young. Metchnikoff, who postulated an instinct for death as the reversal of the love for life and which he thought should supervene at the end, looked for it in himself when he faced imminent and certain death at nearly three-score-and-ten; but in vain. The late Secretary Lane, facing it, was praised for saying, “I accept,” but the psychologist doubts whether anyone ever did or could welcome death understanding it to be extinction. The suicide may murder his instinctive will to live; the martyr may die in the hope of a better world beyond; the disappointed lover or the coward to life may turn to it as the lesser of two evils. A man may surrender his life as a sacrifice to a cause he deems greater than self but it is nevertheless a supreme sacrifice. A soldier accepts the fatal thrust of the bayonet and a criminal mounts the scaffold or sits in the death chair because he cannot help it. For how can life accept its own negation? It can never hope to know more of it than the sun can know of shadows, which are where it is not. Thus the old are no wiser and no more willing to die than the young, if indeed they are as much so, because it means more to the latter who have more to lose by it. All that philosophy or religion can do is to direct our minds from its full and stark envisagement.
Growing old hygienically is like walking over a bridge that becomes ever narrower so that there is progressively less range between the licet and the non licet, excess and defect. The bridge slowly tapers to a log, then a tight-rope, and finally to a thread. But we must go on till it breaks or we lose balance. Some keep a level head and go farther than others but all will go down sooner or later.
Several of my respondents say that they never on any account admit to themselves that they are old and a few advise us to avoid by every possible means all thought of death, using every method of diversion from it. One thinks that to dwell upon this theme is positively dangerous because the thought tends to bring the reality. I believe, on the contrary, that such an attitude is not only cowardly but that it involves self-deception because the memento mori is in fact always present, if unconsciously, in the old and to face the Great Enemy squarely really brings easement and safeguards us from a thanatophobia that may have far more dangerous outcrops. To have once deliberately oriented ourselves to death before our powers fail gives us a new poise whatever attitude toward it such contemplation leads us to.
My own conclusion that death is the end of body and soul alike, while it gives me a profound sense of satisfaction as having reached and accepted the final goal of all present culture tendencies which all serious souls feel impelled toward but which many of them still fight down also brings me, I frankly confess, a new joy in and love of life which is greatly intensified by contrast with the blankness beyond. As a dark background brings out a fading picture, so whatever remains of life is vastly more precious and more delectable day by day and hour by hour than it could possibly be if at the door of the tomb we only said au revoir. The very minutes seem longer because the departure into eternity is so near. Although death treats our psyche just as it does our soma, this is not so bad on our present views of the universe and insight lifts us above the need of consolation and even gives a sense of victory though Death do his worst, which those who expect another personal life never attain. And so I am grateful to senescence that has brought me at last into the larger light of a new day which the young can never see and should never be even asked to see. Thus if any of them should ever read my book thus far I would dismiss them here and in the following chapter address myself to the aged alone. That Jesus faced, and consciously, this absolute death at the close of his career seems to me now to have been made clear by modern critical and psychological investigation. But it was a sound pedagogic instinct that led the evangelists to veil this extreme experience of their Master.203