Chapter III: Literature by and on the Aged (2)

One writer says no man can be happy till he is past sixty, and another, “He who teaches the old is like one who writes on blotted paper.” A long life is the desire of all, and old age, which all abhor, is the hope of all. “It alone justifies a man to himself and before others.” “The sage is he whose life is a consistent whole and who carries out in his age the plans which he made in youth.” “The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life than the non-Jewish citizens because they avoid unsanitary avocations and observe wiser rules of diet.” At seventy-five exposure to cold is thirty-two times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age. “The sorrows of age are usually the returns of the investments of youth, these proving of that sort which levy assessments instead of paying dividends. A short life and a merry one is the maxim of many a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the core of this philosophy is the belief that happiness belongs to youth alone.” “The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a common class of illusions.” “He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. He will guard the fires of youth that he may not in age have to sit by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.” The price of so doing is premature senility, loss of zest in life due to the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments. “The only malady which all covet is the only one which is absolutely fatal, old age.” No passion is so weak but that a little pressed, it will master the fear of death. “He who is haunted by the dread of dying makes himself miserable for fear he cannot make himself miserable longer.”

Few modern writers have written more sagely on old age than N. S. Shaler, late professor of geology at Harvard.[101] He attaches great importance to the interval between the end of the reproductive period and death, which in lower creatures is very brief if it exists at all. In domesticated animals there is hardly any normal old age and they do not seem to know a climacteric. There is a great variation among different races in this period of senescence, which is so peculiar to man. This interval is very brief among savages. But with the beginning of speech all the relations of the individual to his group change. If old animals live on, they do so to themselves and not for the benefit of their kind. But in man the old individual becomes a storehouse of acquired or traditional knowledge, and wisdom has, for the first time, a distinct value in organic association. It was in this way that the reproductive period was shortened, or perhaps we had better say that life was prolonged beyond it. In civilized society the old are still members of the species, not aliens or enemies. When a people begins to have a literature or a religion and a large body of mores as social inheritance develops, the value of old age increases.

The old have to maintain a more dignified demeanor. They are readapted and can go on with life as before, especially as they now have eyes and teeth preserved. The best attitude toward the old is one that assures a broader view of life and better sense of values and marks the modern passage from the earlier division of men into ranks and occupations, in which women, youth, and old men were once separated from the active and militant class. Thus the position of the aged is now bettered by keeping in close relation with their fellows.

The growth of wealth has helped democratic individualization and thus helped old age. “The presence of three or four generations in the social edifice gives to it far more value than is afforded by one or two.” They “unite the life of the community and bridge the gap between successive generations.” “As the body of the tradition which makes the spirit of a people becomes the greater, it is the more difficult to effect the transmission of it from stage to stage in the succession.” Despite the volume of printed matter, including history, there is a spirit of society that cannot be preserved in books. Who can doubt that if veterans of our Civil War had been more numerous and influential, we should have plunged into the late war with Spain. There would have been more men who really remembered what war meant and its lessons, for the new generation lacked the true sense of what conflict was and went about it light-heartedly. So the need of strict military discipline generally has to be relearned with each war. The same is true of hygienic policies in the army. There are, thus, many political, social, and even business follies that would have been avoided had the wisdom and experience that only old age can bring been more dominant. Thus we could make our historic records not only more effective and more complete in regard to its matter but also more perfect as regards the lessons it conveys. History is often written by men who are separated from the times they chronicle and the best way to bridge the gulf is to keep in touch as long as possible with the generation that was making history.

But the endeavor to retain the aged is not merely an effort to preserve the lives of the old but part of the problem of avoiding premature death for everyone. Thus since man came there seems to be a sudden loss of longevity if we measure it solely in terms of the period of growth. If this really has occurred, it may be that the term is less fixed than we should expect it to be if the institution were of more recent date.

Anthony Trollope[102] tells us of a small republic, Britannula, situated somewhere in the South Pacific and which had freed itself from England, that had been induced by its leader, Mr. Neverbend, who was deeply impressed with the sufferings and dangers of old age, to pass a law that at a fixed period, which after much discussion was fixed at 67½ years of age, everyone in the colony should be taken with great honor to a college beautifully situated five miles from the capital city and there spend a final year, at the end of which he was to suffer euthanasia at the hand of the chief by being placed under an opiate and bled to death. Details are given of the many discussions that led up to this legislation, with the justifications for it and descriptions of the college. When the law was passed, there was no one in the community of great age. Deposition or relegation to the college was to be a matter of much pomp and dignity, with bells, banquets, and processions, and life within the walls was to be made attractive by every means.

The first to reach the required age, Crasweller, ten years the senior of the founder, was a man of immense vitality and wealth, the most efficient proprietor of a very large estate, and when the day of his deposition drew near he dismayed the founder by insisting that he was a year younger, although all knew his age, which was to be tatooed upon the skin of everyone. Meanwhile, an interesting love episode is described between his daughter and the son of the founder. There was much bitterness and recrimination and it is realized that it will never do to compel the withdrawal by force of the first victim, who was to set a high example to all others; and so finally the year falsely claimed is allowed to pass and then Crasweller is taken in state to the college itself, which another citizen was growing weary of tending because it was untenanted. There were many criticisms of its new and unfinished state and of the proximity of the cremation furnaces, which were said even to smell of the bodies of the animals that had been consumed in them.

Meanwhile, as the others were drawing near to their term, support of the plan passed over into covert and then overt opposition, and just as the first victim with his escort entered, an English man-of-war appeared--in response, it afterwards became known, to a petition of the citizens to stop such a proceeding, which thus cost the colony its independence. Thus Crasweller was freed and Neverbend, the founder, retired to England, where his musings at last convinced him that the world was not yet quite ready for his great reform. It might work if and when men were philosophers but it would doubtless have to be postponed at least during the lives of his grandchildren, and perhaps indefinitely. Thus the women, who had always opposed it, and the populace, who welcomed it when they were young but condemned it as they grew old, had their will and its realization is yet to come. The reasons that led to the scheme were that the misery, uselessness, troublesomeness, and often obstructiveness of old age still remain and are ever increasing in force, so that something like this must surely sometime be.

Stephen Paget[103] gives us an excellent description of what he thinks a typical state of mind of old age, but which I deem an excellent illustration of senile degeneracy. The old man, he says, wonders at his own existence, is bewildered at the feel of the pen in his hand, at the taste of his food; that he is alive when so many millions are dead or unborn; at a funeral is fascinated by someone’s whisper or the contour of a face or some other irrelevancy; is smitten with momentary surprise that he is or that it is it; finds an apocalypse on looking in the glass; is oppressed by a sense of mystery that is very far from philosophic contemplation; and realizes that when others observe him thus, they reflect that there is no speculation--“No speculation in those eyes that thou dost glare with”; finds himself growing out “of the world, of life, of time”; feels it not unreasonable to consider the one, the all, the infinite, if his mind drifts that way. His mind wanders while he wonders whether heaven lies about him in his second infancy. Perhaps it all brings the kind of smile we call wistful. He may go crazy over a human eyebrow or a breath of air; common things seem novel; the dull things fascinate. One enjoys a vagabond ease on the street; is irked at fine manners; is fond of news. The old problems of politics and religion lose their charm and in place of pure art we turn to that of the street. He says we old are thus a sentimental lot and for the sake of economy live on our emotions, which cost nothing. This point of view he deems more or less philosophic, etc.

This state of mind the psychologist would call dissociative, if not dissolutive. It is the dementia præcox of old age and can mean nothing but disintegration and befuddlement. True, childhood is often lost in wonder at items of experience that later are synthesized into wholes and become commonplaces. But this goes with a keen rapport with the environment, which the senses are developing, while this author’s musings reveal a falsetto last look before we are melted or diffused into the cosmos. Such reveries are letting go, not taking hold of life. They are the decadence of the philosophic spirit and belie the normal tendency of old age, which is to knit up experiences into synthetic wholes, to draw the moral of life, and to give integrity to the soul.

Thus Mr. Paget seems to be the victim of a kind of senile Narcissism, revering its chief traits in his symptoms, yielding himself with a kind of masochistic pleasure to any chance impressions that present themselves. He has ceased to strive and to will, and there is no justification of his point of view, that his state is akin to that of certain transcendentalists who have fallen into deep puzzlements over what Bronson Alcott called “the whichness of the what.”

Old age is neither helped nor understood by the cheap and chipper paradoxes about it of those who tell the old that they are not so save in years and that these do not count, or who affect to marvel at the passion to look and seem young. One writer[104] even tells us that the old are beautiful and thinks it is a perverse precept of social condition to think of chronological age at all. “We should say eighty years young;” “properly speaking there is no old age,” etc. All this is really the state of mind of a mental healer who does not wish old age, disease, or death, and so denies their existence and turns his back upon reality. It is the state of mind mythically ascribed to an ostrich, although the best observers deny that it ever buries its head in the sand from fear of danger. Such cajolery of the old is like baby-talk to children, which only infantilism or advanced second childhood relishes. It suggests infirmary wards and is itself a product of the type of psychic invalidism and valetudinarianism that is interesting to the psychologist because the appetite for it suggests the dreamy state of mind in which delusions become factual if they embody our desires. The old should be beyond attitudinizing or affecting a youth that is gone, for this is to live a lie, which is dangerous not only to their serenity, for old age should be the age of truth, but to health and even life.

G. S. Street[105] refutes the statement that of late, especially since the war, there is a great and growing gap between the young and the old, who speak a different language mutually unintelligible; that the old can no longer understand the young; etc. This has found frequent expression in recent literature. The rising generation is said to have its own interests, ideas, and even language, to have broken away from the old, and even to have developed a new poetry and art. A generation ago there was such a gap. The grown-ups were Olympians and there was little attempt of either young or old to understand each other. There was little friendship between dons and students but we have now a popular cult not only of childhood but of adolescence. It is said that psychoanalysis is becoming a cult of the young generation but Freud himself was not born yesterday. A very few soldiers have complained bitterly of the selfishness and stupidity of their elders who sent them into the trenches, safely staying at home themselves. There are, of course, aging politicians and diplomats who are little in touch with the future as represented by the sentiments and aspirations of the young.

But, on the whole, the war has brought old and young nearer together. The old have given up their foolish airs of superiority and the young have been matured by their experience. To be sure, these oldsters often criticise the young generation, that it is aggressive and free of speech or conduct; and there are young people who, under the illusion of new ideas, are aggressive. But such a gulf as has existed between the old and the young has always been mainly the fault of the old, and the qualities of the young give them less excuse for this attitude than they ever had before. Perhaps the world is a little too much in the hands of people who are a little too old, but this is being rapidly remedied.

C. W. Saleeby, M.D.,[106] says that young children never worry and youth does so almost entirely for the future, while the worries of old age are chiefly retrospective and may take the form of regrets. If young people feel these, it is only for a brief space, for they are resilient and soon react. In middle life the struggle for existence is keener and the “might-have-beens” cannot always be dismissed, although those in good health can usually soon surmount them. But this is more difficult in old age unless, indeed, it is “a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.” Wordsworth describes old age as it should be in this respect in “The Happy Warrior”:

Who not content that former worth stand fast
Looks forward persevering to the last,
From well to better daily self-surpassed.
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
Forever and to noble deeds give birth
Or he must fail, to sleep without his fame
And leave a dead, unprofitable name--
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause
And while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath of confidence in heaven’s applause.
This is the Happy Warrior, this is he
That every man in arms should wish to be

* * * * *

A being breathing thoughtful breath
A traveler between life and death,
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, forethought, strength, and skill.

There is a vast difference between old age as commonly seen and as it should be. The average type of humanity is undergoing a change. Civilization means city-fication and this involves a state of mind very different from that of the rustic. Worry has become the disease of the age as it was not formerly when man’s vegetative nature was stronger. It is a _maladie des beaux esprits_. We are no longer content to eat, sleep, and sit in the sun. The old always and greatly need grandchildren and it was never so hard to provide occupation for them, for their temptation now is to become self-centered, which is perhaps most common in women. It takes a different form in men superannuated by some automatic rule. Pitiful is the state of those who withdraw from occupations that have required and developed great mental activity.

The young, on the other hand, are less tolerant than formerly of the foibles and frailties of age. We live at such a high speed that it seems slow, if not stupid, and lack of sympathy adds to its burdens. The very idea of the family is declining and there is little left of the old sentiment for the patriarch, so that “the faster we move, the wider must become the gap between the young and those who, like the aged, have ceased to move.” Indeed, old age “is probably less tolerated and less tolerable to-day than ever in the past,” for the old were never so out of it. It might be expected, as death draws near, that religious anxieties would increase, but the contrary is true. Youth was never so unable to apply the principle _Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner_ or to make allowances. So it is the young who worry most about religious matters. “Absence of occupation is not rest. The mind that’s vacant is a mind distrest.”

If the man who has lived solely for sport is ill prepared to meet old age, he who has lived solely for business is still less so. He has had no time to cultivate his more human tastes but has developed his potentialities in only one direction and when superannuation comes his soul is bankrupt. He generally now has money as well as time to spend and so devotes himself to increasing his material comforts in a way that beckons death, because high living is no substitute for high thinking. He should discover the least atrophied of his powers and devote himself to their eleventh-hour development. The man of the modern nervous type should lay up treasure that age cannot corrupt. Herbert Spencer said the purpose of education was to prepare for complete living.

One of the most beautiful and normal attributes of old age is interest in the young, without which age is lonely and life becomes, as the preacher said, “vanity of vanities.” “If old people are confined to the company of other old people, they hasten each other’s downward course.” There was “even a certain psychological truth symbolized in the old idea that the company of a young girl was the best means for the rejuvenescence of an old man.” “Never was the tendency to abandon old age to its own devices so strong as it is to-day.” Spencer thought the care of the aged by their dependents was the fit complement for the care that in earlier years had been devoted to them and regarded the imperfection of this return the great defect of our practical morals. Indeed, the author doubts “whether the aged were ever so much to be pitied as they are to-day.” The psychological needs of old age are greater than ever.

In his _Health, Strength, and Happiness_,[107] he gives an earnest, practical caution for all, but especially for the aged, to eat less; and particularly so in warm weather. “We dig our graves with our teeth.” Fat is hardly a part of the body at all. Flesh is really muscle, so that the fat man should be said to be losing flesh. “The whole secret of prolonging one’s life consists in doing nothing to shorten it.” The writer profoundly believes in government by the elderly in years and thinks that the really greatest works in many of the most difficult fields have been done by them. He stresses the fact that there is a certain kind of wisdom that nothing but age can bring. He sees the chief cause of senile degeneration in the hardening of the arteries, due to the necessity of disposing of superfluous fat. A man is really as old as his mind and he doubts whether we are producing more really living elderly men and women than did the ancient world. He is bitter in his condemnation of the common phrase, “Too old at forty.”

Bernard Shaw[108] thinks mankind is headed straight for the City of Destruction and can be saved not by eugenics or by a new and better education, as H. G. Wells opines, but by prolonging human life to _circa_ three hundred years. If the length of life were reduced to one-half or one-quarter of what it now is we may assume that our culture and institutions would decline because children could not direct them. It is exactly the equivalent of this that has actually happened, only instead of life being shortened to half or a quarter of its span the problems of life have doubled or quadrupled in magnitude and difficulty so that present-day man is not grown up to them. Trained only to run a motor truck, he is now since the war called on to be an air pilot, and this requires a long and arduous training with a great deal of preliminary selection or weeding out. Thus man must now simply either live a great deal longer or the race will go under.

This can be done and Shaw tells us how. It is simply by wishing and willing it intensely enough and for generations. Lamarck, the first creative evolutionist, devoted his life to the “fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to.” They wanted to see and so evolved eyes; to move about and so grew organs of locomotion; the forbears of the giraffe wanted to browse on taller and taller tree-tops and so grew long necks, etc. All this was done by the same phyletic impulsion as now impels us to talk, swim, skate, ride a wheel, etc. We strive at it long and persistently and by and by, presto! the power comes from within because we will it, and it is never lost. In this same way man can and will acquire the power of living several times longer than he does now. As he does so he will put away his present occupations and interests, sports, amusements, party politics, religious dogmas, ceremonies, and indeed most of the things that now interest the populace, and come out into a new adulthood with vastly enhanced powers and a far wider horizon. Those who do this first will become pilots of mankind, which at present seems doomed for want of more wisdom and better leaders. Darwin and especially the Neo-Darwinians who believe in “circumstantial evolution” launched the world on a career of egoism in morals and mechanism in life that has brought it to its present pass and made it forget that all true evolution is from within, vitalistic, and voluntaristic.

Shaw’s drama opens in Eden, where Adam, oppressed by the conviction that he must live forever, first faces the fact of death in finding the putrefying body of a fawn. The gorgeously hooded serpent explains to Eve how she is to renew life by offspring from her body, and because of this she and Adam are assured that they need live only a thousand years. In the next scene Cain the Killer justifies his vocation.

In the second part, which opens in our day, two brothers, one a liberalized clerical and the other a biologist, agree that life is too short to be taken seriously and that neither of them is within a hundred and fifty years of the experience and wisdom they have been sincerely pretending to. To be a good clergyman or biologist requires several centuries. Man now dies before he knows what life or what science is. Indeed, life is now so short that it is hardly worth while to do anything well. Then a past and present prime minister, obviously caricatures of the two most famous men who have lately filled that position in England, enter and try--each according to his method and hobbies--to interest the brothers in one popular cause after another, but in vain; and are finally plainly told that they have not lived long enough to outgrow personal and local prejudices or to see things in their true perspective. The statesmen, failing to find campaign material serviceable for the next election in this new Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, then ask for a prescription that will prolong their lives and, failing to obtain either, cease to be interested. It does not seem practical to found a Longevity Party and it might be dangerous to let everyone live as long as he wanted to. The statesmen are finally told that as they are incompetent to do God’s work He will produce some better beings who can.

In Part III, A.D. 2170, The thing Happens. An archbishop, now 283 years old, is convinced that “mankind can live any length of time it knows to be absolutely necessary to save civilization from extinction.” Such lengthening may now happen to anyone and when he is convinced that he is one of these elect everything changes. A well preserved lady who appeared in a former part as a parlormaid but who is now 224 years old enters and discourses sapiently on the traits of the short-livers and complains that there are so few grown-ups. “What is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult race.” Her own serious life began at 120.

In Part IV we are transferred to the year A.D. 3000. An Elderly Gentleman, attired in very pronounced fashions that have not changed from our day, comes from Bagdad, now the British capital--London being only a park and cities being for the most part abolished. He is an amateur student of history and comes to revisit the home of his remote ancestors but finds it now tenanted only by long-livers who regard him as a child and chaperone and instruct him as such. At first he loquaciously vents his own opinions on a great variety of subjects with the utmost confidence but finally, under the tutelage of a Primary and a Secondary, and at last from contact with an awful Tertiary (for thus those in the first, second, and third century of their lives are known and labeled) he loses confidence, becomes more and more depressed at finding so many things he cannot understand, and has a serious attack of the “discouragement” that is generally the doom of all short-livers who visit these parts. In the end the aged Briton is so confounded by the wisdom that he cannot comprehend that life loses all its attractions and he finally dies of exhaustion at the feet of the Oracle. Napoleon also swaggers and boasts upon the stage, but his ideals, too, are shown to be only characteristic of the short-livers and he is completely subjected.