I ONCE met a woman who moved with her husband from the New Jersey suburbs to a house on a dirt road in the Adirondack Mountains. She said she could no longer cope with the whirlwinds of traffic back home. Here in the woods, by a rocky river, she intended to spend her last years.
Her life didn’t really conform to the American ideal, which involves lots of activity, lots of travel and lots of fun. Old age is supposed to bring youthful busyness, with dancing to pumping music in gyms, road trips and cruises to exotic places. You’re supposed to dress like you’re 16, in tank tops and yoga pants, and be up for romantic novelty with new “partners.” Toward the end of life, when the body is worn and much less attractive, one is supposed to imitate not just the energy of people decades younger, but even their sexual appeal, which only goes to making the old ridiculous and sometimes downright hideous.
This cultural phenomenon is a disaster. For one, it keeps the old from anchoring the ship of society. By devoting time and energy to correcting, directing and upholding, the old protect moral and spiritual values. There’s an evil drive behind the leveling of the generations. It helps create a society of soulless materialists easy to control. In dystopia, the young are given rights and privileges beyond their years.The young are not young and the old certainly are not old. The generations are equally superficial and hedonistic.
The importance of old age is not in having free time for pleasure and doing things one couldn’t do when one was young; it’s in preserving and embodying wisdom and reverence. In the loss of beauty, the old prove perhaps that beauty isn’t supreme.
An old person has ideally learned from his own sins, his own failures. He counsels the young not necessarily to do as he has done, but to avoid the same mistakes. Many old people today are not truly old in this sense. They really don’t have regrets or contrition even for their worst mistakes. They are old in years, but immature in character. Can we really know ourselves when we are always busy?
By “wisdom,” I don’t mean a stock of common sense adages. I mean the knowledge of what is true and good, but also a way of being, an ingrained acceptance of the tragic side of life and an awareness of its transcendent value. The wisdom I refer to is contentment and disappointment combined, with struggle and loss having washed over the soul like water rushing over rocks in a riverbed. A person who is ill and has lost most of his higher faculties can thus radiate hard-won wisdom. A marriage that has lasted for many decades radiates wisdom. In the evanescence of all things lies wisdom.
Under the starry sky and during the bitter, snowy nights, that woman in upstate New York was, I imagine, just being old and not displaying pep that would only render her waning existence absurd. A world without old people acting like old people is like a forest without shadows or a sunset without streaks of enveloping darkness. It’s a world without meaning and depth.
The old person must say yes, not to youthfulness but to the eternal, not to busy emptiness but to the inspiring implications of mortality. Collectively, the old represent a reservoir of earned knowledge, best preserved for its own sake, only useful in intangible and mysterious ways.
Take hold on her, and she shall exalt thee; thou shalt be glorified by her, when thou shalt embrace her
She shall give to thy head increase of graces, and protect thee with a noble crown. (Proverbs, 4:8-9)
— Comments —
Tony S. writes:
As Blaise Pascal remarked, “Constant diversions are necessary to avoid noticing the emptiness of one’s soul.”
Johanna writes:
Excellent essay, Laura.
Laura writes:
Thanks very much.
S.T. writes:
“A marriage that has lasted for many decades radiates wisdom.”
I’m watching my elderly parents this past few years day in day out and I notice this wisdom. For one, my mother always greets my father when he comes in the door from whatever he’s doing ; it’s respectful and keeps things friendly. Also ignoring really annoying personal habits each other has is another.
Hurricane Betsy writes:
The above essay is magnificent. But it is too bad that so many old people are still locked into a quest for continuing (fake) youthfulness.
Also, I’d like to mention that some old people behave like persons 40 years younger because they can’t help themselves; they are just naturally energetic and can’t stop. Of course, maybe at some point their body will just say “No, that’s enough now.” But there won’t be enough time for the self examination and rumination which ideally should have set in some years back.
Laura writes:
Thank you.
You can be energetic and do many things, even travel all over the world, and yet still have a way of being that doesn’t emulate youthfulness, despise truth or undercut the dignity that should come with age. One can be an active person, without using activity as a form of escape and without believing the very purpose of old age is activity.
To be an energetic exemplar of fun — well, it may look impressive to a world that abhors silence and contemplation, but that’s a terrible way to close the book of life. To flirt with spiritual death or refuse one’s obligations to instruct the young when one is approaching the end is truly one of the saddest of all examples of human folly.
