Since I was a small boy, I was aware that I would become an old man. One of my keenly felt memories is sitting with my grandfather and two of his old friends on a porch stoop in the dark. The Camp Washington section of Cincinnati, Ohio where he lived was succumbing to night and the voices of the three men became more distinct and resonant as the sense of sight gave way to hearing. It was just after the war and they talked among shadows about gasoline rations, air raid sirens, the civil defense unit they were in, young men back from Europe and the Pacific, young men not coming back. They could remember things I did not live through, the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor. One of the stock phrases that opened many of their conversations was, “Do you remember the time we . . .” The time-space defying gift of memory, being in two times and places at once. It was a gift that came with years. Although at age five I was just beginning to accumulate years, experience, and memories.
After the war the country breathed a collective sigh of relief and felt youthful again. I was young and glad to be growing older. When asked my age, I would frequently add “and a half” to the correct number of years. For the first thirty years of my life I was in an age category called ‘young.’ Then, as I began my fourth decade and realized I was in danger of no longer being young. The advertising world encouraged me to age in reverse. (The movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button comes to mind.) Everything, from personal computers to people, could be new and improved. Old age became an embarrassment. Youthfulness was all the rage.
I am not anti-youth. I enjoyed my childhood and adolescence, even with the inherent challenges of each new year. I enjoyed my children and now enjoy my grandchildren as I learn from their vitality and curiosity. But as I gained years, I became suspicious of a culture that valued youthfulness as the pinnacle of personal development. The dilemma: we all want to get older, but no one wants to be old. We can do better than the irrelevance and impotency too often assigned to old age.
Wise old age does not just happen. It is not just a matter of accumulating years like interest in a savings account. Without respect for the long process of aging, it would be easy to get caught up in the myth of perpetual youth, trying to imitate our former selves, trying to deny the fact that our bodies are changing. For his eightieth birthday I gave my father a figurine of an old Chinese philosopher alert and serene. I hoped it would give him a positive image of his late years, a sacred ikon of a deeply lived old age. It did. Now it is inspiring me.
But as we did not squander our youth, let us not waste our old age. Some are fortunate to do what they have a gift for doing well into old age. Lucian Freud, the British realistic artist, painted two days before he died at age 88. Even with Alzheimer’s disease, Tony Bennett performed with Lady Gaga at Radio Music Hall on his 95th birthday.
Now, while the clock ticks louder and the calendar pages are turned with swift regularity, we have the opportunity to reflect on what we made happen; the ways we participated in the story of the world, the family histories we have made, spouses, children, grandchildren, friendships, antagonists, the close calls and long hauls we have survived, our work, our play, the dramas staged in our unconscious dreams and fantasies, the things we wanted to do but never did, our accomplishments known to others, the private realizations known only to us.
A source of inspiration for me are poets. Poets spend a lifetime paying exquisite attention to the ordinary details of life. And they hone our shared language to prompt an experiential response. In his poem “The Layers,” Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) instructs us to:
Live in the layers
not on the litter.
Old age affords us a slow time, a time to enter the “still point of the turning world,” (T. S. Eliot) a time to meditate on the life we have raced through, a time for reverie and reflection, for looking beneath the biographical-historical data into the stratums deep within experience, a time to value the extraordinary marvel we call life.