What makes the 73-year-old me that I see in the mirror, that I identify as “me,” the same as the four-year-old in the picture on my desk? No one would recognize me in the four-year-old. Even I have trouble identifying what remains of her. As we age, “what abides?” is a question worth pondering. People try to answer it in different ways – some look up old friends, some write memoirs. We all dread the loss of what we think of as our “selves;” I watched my mother turn into a different person in her late eighties, and yet she retained many early memories. In fact, she seemed to live in her earliest memories. What of her self was lost, and what remained?
These questions made me think of that old word: abide. In old age, what abides? What stays and makes us us until the very end? Or is the concept of a constant being just fallacious? In “Ulysses,” Tennyson posits that “much abides” in old age – that while the body fades and weakens, the will is strong:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” when he was a young man; I would posit that the admonition “not to yield” would not be the advice of an old man.
On the other hand, Thomas Hardy was around sixty when he addressed “abiding” into old age in “I Look Into My Glass:”
But Time, to make me grieve.
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
While Tennyson wants to concentrate on the value of what abides, Hardy finds it a form of torture, as his spirit wants to do what his body cannot do. And then there is Robert Graves and his poem about looking in the mirror, written when he was about 72:
I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.
For Graves, what abides is “presumption.” And more specifically, “a boy’s presumption.”
In its intransitive form (as used by Tennyson and Hardy above), abide means “to remain stable or fixed in a state;” this is the same as the meaning it takes in the great hymn, “Abide with Me.” The tale is that the author of the hymn wrote it at the deathbed of a friend, a friend who asked him to abide with him until the end. The Biblical reference is Luke 24:29. The disciples (after they had met the risen Christ) plead with Jesus: “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.” This is from the lovely King James Version; I would note that some later versions use the word stay rather than abide. I prefer abide, which is related to the word “abode.”
This is an old problem. The ancient Greeks pondered the problem of the Ship of Theseus. As told by Plutarch in the first century, Theseus’s original ship was used for a ceremony commemorating his defeat of the Minotaur; over the centuries, almost every part of the ship had to be replaced, as it rotted and rusted. A thousand years later, was it still really the Ship of Theseus? Sixty-nine years later am I still my four-year-old self?
So, the question still is: What abides? What abides when we walk with a limp, when we can’t remember the librarian’s name or where we put the library book? What abides that can reassure us of who we are? Tennyson would leave us with the impetuosity of youth; Hardy would have us the prisoner of passions we can’t act on; Graves chides us for presumption. I firmly believe that something of value abides, and I spend a bit of time trying to winnow out the chaff to find it.
When I Come To Be Old 