Tag: Golden Age

Golden Years?

We have come to talk about old age and retirement as the “golden years.”  The current use of this term is relatively recent (1959) and usually dated to advertisements by Del Webb for the new “Sun Cities” sprouting up in Arizona and elsewhere.  In the past, however, the “Golden Age” referred to earlier and better times of men. Things were perfect in the Garden of Eden – and it was all downhill from there.

According to Ovid and the mythology of even earlier civilizations, including the Hindu and Judaic (Book of Daniel), the first age of man was the Golden Age, from which we have degenerated through the Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages.  Over time, according to ancient law, things got worse instead of better (as in the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

This was, in part, because early man hadn’t developed the cult of progress.  Until the Age of “Enlightenment,” there was no assumption that the world was “progressing.”  In fact, there had been an accepted notion that culture was deteriorating from an earlier “golden” time as noted above.  The Enlightenment changed that; progress was real, progress was good, progress became a god.  But, for the aged, this reversal also produced the paradox of a cultural ideology of progress juxtaposed with the reality of the aging body. (Think about that!)  But back to the “golden years.”

Of course, golden also has connotations of wealth.  And we often conflate a good old age with a financially rich one.  Theo of Golden, a recent bestseller, is a good read about an admirable elder, yes, but Theo is an old man with endless riches at his disposal.  And while it is true that Theo often uses his riches to help others, it is also true that he is not on a budget, nor does he worry about what happens if the cost of heating his house goes up dramatically.  Is money necessary for a good old age?  Do you need to have enough to buy friends and a house in Sun City?  “Better to go down dignified/With boughten friendship at your side/Than none at all. Provide, provide!” says the hag of Frost’s poem.

In years past, old people with money were generally depicted as misers.  One might think of Silas Marner, Scrooge, Uriah Heap, or Mr. Potter of It’s a Wonderful Life.  Now, gold is looked on as a necessity and not a flaw in old age.  Of course, capitalism has encouraged such a change – don’t hoard your money, spend it!

The highly underrated G. K. Chesterton had more naturalistic take (long before 1959) on the golden glow of old age:

Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.

Here, gold is a matter of perception, specifically a change in appreciation that comes with age – or so we would hope.  And the notion of progress is meaningless in the face of the cycles of nature.

Of course, we might also nod to Robert Frost again, who brings us back to the golden age being at the beginning of life and reminds us that the true gold is nothing that we can grasp:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Our memories of early days are often golden.  We are nostalgic for our past, but our childhood Edens cannot stay nor be re-created.  They can only be recognized and remembered.  But it might be the wisdom of old age that makes us remember and finally realize that the real gold is in all Chesterton’s leaves and faces.  And that, perhaps, for us and for our planet, progress is overrated.

For other of my posts about the golden autumn of old age, you might try “Accepting the Season” or “Bare Ruin’d Choirs.”

The Notion of Progress and the Reality of Aging

How does aging fit in with the narrative of progress in which we are immersed? One can wonder about what progress really is or means (G. K. Chesterton: “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision”) or marvel at the reversal of the Enlightenment period from the old story of decline from the Golden Age to expectations of ever-better lives, technologies, civilizations (J. B. Bury: “Between 1690 and 1740 the conception of an indefinite progress of enlightenment had been making its way”). Regardless of how we define it or how it arrived, we now live in a world that sees itself as progressing; we participate in a world that expects people to improve themselves; we flail around in a world that offers us visions of innovation and perfectibility.

Humanity did not necessarily start with a progress narrative; ancient stories often depicted a fall from a golden era (think Eden or the Golden Age (which the Greeks said were followed by the inferior Silver, Bronze and Iron ages). In this old story, the trajectory of a human life followed the pattern of the cosmos. Childhood and youth were a kind of Eden; loss of innocence was followed in a few years by many other losses. With the Enlightenment and the advent of a progress narrative, humanity found optimism in a future which included scientific advancement and expanded life spans. Things were only going to get better. Celestial immortality was replaced by the hope of infinite mortality. Yet, people still age. More slowly, perhaps, and certainly for a longer time span than did our ancestors. And yet – we age and wane in a world that does not seem to have a narrative of decline.

What does one do with a body (despite periodic repairs in organs and skin tone) which is on a downward trajectory? And what about the mind that might be wiser, but is slower and more forgetful? What do we do with the discrepancy between the decline of the individual body and the ideology of progress? The “ideal” of the Enlightenment was progress; this collective advancement was hard to reconcile either in fact or metaphor with the reality of the aging of an individual. And no one seems to want to help us (other than by selling us things to make us look or feel younger). We are exhorted to keep up with things, stay busy, see the world, look younger, eat strategically and beat the odds. The day comes, of course, when we can’t keep up, don’t want to be busy, look old, and face undeniable omens of mortality. And often the terminology used is that of failure: “She’s losing her fight against gravity.” “He doesn’t even try any more.” “She wears old lady clothes.” “She’s given up.”

I am no Luddite. Science has certainly given us longer and healthier lives, but it has not given us an allegory, a template, for growing old. Science does not grow old; it renews and adapts itself continually. Technology, science’s step-child, not only moves steadily forward, but is commercially insistent that we all come along for the ride. If we cannot keep up, we are “behind the times.” How can we be behind the times we are living in? And if we are (and see this week’s story, “The Needs of the Living Organism”), is that entirely a bad thing? Might those outside the circus be the only ones who can see objectively the frenetic activity in the three rings under the big top? Might we not appreciate this as a good place to be? (Think of Lear’s plan for his old age at the end of the bard’s play – but more on King Lear next time.)

When I left the commerce of the working world, I was relieved I would not have to learn another computer update, not have to adjust again to whole new ways of getting the job done. My generation – who entered the work world before computers and just slightly after Xerox machines – adapted to a great deal and did it well. But is learning a new technology really a growth experience? Given a choice in old age, might we not want to spend our time learning other things? Or reflecting on what it means to have spent so much of our lives learning and adapting to ever-changing tools – and wondering whether that effort minimized our better understanding of what those tools were used for. We might decide the Enlightenment notion of progress is something we can transcend; indeed, it might be one of the things that old age is for.