There are basically two approaches to aging. The first seeks a deep acceptance of the changes wrought by decay and death; the other prizes fighting until the end. I think you know which camp I am in, but I have had reason to examine this topic again recently, both in relation to myself and to the larger world.
In his posthumous book, On Late Style, Edward Said differentiates between two artistic approaches at the end of creative lives. He proposes that one group of aging literary and musical artists reflects “a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of miraculous transformation of common reality;” he puts the Shakespeare of the late romances and the Sophocles of Oedipus at Colonus in this category. However, Said is more interested in those creative minds that struggle with the “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction” of “age and ill health.” He references Beethoven (I disagree with him on this) and Ibsen as artists who “fight until the end.” One might think of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” There is an article in last week’s NYTimes magazine written by a woman whose father rushed through his last months and last dime trying every new treatment, leaving no chance to say goodbye or to experience the end of his life.
In the same year (2006) that Said’s book was published, David Galenson published a classic account of old age and genius. Old Masters and Young Geniuses divides artists into conceptual geniuses who do innovative work early, and experimentalists, whose best work is the product of the slow accretion of learning, experience, and reflection, and often occurs in the later years.
If we continue to struggle, when will we have time for the reflection and “the slow accretion of learning”? Do we really want to heed Dylan Thomas in his exhortation to combat the inevitable? Do we want the screaming and resistant death of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich, the bitter death of Eliot’s Peter Featherstone – or the serene death of Alcott’s Beth March, Cather’s Archbishop? I know which one I would choose.
But even if we choose a peaceful old age, it is not easy in our culture. Capitalism sees no profit in a serene old age. There is more money in sending old folks out on pilgrimages to the fountain of youth – hawking cosmetics, plastic surgery, cruises, lifestyle “enhancements.” In theory, technology should be the best friend of elders, allowing them to shop, listen to music, order books from the library – even when driving is no longer possible. However, the internet is a capitalist production these days and even what it is good in it (think Wikipedia) has been co-opted to feed the AI engines.
As usual, we can be our own worst enemy. New retirees often feel the need to excel at something to get back the respect (situational though it might have been) that they had in the office. They want to write their first book and they want it to be a bestseller. They take up art and enter juried shows with their first watercolors. That is all fine if you can step back and realize what is going on. I had a friend who fell into this pit so often that she posted a reminder on the top of her computer screen: “You’ve already done that.”
I have recently been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. It is the first of his books that I have read, but it won’t be the last. I recommend this slim volume. I don’t always think that Han is right, but he definitely gets me thinking. In any case, he talks about the old systems of narrative (religious stories, heroic sagas, legends) with endings. Capitalism wants no closure – there is always another way to spend your money. A sense of endings gives way to what Han calls the “endless conjunction [and].” Capitalism thinks we always need one more thing. Rituals are stopping places:
Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure. Without them, we slip through. Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults. The discontinuity of autonomous time gives way to the continuity of production and consumption.
I am not trying to tell anyone how to handle their own old age, but I am cautioning all of us to think about it consciously. As one who plowed through her childhood and young adulthood with more energy than consciousness, I know that I want to carefully consider how to spend the time left to me. It is hard to battle the latest cruise ad, bestseller list, fashion, or medical fad. I have written both a story and a blog about someone who determined on “nothing new” in their old age. No reading new books, no going new places, replacement purchases only. It is not a prescription for life, but it is a worthwhile exercise. (Ann Patchett tried it and wrote about the results here.) But, again, there are at least two ways to spend our waning days. Let’s at least choose somewhat deliberately.
Even if we believe in wringing the last drop out of life, we should consider how to do that. I think of Thoreau:
…nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden)
Lastly, it often seems like our world, our culture, is in its old age, even in its death throes. And it is fighting against it, although not in any logical way. It is fighting for oil, for supreme intelligence, for control, for the way it used to be – and the fires rage, the coral dies, and there is constant action but no real progress, and surely no peace. Just a thought.