Tag: old misers

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.”

Scrooge or Quixote

First, happy holidays and a hopeful winter solstice to all of my readers.  I recently got a notice that I have posted over 200 blogs and scores of stories, lists, and miscellanea.  Amazing.  I particularly appreciate those of you who have been with me from the beginning.  To paraphrase Tiny Tim, bless you, every one!

And so Christmas brings up that quintessential old person of holiday fiction – Scrooge.  His name has entered the English language as probably the most common word used to describe someone who is mean and miserly and … old.  In the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Dickens describes Scrooge this way:

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

The original Grinch.  Scrooge is surely not the only elderly miser in literature – think of Ethan Frome, for example.  Miserliness is a trait that has been commonly used for the aged for millenniums.  Horace, in around 20 BCE, describes old men as having “desire for gain, miserliness, lack of energy, greediness for a longer life, quarrelsomeness, praise of the good old days when he was a boy, and condemnation of the younger generation.”  Of course, in days before social security and pensions, old people had every reason to be miserly – even in the face of impatient heirs.  King Lear is surely a lesson about distributing our assets before we are dead!  Scrooge has been the model for many old tightwads, including a Disney duck.  But, of course, Scrooge is not just miserly – he is mean and cautious and compassionless.  Nevertheless, he is certainly one of the stereotypes of old age – in his pre-conversion state.

But there are many oldsters in literature.  If Dickens gave us one commonly-used word for old men, Cervantes’ Don Quixote gave us another and somewhat opposite one – quixotic.  Here is how the Don is described in the beginning of Don Quixote:

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame….  and so it was that with these exceedingly agreeable thoughts, and carried away by the extraordinary pleasure he took in them, he hastened to put into effect what he so fervently desired.  (Grossman translation)

If Scrooge was mean and “Bah Humbug,” Quixote was magnanimous and “Let’s go!”  Both got more than slightly in their own way – Scrooge saw ghosts and Quixote tilted at windmills.  One was rich and one was foolish.  Scrooge learned his lesson, and – although Quixote goes home in the end – the Don never really regrets anything.  In honesty, both men end up often making life fairly miserable for those around them, until, of course, Scrooge sees the light and Quixote turns his horse homeward.

So where is the lesson in all this from these two old men?  First, let’s admit that the elderly are entitled to some level of avarice, caution, and retrospection.  We are planning to support ourselves for a lifetime of unknown length and quality.  Our bones are fragile, our energy is limited, and our earning-power is defunct.  We may want to be Quixote, but, in all honesty, we usually wind up acting more like Scrooge.

But here’s what is admirable about Scrooge.  Albeit with the help of Christmas ghosts, he looks at the past and present honestly.  Quixote is deluded in his romantic idea of being a knight, but Scrooge has been deluded too about the results of his actions and what his money can really do for him – until the ghosts arrive. Scrooge is scared into opening up, Quixote is stuck in his delusions.

And there is this.  What Scrooge goes through during the course of A Christmas Carol is a life review.  It is a model for what the angel Clarence takes George Bailey through in It’s a Wonderful Life – albeit George needs to recall all the good he has done, while Scrooge needs to face his bad deeds. Life review is surely one of the tasks of old age.  Indeed, there seems to be an instinct that makes people want to make sense of things – to unravel the themes (not plots) of their lives.  Like miserliness, looking to the past is a trait commonly criticized in the elderly.  But, our experience may be our most valuable possession.  And I find that thinking about it is not enough.  Talking to someone else is good, but even better is to try to concisely relate what happened on paper, read it over, and determine what we have learned.  So, Scrooge does have something to teach us.  However, if you are already quixotic and out meeting the world with an open heart, more power to you!  I myself am more like Scrooge, and probably still need the assistance of ghosts.