AGE AND youth
M
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emories
become particularly insistent in old age. Many old people become obsessed with
past suffering, mistakes and lost opportunities – the ‘if only…’ syndrome. When
the old commit suicide, it is often not because they cannot cope with the
present, but because they cannot face their past.
The old are their own historians,
but very few of them are honest historians. All too often, they are fantasy
novelists.
Old people often talk to themselves,
largely because no one else is willing to listen to them. Given the repetitive
paucity of their thoughts, this is not surprising.
The young believe that they are the
first people in the world to experience certain things. So do the old. This is
perhaps because we do not recall our previous lives.
‘Old
age should burn and rave at close of day,’ wrote Dylan Thomas. On the
contrary, old age should be cool and detached, not burning, and lucidly
rational, not raving. Thomas was confusing age with youth. Hot-headed, raving
old men are looked on with pity admixed with contempt. Only Yeats could get
away with his ‘wild, old wicked man’ persona, for he had a Nobel Prize.
The ignorance of the young about
life irritates the old, even as the ignorance of the old about the world amuses
the young, while exciting their contempt.
The young should beware of their
friends and relatives, rather than of their enemies, for they are already
forewarned against the latter.
When I was fifteen I was convinced
my grandmother knew nothing whatever about love and sex, even though she had
idolized my grandfather, to whom she had borne six children. I believe I knew
all about love and sex for I had once chastely kissed my girlfriend.
Testosterone has always made idiots
of young men, but in my youth we were at least romantic idiots. Nowadays, when
intercourse commences at an average age of 16.4 years (the latest figures
available) among Australian youth, and oral sex begins even earlier, romance is
speedily replaced by mere sexual gratification. Only the idiocy remains.
The self-centredness of the young
can make them shallow, ungrateful, cruel and sentimental, as the
self-centredness of the old makes them self-pitying, hard, cruel and
sentimental. Both are, however, equally convinced of their own goodness. “How
foul and hollow is the human heart,” as Pascal observed.
Gurdjieff said that the young issue
promissory notes, which they spend the rest of their lives paying off. True!
The disturbing thing is that such notes are often issued secretly. We spend all
our lives paying off ruinous debts of which we know nothing and believe we have
never incurred.
I sometimes tell my students I am
not young enough to know everything. Only the cleverest and the stupidest find
this amusing, though for quite different reasons.
The highest suicide rates are found
among young men (16 to 30 years) and old men (65 years upwards). Men are more
easily stressed than women. Even in the womb male foetuses exhibit a higher
level of cortisol than their female counterparts. From an evolutionary viewpoint,
men are clearly dispensable in a way women are not. We are not built to last.
Good news for feminists!
In exile, Trotsky complained
petulantly at the age of fifty-six that “age is the most unexpected of all
things that can happen to a man”. He was wrong. Age is not nearly as unexpected
as having a social caller bury an ice pick in your skull. [1]
Swift’s warning to himself to avoid
acquiring some of the disfiguring characteristics of old age – like telling the
same story over and over again, praising the past while lamenting the present
etc – is just as valid today as it was in the eighteenth century. It should be
pasted on the medicine-cabinet of everyone over sixty and prominently displayed
the haunts of the old - doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, pharmacies,
bowling-clubs, bingo-halls, bridge clubs, hospices and massage parlours. And
perhaps, for the benefit of fundamentalist Christians in ‘sure and certain hope
of the resurrection’, even in cemeteries.
No one wants those tedious, thrice-told tales on Judgement Day.
Our society grossly overestimates
the young and greatly underestimates the old. Dr Johnson believed that there
was “a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his
intellects”, pointing out that if a young or middle-aged person forgot
something, nobody paid any attention to the lapse, whereas the same
forgetfulness in an old man would give rise to comments about his memory
decaying. This is as true today as it was then. Only now, where Johnson’s
contemporaries saw mere senility, we see Alzheimer’s. Irrational, malicious
prejudice against the old – ageism – is not only as prevalent as racism and
just as harmful; in a society aging as rapidly as ours, it is foolish and
destructive.
Old age can turn us into twisted
Hogarthian caricatures of ourselves. The self-absorption which we may find
amusing in a pretty young girl becomes disgusting narcissism fifty years later,
like a tiny ‘beauty spot’ mole degenerating into a hideous melanoma.
A teenager with a hearty appetite
provokes indulgent smiles, whereas an old person greedily shovelling down food
is rightly considered disgusting. We expect the old to have learnt
self-control, whereas all too often they think that their very age gives them
the right to be self-indulgent in everything.
Old academics never die, they simply lose their
faculties.
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