Mantegazza[65] collected very many views from literature concerning old age and death and grouped them in two classes, favorable and unfavorable. The majority of his quotations stigmatize it as repulsive, crumpled in skin and form, perhaps tearful, squinting, with mottled skin, loose, distorted teeth, emaciation sometimes suggesting a skeleton, hardness of hearing, croaking voice, knotted veins, hemorrhoids, tending to drift into an apologetic attitude for living like a beggar asking alms or craving pity, with no strong desires, etc., so that even those who love old people in the bottom of their hearts often do not want them around. These quotations stress the garrulousness, untidiness in table manners, carelessness in dress or toilet, moodiness, exacting nature, and disparagement of present times in always lauding the past. “Old age is pitiable because although life is not attractive, death is dreaded.” People sometimes “seem to themselves and to others to live on because the gods do not love them.” Life is often described as a “long sorrow, the last scene of which is always death.” “There are only three events—to be born, live, and die. A man does not feel it when he is born but through life he suffers and death is painful, and then he is forgotten.” “Every tick of the clock brings us nearer to death.” “We part from life as from the house of a host and not from our own home.” “One after another our organs refuse their service and collapse.” “All that lives must die, and all that grows must grow old.” “Death begins in the cradle.” “The harbor of all things good or bad is death.” “The elements are in constant conflict with man, slowly demolishing everything he does and in the end annihilating him.”
On the other hand, some, like the Stoics, have not only affected to accept death with perfect equanimity but call it the highest good that God has given men. The Epicurean said death was no evil because as long as we live it is not present and when it is present we are not there. Pliny said the gods have given us nothing more to be desired than brevity of life. Others say that the old may have weak bodies but normally have good will and this compensates. Others stress the dignity of age or its steadfastness, its fondness for children and the young. Sometimes the old become epicures in eating and connoisseurs in drinking. Some commend as a laudable ambition the desire of the old to live as long, as well, and as fully as possible. Others think the love of beauty, especially in nature, is greater; still others find a new love of order, better knowledge of self, both physical and mental. He suggests that old age should be almost a profession, as we have to fit to new conditions. It is possible then to take larger views, and he says that of the three attitudes toward death, (1) not to think of it at all, the recourse of the common and the weak, (2) belief in immortality, a very pleasing and comforting delusion, and (3) to face and get familiar with it, the last is by far the highest and hardest. Thus the old must realize that they are as brittle and fragile as glass, cannot do what they once could, become ill from slighter causes and recover more slowly, must especially guard against colds, fatigue, change of habit, and must be always on their guard not to accept others’ precepts about keeping themselves in the top of their condition but work out those best for themselves.
In all ages since civilization began we have frequent outcrops of the tendency to divide human life into stages, many or few, more or less sharply marked off one from the other. L. Löw has given us a comprehensive survey of this subject. There has never been, however, any general agreement as to these age demarcations save two, namely, the beginning and the end of sex life, which divides life into three stages. Child life, as we all know, has lately been divided into various epochs—the nursling; the pre-school age; the quadrennium from eight to twelve; puberty; the age of attaining majority; nubility; the acme of physical ability (for example, for athletes circa thirty); the beginning of the decline of life, most often placed between forty and fifty, a stage that has many marked features of its own; the development of the senium, marked by impotence, with occasional subdivisions of this stage, as, for example in Shakespeare:
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,