Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

R. S. Bourne[70] also realizes that there is always a half-conscious war going on between the old and the young and believes this is a wholesome challenge that both should recognize to justify themselves. Older men should not be led captive by the younger and should neither over-emphasize nor waive their own cherished convictions, which are the best results of age and experience. To-day the older generation is more inclined to stress duty and service and to hark back to Victorian ideals. Perhaps in general they tend a little to over-individuation but they should choose the golden mean between insisting upon their own point of view and complete capitulation to youth.

Indeed, we may go much further and say that just as, despite the love of man and woman, there has always been a war of sex against sex, so despite the love of parents and children, there is also eternal war between the old and young. The small boy loves, reveres, and obeys his father but often oscillates to the opposite state of fear and even hate under the law of the so-called ambivalence of feeling. Each age tends to assert itself and to resent the undue influence of another age. Youth pushes on and up and seeks to make itself effective and to escape or resist control by elders. This is very fully brought out in the recent literature of psychoanalysis. In primitive society the boy soon transfers this attitude toward his parents to the chief of the tribe, and then perhaps to a supreme being, for all gods are made in the father image. Indeed, we are now told that the primal, generic sin in its extreme form is patricide, and one of the deepest fears is directed against authority. The pre-Abrahamic sheik was his own priest and king and that of his tribe. There was no law save his will. Enlarged, perfected, and projected into the sky, the patronymic sire became a deity. Part of the ancient reverence for fathers accumulated from generation to generation was thus transcendentalized into deities and part of it developed in the mundane sphere as reverence for rulers, heroes, the great dead, or perhaps into the worship of ancestors. But one very essential part of it survives in adult life in the attitude toward authority, every instrument and bearer of which is thus generically a father-surrogate. Thus older people feel toward their deities much as younger children do toward earthly parents and the greater men in their environment. There is always a measure of love and dread merging into each other. Ancient tribes that Robertson Smith and Frazer describe, after selecting and feeding fat their rulers for a time, ascribing to them divine prerogatives, giving them extraordinary freedom in certain respects while restricting them by severe taboos and in other ways, finally slew them ritually as sacrifices offered with piacular rites. All this illustrates the same dual trend of affectivity within and so does the fate of every deity who is slain, perhaps with every indignity and torture, and afterwards resurrected, transfigured, and glorified.

All government in a sense, too, springs from paternalism, and so does all human power, dignity, and prerogatives, so that the French revolutionist and even Nihilist, who is chronically and constitutionally against all the powers that be and who feels that every command or prohibition is a challenge to defy or violate it, only illustrates the extreme of revolt now sometimes designated as kurophobia.[71]

Of course rebellion against tyranny is commendable. Many fathers are bad and this cumulative fact has greatly intensified the instinct of rebellion. In an extreme form this may be expressed in negativism or anti-suggestibility, but sooner or later there is a revolt of all sons against all sires. This, too, acts as a challenge to originality and gives its élan to the passion for boundless freedom, which may even degenerate into forms of affectation and a passion for over-individuality. Thus next to hostile nature herself, fathers and what they symbolize have been the objects of man’s chief opposition in the world’s history. The very words “obey” and “conform” hardly exist in the vocabulary of some recusants. The devil, too, always denies and defies and all through the history of religions has been the typical rebel. The kurophobe is the evil genius of republics and democracies. He prates of rights and has little or nothing to say of duties and on this view he is the product of all the bad fathers in his pedigree.

In many patriarchal and tribal societies the father or chief monopolized the women, whom the sons dared not approach. Hence we are told that they were compelled to seek mates outside, whence exogeny arose. Freudians hold that the son’s rancor against the father is rooted in this inhibition of the mating instinct. This doubtless did contribute very much to intensify it as the boy grew to man’s estate but it is going too far to say that in the very intricate grammar of revolt, no less complex than Newman long ago showed the grammar of assent to be, other factors did not come in and that there no other social inhibitions of the will-to-live than those of the will to propagate. This rivalry and antagonism, which is probably more deep and multiform than we have yet realized, is seen at every age from early childhood—in the hostility of Freshman and Sophomore, those under and over age for citizenship or for war, in struggles of men in the meridian of life to depose or supplant those a little older, in the countless devices of those who are aging to maintain their power and influence, which perhaps never in history had such an efficient bulwark as when they became secure in the right of testamentary bequest of their property as they wished—and is only mitigated in the case of the very old because they are few and feeble and have already in many ways been superseded and relegated to inefficiency.

Metchnikoff in his essay on Old Age tells us that at Vate the “old men have at least this consolation—that during the funeral ceremonies it is customary to attach to their arms a pig which may be eaten during the feast given in honor of the departure of the soul for the other world.” After citing other similar cases, he tells us that civilized people are not unlike savages for although they do not kill superannuated members of the community they often make their lives very unhappy, the old often being considered as a heavy charge, which causes great impatience at the delay of death. This is expressed in the Italian proverb that old women have seven lives and the Burgomasks think that old women have seven souls, besides an eighth soul, quite small, and half a soul besides; while the Lithuanians complain that an old woman is so tenacious of life that she can not be even ground in a mill. He cites the protest of Paris medical students against the decision of the state superseding the law prescribing a limit of age for the professors, saying, “We do not want dotards.” A convict in the Saghalien Islands condemned for the assassination of several old men said, “What is the use of making such a fuss about them? They are already old and would die anyway in a few years.” In Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment one student declared in a group of his mates that he would kill and rob the cursed old woman without the slightest remorse, and continues, “On the one side we have a stupid, unfeeling old woman, of no account, wicked and sick, whom no one would miss—on the contrary, who is an injury to everyone and does not herself know why she keeps on living and who perhaps will be good and dead to-morrow; while, on the other hand, there are fresh young lives wasting for nothing at all, without being helped by anyone, that can be numbered by thousands.” Old men, too, often commit suicide. Prussian statistics show that people between 50 and 80 commit suicide about twice as often as those between 20 and 50, and the same is true of Denmark. “The young and strong adults furnished, therefore, 36½ per cent of the suicides, while the number furnished by the aged amounted to 63½ per cent.” Metchnikoff finds that “the desire to live, instead of diminishing tends, on the contrary, to increase with age.” “The old Fuegian women, aware that they are destined to be eaten, flee into the mountains, whither they are pursued by the men and carried back home where they must submit to death.” “The philosopher in me does not believe in death; it is the old man who has not the courage to face the inevitable.” And so it is that old professors rarely wish to abandon their chairs. Nor do they even always renounce the tender passion, a fact illustrated by Goethe, who at the age of 74 fell in love with a girl of 17, proposed marriage to her, and failing in the project wrote his pathetic Elegy of Marienbad, in which he said “For me the universe is lost; I am lost to myself. The gods, whose favorite I lately was, have tried me,” etc. The weakening of his powers in the latter part of Faust and at the end of Wilhelm Meister was abundantly shown.

We resume our historical notes with Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566),[72] a wealthy Venetian nobleman, who, as a result of a wild and intemperate life, found himself at forty broken in health and facing death and so radically changed not only his mode of life but his residence and devoted himself, after this crisis, with the “most incessant attention” to the securing of perfect health, studying every item of diet and regimen for its effects upon him. At eighty-three, after more than forty years of perfect health and undisturbed tranquillity, he wrote his La Vita Sobria, an essay that was later followed by three others, one written at eighty-six, another at ninety-one, the last at ninety-five; the four completing a most instructive life history and one which the most earnest desire and hope of his life was that others might know and follow. He believed that the kind of life most people lead is utterly worthless and emphasized the great value of the later years of life as compared with the earlier ones. His message to the world has been a classic. He hoped that he had made the moderate life so attractive that the attitude of the world toward old age and death would be changed.

In his first discourse he gives many details of how he conceived life in the simple way nature intended it and how we must learn to be content with a little and experience all the joys that come from self-control. When the passions are subdued, man can give himself up wholly to reason. His physicians told him that he must partake of no food save that prescribed for invalids but he found that he must carefully study each article of diet and decide for himself because no general prescriptions avail. By dint of long observations upon himself he started with the belief that “whatever tastes good will nourish and strengthen” and learned that “not to satiate oneself with food is the science of health.” He guarded particularly against great heat, cold, and fatigue; allowed nothing to interfere with his rest and sleep, would never stay in an ill-ventilated room, and avoided excessive exposure to wind and sun. At the age of seventy he was severely injured by a carriage accident so that all his friends expected his death and the physicians suggested either bleeding or purging as forlorn hopes. He refused both and trusted to the recuperative effects of his well regulated life. He recovered completely as he, indeed, fully expected to do, although it was thought by his friends to be miraculous. Later, yielding reluctantly to the urgency of physicians and friends, he increased his daily intake of food so that instead of twelve ounces, including bread, the yolk of an egg, a little meat and soup, he now took fourteen ounces; and instead of fourteen ounces of wine, as before, he raised his ration to sixteen ounces. Under this increased diet he grew seriously ill (at seventy-eight). But on returning to his old dietary he recovered.

Hence, he concludes that “a man cannot be a perfect physician of anyone except of himself alone” and that by dint of experimenting he may “acquire a perfect knowledge of his own condition and of his most hidden qualities and find out what food and what drink and what quantities of each would agree with his stomach.” “Various experiments are absolutely necessary, for there is not so great a variety of features as there is diversity of temperaments and stomachs among men.” He found he could not drink wine over a year old, and that pepper injured but cinnamon helped him, something which no physician could have anticipated. He shows the fallacy of the notion that such a life leaves nothing to fall back upon in time of sickness by saying that such sickness would thus be avoided and that his dietary is sufficient so that in sickness, when all tend to eat less, he has still a sufficient margin, although probably the quantity or quality of food that suits him, he admits, might not suit others. The objection that many who lead irregular lives live to be old he refutes by saying that some have exceptional vitality but that all can prolong life by his method. He tells us that he rides without assistance, climbs hills, is never perturbed in soul, is occupied during the entire day, changes his residence in warm weather to the country which he thinks important, enjoys the society of able, cultivated, and active-minded men, and all his senses have remained perfect.

He tells us that he improved upon Sophocles, who wrote a tragedy at seventy-three, for he has written a comedy; of his seven grandchildren, all offspring of one pair; how he enjoys singing (probably religious incantations), and how much his voice has improved; that he would not be willing to exchange “either my life or my great age for that of any young man,” etc. He praises his heart, memory, senses, brain, and is certain that he will die, when the time comes, without pain or illness and hopes to enjoy the other world beyond.