Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Each generation, as it passes, gets from its successor much more criticism than sympathy; the heir is not on good terms with the king. “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” No English monarch ever built a tomb for his predecessor. We should thank God that Abraham, Isaac, and David are well dead.

It is young men who deal most courageously with the doctrine of immortality; old men have made no contribution to it. They are silent or do not wish to be suspected of cant or hypocrisy, or perhaps fear striking their heads against a stone wall. If there is no immortality it is the great souls who will be most disappointed and the world will be “only the receptacle of a compost heap of the carcasses of an extinct humanity.” A cruel Highland chief shut his rebellious nephew in a dungeon, fed him on salt meat, then let down a cup which on opening contained no water, and left him to die of thirst. The Divine treats us this way if there is no future. Old men develop individuality. They reason less and less about the future and trust reason less. But “beside the silent sea I wait the muffled oar,” assured that “no harm from Him can come to me on ocean or on shore.”

W. D. Howells[95] said at eighty that he was less afraid of dying than when he was young. Virtues may become faults, for example, thrift may make a miser, his love of gold being more tangible than of greenbacks. It is, indeed, a shame to die rich. We are often young in spots, for example, on a spring morning. Slight acclivities seem to grow up into hills. After too long sitting, for example, in the theater, we realize that we have over-rested. The golden age, he thinks, is between fifty and sixty. Those who have made themselves wanted are still so. Our utmost effort is less. We are not dull, as the young think us because we seem so to them. A reader has exhausted most of the best literature and yet of rereading old books and reading new ones we never tire and have our favorite passages. We should interest ourselves in public questions. It hurts to be always told how young we look. We forget names we were most familiar with and recall them by their uses or perhaps by their foreign equivalents. He thinks old women, however, do not forget words. Tolstoi said that memory is hell and a future state that recalls all would be a bore. Titian outlived 99 and painted to the end. His masterpiece, the bronze doors of the sacristy at St. Mark’s, was done when he was 85. When tired he withdrew to a dark, warm place. John Bigelow in the nineties gave a charming lecture on Dumas. Versus the solitude of old age, the young do often seem dull. We do not help other old men enough. Woman’s sympathy goes far to bridge this interval. Some grieve that they cannot help with their own self-support. Howells says he is a great dreamer and forgets where he puts things, for example, his spectacles.

H. D. Sedgwick[96] thinks Harvard seniors more disposed to answer questions than to ask them. Youth may be worth living, but is old age so? Young men know nothing of youth; they cannot realize it objectively, for they despise it and want to hurry on. The “kid” would be a Freshman. He feels at first just outside the door of something delectable. The boy does not enjoy himself so much as the old man looking on “for such is the kingdom of Heaven.” The young are individualists absorbed in self. They form cliques excluding hoi polloi. They over-praise their own college, but their ego is always the center. It is really the spectator in the theater that gets the most out of it. Youth is exclusive in its foolish divisions. The old do not dwell on differences but common qualities. The old man finds no solace in isolation but in community. He loves humanity; seeks a refuge for self; passes lightly over differences of speech, clothes, and customs. Perhaps this is due to the slow approach of night, which makes all draw together for the warmth of friendship. The old man snuggles to the breast of humanity and is less prone to lose himself in random interests. If he cannot get about in space, he turns to the essential truth of the universe. The gods do not know the words “great” or “small.” The old see wonders in the iris. Youth seeks the top of the mountains because it cannot see the wonders in what is common and what is right about. The old are more religious and less subject to emotional crises. They do not see God in the fire or smoke but can see Him in the commonplace, and find beauty in cloud, flower, and tree; while youth is too busy with its own emotions and their tyranny. The records of earth tell of bestial cruelty. The globe is cooling and youth resists it like Prometheus. To youth the energy of the world is inexplicable. All is the product of brute force. Out of the dust came the eye and the brain and the mind, and all the turmoil is like labor-pangs to produce love, beauty, and happiness. Everything is full of aspiration. Out of the universe will come God, who is slowly evolving from the material without. If the matter of life has produced the passions of humanity, it is charged with potential divinity.

Walt Mason[97] says that until his system falls apart he will stay on deck, with his coat-tails in the air, refusing to be relieved, even though he may require overhauling every few days. When he was young he was careless in dress, but as he grew older he became very fastidious and was inclined to turn a new leaf in dress every day and give the best imitation possible of a young man. But we who were born during the Van Buren period cannot look like little Lord Fauntleroys. He studied old men and found that one did not believe in adding machines while most hated innovations in general. An old man who criticises anything present is always very unpopular and when he praises it, the attitude of everyone changes toward him. The young hate ancient history and want to lay it away in moth-balls. Eternal vigilance is the price of eternal youth.

Edison at the age of seventy-two said he worked eighteen hours a day and that it was hard for him to take a week-end off. When Colonel Death comes around the corner and says “Time’s up,” Mason says he wants him to find him in a hand-to-hand conflict with his trusty lyre. Every town has a coterie of “old boys” who are against everything; they write letters to the press, etc. Now, idleness is the worst thing for an old man and for his disposition. If he retires at 50 kindly, he will grow impossible by 70. The old are always blaming and brooding over the final showdown. It is always possible that the next cold or bit of rheumatism may break down the carburetor, but why worry?

E. P. Powell,[98] a Florida clergyman, cannot conceive old age for young Sidis and others like him. Charity should not help people to get rid of work but conceive a haven of rest. A workman damns epitaphs readable a few years hence. Humanity must not be loaded with a mass of pensions. Old age must not be a luxury. Good sleep should renew the world. Rev. Tinker improved sweet corn, Rev. Goodrich, potatoes. Worry is one road to the cemetery and idleness is another. The working problem is more important than that of diet. The author writes his sermons lying on the floor and spinning a top. A Florida June morning, he says, is far better than a month in Paradise. He does not care for heaven because he is more interested in the divine earth. The family should include four generations. We should all strive for perpetual youth. “Few children but better,” should be our motto. Premature old age is reprehensible. The world is full of half dead men. We shall never abolish death. Present society is death-hastening and life-wasting. Fisher would prolong by (1) eugenics, (2) personal hygiene, (3) public, (4) what might be called domestic hygiene.

U. V. Wilson[99] says that the seasons or nature were never so pleasant. He has the leisure that he toiled for all his life. Every year seems shorter (being now only one-seventy-third of all) so that he feels he is approaching the infinite point of view. Religionists tell us that it is hard for the Lord to save an old man but now that the days and years shrink we approach eternity. Seventy-three is the age of his physical being but he is really centuries older. His circle of friends is narrow but closer. He had a fad for hunting and fishing and photography and his sense of youth remains forever. He dreads decrepitude and helplessness and hates to see his body tumble down, like a man in a dungeon seeing the world only through a very small window. Second childhood suggests that if the eye fails, there are glorious things beyond it can see; that if the ear fails, there are inner harmonies. He feels like a youth shut up in an old body. Infirmities are forerunners of immortal health. So he does not fear death because it only removes barriers between him and the fullness of life.

D. G. Brinton[100] says “that old age is synonymous with wisdom is a comical deception which the graybeards have palmed off on the world because by law and custom they hold most of the property and want most of the power as well.” “As we grow old, we cease to obey our finer instincts” (Thoreau). “The experience of youth serves but to lead old age astray, and this is nowhere so plain as when an old man pretends a zest for the pleasures of the young. No fool like an old fool.” “Every age has pleasures sufficient which are appropriate to it, and these alone should be sought after.” If youth respects the laws of nature, old age is very tolerable. It brings many compensations for losses, and although not likely to be so happy as the best of middle life, it should be and often is superior in this respect to youth. “Probably it would generally be so were we more willing to learn the lessons appropriate to it.”

One writer says no man can be happy till he is past sixty, and another, “He who teaches the old is like one who writes on blotted paper.” A long life is the desire of all, and old age, which all abhor, is the hope of all. “It alone justifies a man to himself and before others.” “The sage is he whose life is a consistent whole and who carries out in his age the plans which he made in youth.” “The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life than the non-Jewish citizens because they avoid unsanitary avocations and observe wiser rules of diet.” At seventy-five exposure to cold is thirty-two times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age. “The sorrows of age are usually the returns of the investments of youth, these proving of that sort which levy assessments instead of paying dividends. A short life and a merry one is the maxim of many a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the core of this philosophy is the belief that happiness belongs to youth alone.” “The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a common class of illusions.” “He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. He will guard the fires of youth that he may not in age have to sit by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.” The price of so doing is premature senility, loss of zest in life due to the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments. “The only malady which all covet is the only one which is absolutely fatal, old age.” No passion is so weak but that a little pressed, it will master the fear of death. “He who is haunted by the dread of dying makes himself miserable for fear he cannot make himself miserable longer.”