Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

But I thank whatever gods there are that all this painful renunciation has its very satisfying compensations and that there are other counsels than those of despair, seeing which I can take heart again, and that these are so satisfying that I do not need to have recourse to wood-sawing, like the Kaiser, though I have a new sympathy even for him.

My very first and hardest duty of all is to realize that I am really and truly old. Associated for so many years with young men and able to keep pace with them in my own line of work, carrying without scathe not a few extra burdens at times, and especially during the war, and having, varied as my duties were, fallen into a certain weekly and monthly routine that varied little from year to year, I had not realized that age was, all the while, creeping upon me. But now that I am out the full realization that I have reached and passed the scripturally allotted span of years comes upon me almost with a shock. Emerson says that a task is a life-preserver, and now that mine is gone I must swim or go under. To be sure, I had been conscious during half a decade of certain slight incipient infirmities and had had moments of idealizing the leisure which retirement would bring. But when it came I was so overwhelmed and almost distracted by its completeness that I was at a loss, for a time, to know how to use it. I might travel, especially in the Orient, as I had long wanted to do, for I feel that I have a certain right to a “good time” for myself since my life has been a very industrious one and almost entirely in the service of others. I might live much out-of-doors on my small farm; read for pleasure, for I have literary tastes; move to a large city and take in its amusements, of which I am fond; devote myself more to my family, whom I now feel I have rather neglected; or give more time to certain avocations and interests in which I have dabbled but have never had time to cultivate save in the crudest way. Or, finally, I could do a little of all or several of these things in turn. But no program that I can construct out of such possibilities seems entirely satisfactory. I surely may indulge myself a little more in many ways but I really want and ought to do something useful and with a unitary purpose. Thus, I might have spent much time as Senex quærans institutum vitæ but for the saving fact that there are certain very specific things which for years I have longed to do, and indeed have already well begun, and to which, with this new leisure, I can now devote myself as never before.

As preliminary to even this, it slowly came to me that I must, first of all, take careful stock of myself and now seek to attain more of the self-knowledge that Socrates taught the world was the highest, hardest, and last of all forms of knowledge. I must know, too, just how I stand in with my present stage of life. Hence I began with a physical inventory and visited doctors. The oculist found a slight but unsuspected defect in one eye and improved my sight, which was fairly good before, by better glasses. The aurist found even the less sensitive ear fairly good. Digestion was found to be above the average. I had for years been losing two or three pounds a year, but this rather than the opposite tendency to corpulence was pronounced good (Corpora sicca durant), and I was told that I might go on unloading myself of superfluous tissue for fifteen or twenty years before I became too emaciated to live, which humans, like starving animals, usually do on losing about one-third of their weight. My heart would probably last about the same length of time if I did not abuse it, and smoking in moderation, a great solace, was not forbidden. A little wine, “the milk of old age,” was not taboo and I was given a prescription to enable me to get it if I desired, even in these prohibition days. One suggested that I insure my life heavily and another advised an annuity; but I thought neither of these quite fair in view of the above findings, for I did not wish to profiteer on my prospects of life.

This hygienic survey reinforced what I had realized before, namely, that physicians know very little of old age. Few have specialized in its distinctive needs, as they have in the diseases of women and children and the rest. Thus the older a man is, the more he must depend upon his own hygienic sagacity for health and long life. The lives of nearly all the centenarians I have been able to find show that they owe their longevity far more to their own insight than to medical care, and there seems to be a far greater individual difference of needs than medicine yet recognizes. Of the philosopher, Kant, it was said that he spent more mentality in keeping his congenitally feeble body alive and in good trim to the age of eighty than he expended in all the fourteen closely printed volumes of his epoch-making Works.

Thus, again, I realized that I was alone, indeed in a new kind of solitude, and must pursue the rest of my way in life by a more or less individual research as to how to keep well and at the top of my condition. In a word, I must henceforth, for the most part, be my own doctor. All of those I consulted agreed that I must eat moderately, slowly, oftener, less at a time, sleep regularly, cultivate the open air, exercise till fatigue came and then promptly stop, be cheerful, and avoid “nerves,” worry, and all excesses. But with these commonplaces the agreement ceased. One said I needed change, as if, indeed, I was not getting it with a vengeance. One suggested Fletcherizing, while another thought this bad for the large intestine, which needed more coarse material to stimulate its action. One thought there was great virtue in cold, another in warm baths. Two prescribed a diet, while another said, “Eat what you like, with discretion.” One suggested thyroid extract and perhaps Brown-Sequard’s testicular juices, and there seemed to be a more general agreement that a man is as old, not as his heart and arteries as was once thought, but as his endocrine glands. One would give chief attention to the colon and recommended Metchnikoff’s tablets. One prescribed Sanford Bennett’s exercises which made him an athlete at seventy-two. Rubbing or self-massage on rising and retiring was commended. Battle Creek advises bowel movements not only daily but oftener, while others insist that constipation should and normally does increase with old age. Pavlovists, especially Sternberg in his writings, would have us trust appetite implicitly, believing that it always points true as the needle to the pole to the nutritive needs of both sick and well and that it gives the sole momentum to all the digestive processes, even down to the very end of the alimentary canal; while others prescribe everything chemically, calculating to a nicety the proportions of carbohydrates, fats, calories, and the rest, with no reference to gustatory inclination.

Perhaps I should try out all these suggestions in turn and seek to find by experiment which is really best for me. I almost have the will to do so because I certainly illustrate the old principle that as life advances we love it not less but more, for the habit of living grows so strong with years that it is ever harder to break it. All things considered, however, it would rather seem that the longer we live the harder it is to keep on doing so, and that with every year of life we must give more attention to regimen if we would put off the great life-queller, which all the world fears and hates as it does nothing else, beyond its normal term, which most generally agree is very largely hereditary. In fact, as Minot shows, all creatures begin to die at the very moment when they begin to live. All theories of euthanasia ignore the fact that death is essentially a negation of the will-to-live, so that a conscious and positive will-to-die is always only an artifact.

So much I gathered from the doctors I saw or read. Their books and counsels cost me a tidy sum but it was well worth it. I now know myself better than they, and it is much to realize that henceforth an ever-increasing attention must be given to body-keeping if one would stay “fit” or even alive. Now that the average length of human life is increased and there are more and more old people, a fact that marks the triumph of science and civilization, there is more need of studying them, just as in recent decades children have been studied, for medically, at least after the climacteric, they constitute a class in the community that is somewhat alien, its intrinsic nature but little known, and the services it was meant to render but little utilized.[1]

As my horizon changed and I became more at home with myself, and personal problems grew nearer and clearer, I realized that I must make a new plan of life, in which both tasks and also a program of renunciation played a very prominent initial part. This began with a literal house-cleaning. My home, from attic to cellar, and even the large barn were more or less full of disused articles of every kind—furniture and even wearing apparel, still serviceable but displaced by better ones, which it was now plain could never be of use to us but might be so to others. About some of these so many old associations clustered that it was a pang to part with them, but it was selfish to keep them longer. And so, by distribution to persons and institutions, then by sales, and finally by dumpage, they were rigorously gotten rid of, room by room, and we all felt relieved physically, mentally, and morally, by this expropriation, even though a few heirlooms were sacrificed. This process has many analogies with those by which the body is rid of waste material.

Next came books, of which my purchases, when I was enthusiastic and had a passion for ownership and completeness in my favorite topics, had been extravagant for my means and which, by many hundreds of publisher’s gifts for review in my journals, had overflowed from both study and library into nearly every room. These, in open shelves for greater accessibility and laboriously and systematically arranged, could not be disturbed often or dusted and are a housekeeper’s abomination. I had for years collected pamphlets and bound volumes on many topics in the vague hope of some future use, but which I now realize will never be warmed up again. So, section by section, shelf by shelf, I went over them, reserving all on topics I might yet study, and after inviting colleagues and the Library to take freely what they would I shipped the residue in boxes to antiquarian and second-hand dealers and accepted with equanimity the pittance they paid. This work done in leisure hours for months, was a wrenching process because every step in it involved the frustration of activities once thought possible but which now seemed to be no longer so. Little, thus, remained outside my own quite definitely narrowed field of work which I hope yet to do, and only a few gifts and sets, along with texts studied in younger and those taught in later days in which my descendants may sometime come to feel an interest, remain. This riddance of the residue of superfluous printed matter is not unlike anti-fat regimens, which are disagreeable but strengthening.

Next, I attacked a formidable pile of old lecture notes, beginning with a few small and faded records of college exercises in bound sheets, including the Heften of European courses, and finally the far more voluminous memoranda of my own lectures for nearly two-score years. How crude and impossible now were these earlier reminders of my professorial activity! What a prodigious amount of work, time, and even manual labor they involved! What hardihood of inference and conclusion! What immaturity and even foolhardiness of judgment on some of the greatest problems of life! If I wanted to dignify or even glorify my old age at the expense of my youth, here are abundant data for so doing. But I do not, and so I found peculiar pleasure in consigning, with my own hands, armfuls of such manuscript to the flames. How hard I rode my own hobbies! What liberties I took—and all with perfect innocence of intent—with the ideas of others, which insinuated themselves unconsciously into all of my mental complexes! And yet, at the same time, how voraciously I read, how copiously I quoted, and how radically I changed the form, substance, and scope of my favorite courses each year, slowly improving them in clarity and coherence! And how many special themes in my field, once central, have lapsed to secondary importance or become obsolete! Such breaks with the past, which psychology regards as analogues of a catharsis that relieves constipation, have a certain insurance value not only against ultra-conservatism but against the inveterate tendency of the old to hark back to past stages of life.