Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

In such answers as are before me two things stand out with special prominence. The first is that the men of science, who constitute about one-third of all, have unfinished studies, which they feel it is their supreme duty to complete before their powers abate. It is less often new themes to which they would consecrate their energies than old ones on which already very much work has been done and that they rightly feel no one else could properly finish and that would thus be lost to the world unless they themselves were able to complete it. These men are less intent upon public reforms or special civic duties than upon adding at least a tiny stone to the great temple of science, although only a few in their own specialty will ever appreciate or be benefited by their work. The world has certainly lost much, although probably less than those concerned think, by the death or the incapacitating senility of savants who left an unfinished window in their Aladdin tower. We all think of great novels, which the authors did not live to complete; of promising, intricate researches, which were perhaps bungled by the imperfect reports of the half-competent who undertook to present them to the world; of papers left by the old to be edited by their children or their advanced students, some of which had better have remained untouched; of belabored manuscripts, which survivors can make nothing of and which are perhaps piously preserved for years and eventually consigned to the flames. It is such fates for the children of their brain that some of our respondents seem to dread chiefly and it is this that prompts them to dreams, which are generally fatuous, of literary executors or post-mortem publications.

The most general conclusion from these data is that the old are very prone to develop, if they have not had it before, a kind of educational instinct in the larger sense of this word; they wish to admonish or exhort, if not the world at least some section of it, to better and wiser living, to the acquisition of the knowledge that is of most worth, to the cultivation of peace and amity, or to a simple and perhaps more strenuous and efficient life and to the development of good habits. The lessons they would teach often impress the young as being trite and commonplace, but if they are so, they are charged with a depth of conviction and enriched by a wealth of experience that give them a greater significance than the young can appreciate.

Is your interest in public, community, or in far future or past things, as compared with interest in persons and things right about you, greater or less than formerly?

Here we have two very distinctly opposite tendencies. On the one hand, more frequently in women than men and much more common in the uneducated classes, the horizon of interest tends to narrow to the immediate environment and to the here and now of each day and if health is impaired, the chief concern may be personal well- or ill-being, in which case we see the egoism and selfishness of old age in its extreme form. On the other hand, and as we would fain believe more normally, we have an increase of breadth of view and of interest not only in local affairs of the community but of the state, country, world, and humanity, which may be intensified as decline necessitates withdrawal from more active participation in affairs nearest in time and place. Two great events have had an incalculable influence in this direction that often appears in our data. The one is the World War, the new era of history it has opened, and the whole problem of the future fate of civilization. This has made a tremendous appeal to those of contemplative habits and has stimulated them to follow the course of world events, to study the past and peer into the future as never before, as well as to want to live on to see the next act in the great drama. Suffrage and the new enfranchisement of woman have marked a great increase in public life and opened new spheres of influence for her sex in political, civic, and moral fields that are proving so absorbing that the former tendency which advanced years brought—to focus on persons at closer range and on narrower human relations—is superseded by a new and larger humanism. Not only have these tendencies greatly enriched old age but there is no reason to think they will ever be transcended or reversed. In this sense there has been no age in the world in which it was so good to be old and the last decade or two have contributed far more than any other to give old people a stronger hold on life and to bring it more of just the kind of culture needed for its legitimate development, as well as to very greatly strengthen the will to live.

In what do you now take your greatest pleasure?

While a few find it only in the same sources as before old age supervened, most have discovered new sources of satisfaction or at least find joy in more abandonment to inclinations that had to be more or less sidetracked or almost tabooed before. Reading is most often specified. A few who used to read novels voraciously have lost all interest in love stories and turned to biographies, which they now pursue with almost the same zest as they formerly felt for romance. A few turn to history in general or perhaps trace the earlier stages of the development of their own field of work. Several find a great resource in meditation or even reverie, giving more time to day-dreaming than before. A very few feel a new urge to give some message to the world before they die, and perhaps try, with or without success, to write for publication, while some do so merely for their own edification. Two old professors who have taught successfully all their lives, on ceasing to do so were impelled to address a larger public by print and were dismayed to find their efforts unsuccessful. Others confess to a loss of ambition to do anything to better the world but would confine their efforts to making those about them wiser or happier. Many find a new charm in nature, for example, walks in the open, gardening, birds, stars, celestial phenomena, or perhaps reading the works of naturalists and out-of-door observers of animals, flowers, plants, trees; while others, like Socrates, prefer human relations and indulge more freely than before in companionships, correspondence, or perhaps things that absorb them in their immediate environment, or in a wider rapport with current events, and give more time to newspapers, etc. It is not uncommon for cultivated old people to reread the classic standard literature they perused in their youth and sometimes to abandon themselves to the study of the best things in ancient literature, which they had only known before by name and always felt inclined but never had time to indulge in, feeling perhaps that they are thus tardily making up for lost time. Only a few specify greater keenness of æsthetic enjoyment for works of art, music, drama, etc. Men very rarely, and women somewhat more frequently, confess to taking greater pleasure in dress, so that while we only seldom find dandified old men who affect the fashions and dress of youth, women not infrequently feel that as their personal charms decline they must compensate by richness of attire, jewels, and perhaps lavish ornamentation, coiffure, etc. One old lady in the eighties regretted bitterly that lavender was the only color in which she could now dress without criticism. Perhaps excess in this direction is, on the whole, more pleasing than the growing neglect of these things with years, which is so much more common.

Of the three muses, solitude, society, and nature, while all have a new if not stronger attraction it is the first that, from our returns, would seem to increase most with age. Deafness, or perhaps impatience with the overactivities of the young, may weaken the social bonds and physical infirmity may limit contact with nature but nearly all our respondents seek and find solace in themselves more than before. We find few old people who, like many younger ones, have a horror of being alone. Several have daily periods of retreat or retirement when they are “at home” only to themselves, perhaps to digest what they have lately read or to adjust with more equanimity to changes within or without. Thus the old generally find resources within themselves that more or less compensate for their growing isolation, although some reproach themselves or others that they find these resources too meager. One old philosopher says in substance that, realizing that he must sometime meet death absolutely alone and reach a point where he must take final leave of all and everything about him, he feels that he must strengthen his soul by practising for the most solitary of all experiences. Thus there is a certain hermit or recluse motive, which of old sent so many aging persons into the desert, wilderness, mountains, etc., a motif that may possibly have received some psychogenetic reinforcement from the dangers of ill-treatment by their fellows to which in cruder stages of life the old were exposed. It is entirely impossible for youth to fully sympathize with age because this would mean nothing less than to anticipate it, and so the aged often feel, deep in their souls, that there is a slight falsetto or conventional note, even in the greatest consideration shown to them. This condition, in morbid cases, may amount to suspicions of insincerity or a sense that kindness masks the opposite feeling. Happily, however, most of the aged do not seem to suffer acutely from this feeling but accept what is done for them at its full face value.

Nature, on the other hand, is probably at no stage of life felt to be so motherly, so sympathetic, or so full of moral meanings. Quite apart from the nature that science teaches us, the old seem to feel a recrudescence of the old anthropomorphic feeling that once made the nature-myths and has inspired so many of the parables, similes, tropes, and what are now called anagogic interpretations, by which man has read into nature’s phenomena the experiences of his own life. The old man feels in a new way that not only all bibles but humanity itself came straight out of the heart of nature, so that contemplation of her various aspects may become for him again a kind of navel-gazing. He sometimes becomes an annotator of weather and temperature, to which he has a new susceptibility, and feels a new kinship not only with the sun, storm, forest, mountain, shore and sea, but even with celestial phenomena. He welcomes the advent of spring with a trace of the old jubilance once expressed in many vernal festivals; feels and is perhaps depressed by the analogy between his period of life and winter; often indulges the hope that he may die in his favorite season and not be buried when the world is ice-bound; and is in the closest rapport with climate and often makes much sacrifice to live in one he has found most favorable. In general, he is responsive, probably far more deeply even than he realizes, to all the moods and tenses in which nature expresses herself. Perhaps his very wakefulness gives him a new rapport with the night through all its watches.

The old who have access to the country often select favorite and generally retired nooks where they can sit for hours and be alone with nature and thus entertain their souls. One old man who did this habitually every summer in a spot in what he called his coign of vantage told me that at each successive year, on revisiting this spot, he was conscious of some deep change, of a certain new sense of closeness to nature’s heart, which, although he could not define it, seemed to mark a new step in his development and which he thought somehow normative for his whole life during the year, for he often went to sleep thinking of the charm of this place, etc. The psychology of solitude, both chosen and enforced, shows that it often brings an almost rapturous delight in the contemplation of some simple object of nature—a flower, shrub, insect or tiny animal, which causes for a moment a kind of temporary focalization that gives it something of a fetishistic power. All this, however, does not lessen but perhaps rather augments, by the law of change and alternation, the growing charm that humanity in the large sense always has for old people who conserve their faculties. The sphinx riddle, what is man and what is the worth and meaning of all his strivings, never fails to come over the matured mind, despite the fact that it is the most baffling and insoluble of all problems, for “age brings a philosophic mind” and with it comes a new realization that the greatest study of mankind is man.

Do you enjoy the society of children, of young people, adults, or those near your own age more or less than formerly?