A Quaker lady of seventy-four has reread Emerson, Browning, Tennyson, Shakespeare, and other masters, and found them more intelligible and charged with meaning than ever before. Hence she is convinced that she has a new mental clarity, not only in regard to these but to the fundamental questions of life. She shrinks from companionship with the very old and infirm but loves society more than ever, especially of those somewhat younger than herself. She feels no temptation except to indulge too much in day-dreaming, has less love for young children individually but found more enthusiasm than in anything else in a cause that saved the lives of many and improved the condition of yet more. She is deeply religious, reading the Bible daily and hoping to see her departed friends in another life, although “I have my doubts.”
One venerable respondent wrote in substance that no words could describe the rest and peace that slowly supervened after he had ridded his mind of every vestige of the old belief in which he was trained of a future personal life and realized that he would live on only in the contribution he had made to the sum of human knowledge and welfare, in the grateful memory of his friends, in his posterity, and that his individuality, with all its limitations, would be resolved into or rendered back to the cosmos with his mouldering corpse. When he realized that death would end all forever for him and was once free from all the harassing hopes and fears about a postmortem state, the new serenity and poise made him believe that he had penetrated to a deeper psychic level than that explored and bequeathed to the Christian world by the marvelously gifted but epileptic apostle, Paul, and that he had struck the bedrock of humanity and attained a fuller and larger completeness of life as it was meant to be and will be if man ever comes to full maturity. He compares the attainment of this new attitude toward death to the change that took place in Bunyan’s Christian when he turned his back upon the city of Vanity Fair and faced the Delectable Mountain.
An able respondent who has given much attention to these subjects concludes that deep in his soul every candid mind feels that all arguments for immortality are more or less falsetto and do not ring true, are factitious, and are neither born of nor have the power to bring inner conviction. Their propounders, if they are honest to the core and also if they have the power to analyze their own mental processes in constructing such so-called proofs, feel, though they may not know it, that they are really reasoning against their own profounder convictions or seeking to convince themselves against their own intuitions. They vilipend skepticism because they hope thus to drown its still small voice in themselves. In no other field of thought does it begin to be so hard to be sincere with ourselves and in no other domain of belief do men accept such specious and inconclusive evidence. Most demonstrators of immortality within the Christian pale fall back sooner or later, some more and some less, upon the myth of revelation and the postulated faculty called faith which, when we study its psychology, turns out to be only a hope-wish born of the unspent momentum of the will-to-live and this deploys in the individual in which it is thus falsely interpreted, as egoism wants it to be. Rich and rank as have been its products for the imagination, they are fancy bred and, in fact, superstitions, extra-beliefs or Aberglauben of the psyche and their acceptance as authentic or final is always and everywhere a craven flight from reality, for the sentence of execution is already passed upon all of us and is only suspended for a season.
One thoughtful respondent who is facing his sunset years says that he has heard some sixty-five hundred sermons and has reversed certain of his opinions so that he has felt compelled to resign as a trustee of his church since he has a new and clear idea of the kind of church he wants. He cannot longer believe in the kind of deity who likes to be flattered, thanked, entreated, and listen to Te Deums. “We inherit such ideas from vain Oriental kings.” “Symbolisms a thousand years old are not suited to us or to our times.” “I cannot subscribe to that stock idea—‘the religion I got from my mother’s knee is good enough for me’—for by the same token we should now be idolaters or Druids.” “Now that the church has become a man it ought to ‘put away childish things’ and should no longer use ‘bottles’ and ceremonies two or three thousand years old.” “If we judge the church by its results in suppressing selfishness or even vice, it is a failure and any other agency in any other field or business not being able to show any better and faster results, that is, in reducing crime, unrest, selfishness, and hate between classes, races, and nations, especially as evidenced by the experiences of the decade 1911–1921, would have to resign.” “If Christianity had not been, almost from the very start, handicapped by the church in creating irrelevant and quarrelsome issues and diverting emphasis to a future life, instead of improving the conditions of the present one, it is fair to say that our present social, moral, and spiritual condition would have been very different from and better than it is.” The church atmosphere, hymns, prayers, sermons, ceremonies, “are all age-musty and dominated by and saturated with miracles and sanguinary and puzzling atonement and trinity theology, things with which I am no longer in sympathy and the emphasis of which is offensive to me.” “I think all these things are man-made incrustations. I sometimes think the wonder is not why so many men stay away from church but why so many attend it. Religion must be rescued. I do not know how but it has got to be done.”
CHAPTER VIII
SOME CONCLUSIONS
The early decades of age—The deadline of seventy—The patheticism of the old—The attitude of physicians toward them—Fluctuations of youth—Erotic decline—Alternations in the domain of sleep, food, mood, irritability, rational self-control, and sex—The dawn of old age in women—Dangers of the disparity when December weds May—Sexual hygiene for the old—Mental effects of the dulling of sensations—Lack of mental pabulum—The tedium vitae—Changes in the emotional life—Age not second childhood—Women in the dangerous age—Need of a new and higher type of old age—Aristotle’s golden mean and the magnanimous man—The age of disillusion—Increased power of synthesis—Nature’s balance between old and young—The eternal war between them—Superior powers of the old in perspective and larger views—New love of nature and the country—Their preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and as judges—Looking within and without—Merging with the cosmos—The three ways of escaping the decay of civilization.
To learn that we are really old is a long, complex, and painful experience. Each decade the circle of the Great Fatigue narrows around us, restricting the intensity and endurance of our activities. In the thirties the athletic power passes its prime, for muscular energy begins to abate. There is also some loss of deftness, subtlety, and power of making fine, complex movements of the accessory motor system, and a loss of facility for acquiring new skills. In the forties grayness and, in men, baldness may begin and eyesight is a little less acute so that we hold our book or paper farther off. We are less fond of “roughing” it or of severe forms of exercise. We may become so discontented with our achievements or our environment that we change our whole plan of life. In the fifties we feel that half a century is a long time to have lived and compare our vitality with that of our forbears and contemporaries of the same age. Memory for names may occasionally slip a cog. We go to the physician for a “once over” to be sure that all our organs are functioning properly. We realize that if we are ever to accomplish anything more in the world we must be up and at it and give up many old hopes and ambitions as vain. Perhaps we indulge ourselves in certain pleasures hitherto denied before it is forever too late. At sixty we realize that there is but one more threshold to cross before we find ourselves in the great hall of discard where most lay their burdens down and that what remains yet to do must be done quickly. Hence this is a decade peculiarly prone to overwork. We refuse to compromise with failing powers but drive ourselves all the more because we are on the home stretch. We anticipate leaving but must leave things right and feel we can rest up afterwards. So we are prone to overdraw our account of energy and brave the danger of collapse if our overdraft is not honored. Thus some cross the conventional deadline of seventy in a state of exhaustion that nature can never entirely make good. Added to all this is the struggle, never so intense for men as in the sixties, to seem younger, to be and remain necessary, and perhaps to circumvent the looming possibilities of displacement by younger men. Thus it is that men often shorten their lives and, what is far more important, impair the quality of their old age, so that we yet see and know but little of what it could, should, or would be if we could order life according to its true nature and intent. Only greater easement between fifty and seventy can bring ripe, healthful, vigorous senectitude, the services of which to the race constitute, as I have elsewhere tried to show, probably the very greatest need of our civilization to-day.
In the seventies we often begin to muse on how our environment will look and what our friends will do when we are gone; and now the suspicion, hitherto nebulous, that there are quarters in which our demise would be welcome may arise to consciousness and perhaps take definite form. There are those who, also perhaps unconsciously, are waiting for our place or positions and so we grow hypersensitive to every manifestation of respect or esteem and not only resist being set aside or being superseded but seek to find new kinds of service that will be recognized as useful. The seventieth is the saddest of all birthdays and if we “linger superfluous on the stage,” we feel that society regards us as, to some extent, a class apart; and so we instinctively make more effort to compensate our clumsiness by spryness and gently resist the kindly offices and tokens of respect to which the young incline or, perhaps more often, are taught to render the old. We are a trifle more prone to lose or mislay things, perhaps almost resent the family’s solicitude for our glasses, slippers, cane, overcoat, diet, and quiet. We have to give ever-increasing time and attention to health and to nursing ourselves and in many exceptional experiences feel that we are seeing persons and may be doing things for the last time. All our plans and efforts and prospects directed toward the future have a new element of uncertainty and tentativeness. We can easily be spoiled by kindness or soured by neglect and our own personality requires so much attention in making the new adjustments that are necessary that we are in new danger of becoming selfish; while our nerves are liable to grow irritable and there is a new trend to depressive states as our activities abate.
It is not strange that one of our grievous dangers is patheticism. One who begins to suspect waning love on the part of those in his sphere may come to accept and even crave pity in its place and farther on in the infirmities of age a husband or wife may do the same and magnify to their partner ailments and symptoms to this end. A little farther yet in this direction lies what may be called the hysteria of senescents. We may come to love to be waited on more than is needful and thus grow into a fictive helplessness and dependence on the ministrations of others. We love to pour our troubles into sympathetic ears and may be spoiled by the too great devotion of our married partner, sons, or daughters, whom we sometimes permit to become slaves not only to our infirmities but to our very whims and notions. Who has not known old people otherwise excellent who almost seem to have lived by the precept of never doing for themselves anything they can get others to do for them. There are fathers who, with no thought that they are selfish, monopolize the love and services of their daughters, and mothers who do the same of grown sons, and these of the younger generation may lavish upon their parents the devotion that was meant for a mate or a family of their own. We know that marriage, when it comes to such people, is likely to be unhappy unless the wife is in the image of the fondled mother or the husband in that of the too much loved father. We are prone to forget that for the old, as truly as for the young, it is more blessed to give than to receive and that we must not insist on our rights and forget that each has its corresponding duties. The old are rarely oppressed by a sense of gratitude and may come to feel that because they have reared their children they have laid them under obligations of a return service that can never be fully discharged, forgetting that beyond certain limits they pay us best by rendering the same service not to us but to their own children. Most of us are or are destined to become a real burden and this we should strive to delay and lighten and not to accelerate or increase, and we should not come to make a luxury of our sense of dependence. Thus if the old have savings, however small, they should never expropriate but retain and use them wherever and when their help will be most serviceable. The fact that we have withdrawn from larger outside activities naturally inclines us to strive to be of compensatingly more account in the smaller circle left us but this must not make us arbitrary in this narrowed field for self-assertion and we should not feel that as we become less important to the world we must become more so within the family circle. We have, in fact, a new place and must exert ourselves to learn and keep it, without interference with those who are taking ours or making their own careers.