Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Special forms of pleasure that have to be prepared for attract us less but we find soul-filling satisfaction in just living, contemplating nature wherever we happen to be, eating, sleeping, and in common converse. All these things acquire a charm unknown before, while “occasions,” events, and sights that are rare and afar lose their charm. Thus we come to love each hour of each day and the most wonted and commonplace experiences, while our work (for no one can be happy without some task) even though it seemed drudgery before becomes attractive because we can do it when and as we will and as much or little of it as our strength permits or inclination impels. Meanwhile friends grow nearer and dearer, enmities fade, and we enjoy converse with those toward whom we were formerly indifferent or even averse. Thus old age may become the most satisfying and deeply enjoyable stage of life. Hitherto the rest cures we prescribed have been more or less reversionary to youthful or even primitive scenes and activities. It may be that this is wrong and that for all such cases we should prescribe for the young or middle-aged the occupations, attitudes and regimen of the old and that this would be more therapeutic.

Sensations and movements are the basis of mind and when these are reduced, as in old age, we often have the phenomena of mental starvation because the supplies of mental pabulum are lowered. If the old have little society and do not read, their psychic powers of digesting their experience run down, not from any inherent weakness but because they are on short rations for data. The mills could often grind as fine and as much as ever, and possibly more so, but the grist is lacking. Thus there are two opposite trends in the old. On the one hand, their physical state demands attention to themselves so that they tend to have “too much ego” in their cosmos, grow subjective, and may become hypochondriacal or preoccupied with their own personal problems. The simple decree of nature is that we must give more care to our health and morale and it is excess, defect, or perversion of this deep instinct that causes so many of our pains and our ill repute. Here lies our chief need of personal study, psychoanalysis, and reëducation. The other trend is in the opposite direction, toward depersonalization. We need to look out, not in; to forget self and to be absorbed in objectives. We are impelled to escape our environment and interest ourselves in things that are remote in space and time, in nature, the stars, great causes and events, personalities, masterpieces, to escape from our miserable selves by their contemplation. We cannot see the countenance of things for their soul. It is this fugue from self that perhaps impels us to so many of our petty pastimes and diversions: solitaire, idle reveries, our predilection for amusements, fussiness about our things; as well as, on the negative side, to neglect our person, really of dwindling value in the great world and soon to be effaced. All these phenomena are outcrops of the tendency by which “the individual withers and the world is more and more,” for our fate is depersonalization and resumption into nature. These symptoms are anticipations of euthanasia or, to use a phrase now current in psychology, they are extrovertive and not introvertive, just as the old were meant to be.

Thus the old need a higher kind and degree of self-knowledge than they have yet attained. They need to be individually studied and analyzed to avoid the new, peculiar, and not yet understood dementia præcox now so liable to supervene upon the youth of age. This is all the more needful now that the intensity of modern life with its industrial and managerial strain compels earlier withdrawal from its strenuosities. We live longer and also begin to retire earlier, so that senescence is lengthening at both ends. Hence, again, the need of midwives to bring us into the new world of higher sanity now possible to ever more of us. Both we and our civilization now so checked, disoriented, and misled by immaturities are in such crying need of a higher leadership that is not forthcoming! We are suffering chiefly from unripeness. The human stock is not maturing as it should. Life is so complicated that the years of apprenticeship are ever longer and harder, so that we are exhausted ere we become master workmen in our craft and the rapid age turnover this involves robs us of too many of the choicest fruits of experience.

Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a new vitality, physical and mental. If we are normal and not too spent, we feel new hopes, ambitions, make plans to surpass our old selves and to at last be, do, say, enjoy something really worth while. As we pass our life in review, stage by stage, up to the present, it seems so incomplete, fragmentary, tentative, and altogether unsatisfying that we almost wonder whether it was we ourselves who really lived it or someone else whose career we are following with an objective detachment never felt before toward our own ego. Certain it is that a new veil falls between us and our past, gauzy and transparent though it be. Our psychic nature did not intend us for the rôle of reminiscence so persistently assigned to and so commonly accepted by us. Our juvenile memories are but the ragbag vestiges of a vaster experience that had to be forgotten to be completely incorporated in our personality and to ascribe too much significance to them is the fetishism of senility. If we write up our lives, we can make them interesting and valuable only by using our better information about and more sympathetic rapport with ourselves with the same impartiality that a close and discerning friend would do if he had all our data. It is for the things of the present and for the problems of the future that our mental vision becomes clearer than ever before. Our wish and will to achieve and make our insights known and prevail acquire new force.

How different we find old age from what we had expected or observed it to be; how little there is in common between what we feel toward it and the way we find it regarded by our juniors; and how hard it is to conform to their expectations of us! They think we have glided into a peaceful harbor and have only to cast anchor and be at rest. We feel that we have made landfall on a new continent where we must not only disembark but explore and make new departures and institutions and give a better interpretation to human life. Instead of descending toward a deep, dark valley we stand, in fact, before a delectable mountain, from the summit of which, if we can only reach it, we can view the world in a clearer light and in truer perspective than the race has yet attained. It is all only a question of strength and endurance. That is the great and only but, when we squarely face it, a staggering proviso. In all essentials we are better and more fit than ever before save only for the curse of fatigability, for age and death are nothing but fatigue advancing and finally conquering life. One single example of a hale old man dowered by nature and nurture, as immune from tire as youth is, would give the world a new idea of senectitude.

We were told that the days and years pass more quickly as we advance in age. What could be more false! Not only do the nights, of which sound sleep once made us unconscious, often drag slowly through their watches but each day is so long that we often find time hanging heavily on our hands; and when we have done all the work we can, we turn to our friends to amuse us and seek and perhaps invent pastimes or fresh occupations to kill it. Sermons, lectures, meetings of all kinds, even the drama, seem long. The winter lingers until we almost fear that spring will never come or out-of-doors attract us again. When we have to wait for things, the time stretches as if there were no limit to its elasticity, and when we turn to reveries of the past, it is a last resort from the tedium vitae. We really have time for anything and to spare. It is the demon fatigue that makes us so in love with diversion, for rest is more and more frequently sought and found in change.

They say our emotional life is damped. True, we are more immune from certain great passions and our affectivity is very differently distributed. But what lessons of repression we have to learn! If the fires of youth are banked and smouldering they are in no wise extinguished and perhaps burn only the more fiercely inwardly because they cannot vent themselves, as even the Lange-James theory admits for repressed feelings, inhibition of which really only makes them more intense. We get scant credit for the self-control that restrains us from so much we feel impelled to say and do and if we break out, it is ascribed not to its true cause in outer circumstance but to the irritability thought characteristic of our years. Age has the same right to emotional perturbations as youth and is no whit less exposed and disposed to them. Here, as everywhere, we are misunderstood and are in such a feeble minority that we have to incessantly renounce our impulsions. Marie Bashkirtseff has betrayed the secret of how the pubescent girl, and Karin Michaëlis, of how the woman of forty feels, but no one has ever attempted to explain the sentimental nature of aging men or women. Even Solomon and Omar Khayyam presented only the negations and not the reaffirmations of the will-to-live.

Thus it is no wonder if the old often best illustrate what Henri Bordeaux describes as “the fear of living.” René Doumic thinks that there is a new disease in our old civilization and that many in their prime only make a pretense of living. “We value our peace above everything and wish to keep it at all hazards, however dearly we must pay for it. We shun responsibilities, avoid risks and chances of struggle, flee from adventure and danger, seek to escape from everything that makes for the charm and value of life. We no longer have any faith in the future because we no longer have faith in ourselves.” How well this applies to those brought face to face with the last stage of life! The fact is, we must find and make new pleasures as well as new modes of escaping and mitigating the pains of body and mind and must learn anew how to love, hate, fear, be angry, pity, and sympathize aright. The serenity ascribed to us would pall and bring stagnation. It is a profound psychological truth that “out of the heart are the issues of life” and our heart is not dead; on the contrary, emotivity probably increases with years and most expressions of it, unless they become more sublimated, strongly tend to grow more crass and stormy. We were never more interested in things, persons, events, causes, in life itself. Slights rankle, neglect chills, attentions warm, affronts incense, and praise thrills us, and if we grow censorious, it is because our ideals of conduct and motive have become higher and purer and we are in a greater hurry to see them realized. We cannot help these gropings toward a new dispensation and their very persistence is the best reason for believing that they will sometime find their goal in a better stage of things and an improved race of men not in another world but here. Perhaps some of even what we now call the whimsies of the old will be seen to be the labor pains of humanity, which is striving thus to surpass itself, to improve the stock, and to really bring in a new and higher type of man.

Old age is called second childhood. This is all wrong for there is nothing rejuvenative about it. Childhood is the most active, healthful, buoyant, and intuitive stage of life; age, the least so. What is there really common to the morning and evening of life? We even lose much of the power we once had to understand children and if we love them, we want them at a distance, while they in turn understand and like us little by nature. They inherit far less of the results of experience with grandparents than with parents, for less of us have survived to see them and the latter often resent or even criticise our relations to them. We are nearly as immune to their prevailing faults as to their diseases. They listen to our stories but do not crave our cuddling, are jealous if we usurp the offices of their parents to them and are usually a little less free in our presence. Nature has established an old and close rapport between one generation and the next. Even young teachers get on best with young, old with maturer pupils. M. L. Reymert[197] says that his general study shows him that teachers below twenty and over forty are of less influence than teachers between these ages. The most efficient man teacher is generally from 25 to 35. The best woman teacher has a little wider range—say, 20 to 40. But of course mental and physiological age are different. Helen M. Downey “Old and Young Teachers,” Ped. Sem., June, 1918, concludes, on the basis of questionnaire data, that the younger teacher has other interests that keep her bright and cheerful; the older teacher excels in mental and the younger in dispositional traits; the old are careless of appearance and this does not appeal to children; the older rule by discipline, not by love and kindness; the young teacher more often overtaxes her strength; the old are more set in methods, fixed in opinions, resent suggestions for improvement. Many suggest there should be an age limit of 60. Health and temper suffer. There are often negative psychic idiosyncrasies. Older teachers lose contact. Social traits are a very great factor in consideration of the period of rapid growth. Dispositional qualities are more impressive than any other. The favorite teacher is enthusiastic, energetic, young. Pupils’ estimates do not involve age when they speak of old and young. I know an old and successful professor, interested in his work to the end, who, when he retired with powers little abated and much work yet to be completed, found that in his speech and writing he imagined himself as no longer addressing minds in the student, even graduate, stage, but wished to be at home teaching and learning from those not under forty, for at that age real wisdom begins, the effects of special training having then faded. A refocalization took place in his mind that involved not only new methods but, yet more, new topics and subject matter. What student, however mature, would care for and what curriculum in any university in the world would include, for example, the theme of this volume. And who but a Greis would ever have found its preparation a fascinating task! No, the old are not childish but, if they are normal, have simply reached a stage of postmaturity that involves much of what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of all values.

But if we can no longer see over the crest of the divide that separates age from youth, if the acclivity is shut off, we do see more nearly and clearly each step of the declivity and find the catabasis of life no less zestful than its anabasis was in its time, while we have the great advantage that comes from the power of being able to compare the two and this itself opens rich mines of thought. The age of the sage has bid a final adieu not only to all puerilities but to the callow ardors of the ephebic stage. He is graduated from adulthood and turns, as by an eschatological instinct, to ultimate human problems, of which younger minds, though they may be attracted to them, can have only premonitions. To hear and heed this call is the strength and glory of those who are complete “grown-ups.” The trouble with mankind in general is that it has not yet grown up. Its faults, which we see on every hand, and the blunders that make so large a part of history are those of immaturity. Man has always felt the need of guardianship and because he lacked wisdom invented immortal omniscient gods—tribal, national, or cosmic—to guide him and as embodiments of what he felt lacking in himself. It is just this need of an all-wise providence that the old will come to supply if and as humanity slowly ripens.