So many persons are disappointed in life! They have had false aims. They have wanted something for nothing. They have listened to the call of ambition and have not heeded the inner light. They have tried short cuts to fame and fortune, and have not been willing to pay the price in self-denial that all worthy success demands. We find our position in life according to the specific gravity of our moral and intellectual natures.
NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OLD AGE[7]
The physiology of old age is well understood—general sluggishness of all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them from their graves: There was G——; how distinctly he recalls the name and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was B——, a name only. There was R——, and the memory of the career he had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat accident; but of his looks, his voice—not a vestige! It is a memory full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly—voice, look, manner—all complete. Others are only names associated with certain incidents in school.
[7] These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand into an article, were among the very last things he wrote.—C. B.
Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then the next moment, away it goes again! Or, shall we call it a kind of mental anæsthesia, or mental paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about Georgetown, South America. I repeated the name over to myself a few times. "Have I not known such a place some time in my life? Where is it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" The name seemed like a dream. Then I thought of Washington, the Capital, and the city above it, but had to ask a friend if the name was Georgetown. Then suddenly, as if some chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came! Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it? (I had lived in Washington for ten years.)
So we say, old age may reason well, but old age does not remember well. This is a commonplace. It seems as if memory were the most uncertain of all our faculties.
Power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only need to focus upon you a little more completely.
Of course both sight and hearing are a little blunted in old age. But for myself I see as well as ever I did, except that I have to use spectacles in reading; but nowadays the younger observers hear the finer sounds in nature that sometimes escape me.
Some men mellow with age, others harden, but the man who does not in some way ripen is in a bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what it lacks in repose.
To grow old gracefully is the trick.