Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
"My father is 95 years old except that he's dead." Is this a nonsensical thing to say?
No. Death is an entirely effective bar to aging: you can't age if you are dead. But you can get older. The sentence sounds like nonsense or a joke because we tend to conflate aging with getting older. That they are different is clear from the fact that some of us age faster than others while we all get older at the same rate.
"My old friends are dead," he said, "and my new ones will never be old."
The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:
No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]
The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber. I must now quit the scriptorium and the 'sphere to sally forth in quest of vittles for the evening's repast.
Life prepares us for death whether we prepare or not. One way it does so is by weaning us of any over-estimation of the significance of the things of this world. For this weaning to take effect, however, one must take care to grow old. Disillusionment takes time. The passage of time, and plenty of it, will reliably reduce both the number of things that matter and the degree of the mattering of those that remain to matter.
Ageing may therefore be recommended as a way to wisdom, though it be a narrow gate thereto, trodden by few, the rest serving to show that there is no fool like an old fool.
The old saw that age brings wisdom is resisted by Susan Jacoby. I resist her resistance.
Both animal and thinker, he faces two sorts of threats. Among the first, hardening of the arteries. Among the second, hardening of the categories. Which is worse depends on your categories. Either way, categories rule.
As we slow down, time speeds up!
Here (HT: Karl White)
A ninety year old woman died in her home in Auburn. She had decomposed through the floor before she was found six months later. The diaries found in her belongings shed light on this lonely and brilliant mind. Watch the documentary above, and read further excerpts from her diaries below.
A worthwhile NYT piece and a good counter to Susan Jacoby's Never Say Die which I criticize in one of my better posts, appropriately entitled Never Say Die. An excerpt from the former:
An impediment to wisdom is thinking, “I can’t stand who I am now because I’m not who I used to be,” said Isabella S. Bick, a psychotherapist who, at 81, still practices part time out of her home in Sharon, Conn. She has aging clients who are upset by a perceived worsening of their looks, their sexual performance, their physical abilities, their memory. For them, as for herself, an acceptance of aging is necessary for growth, but “it’s not a resigned acceptance; it’s an embracing acceptance,” she said.
“Wise people are able to accept reality as it is, with equanimity,” Professor Ardelt said.
True, acceptance of reality is an ingredient in wisdom. But the distinction between resigned and embracing acceptance smacks of the bogus. Let's say you are 80+. You are now deep in the backcountry of old age. You must accept with equanimity the attendant deterioration. Whining will only make things worse and no one wants to hear it. You must set a good example. But how does one embrace the deterioration of one's physical and mental powers? That is a bit like physically embracing the skeleton that one will soon become.
I can think of only two ways to embrace one's deterioration, neither of them live options for the average reader of the Grey Lady. There are those who have had enough of this life and embrace deterioration as a means to its cessation. When Ludwig Wittgenstein learned that he had cancer, he said, "Good." And there are those who look beyond this life to a truer and better one. They are the mystics, the religious, and the true philosophers.
But if you are a non-nihilistic naturalist, someone who believes that this life is satisfactory as it is and worth living and that there is no other, then how the hell can you embrace the Buddha's triad of sickness, old age, and death? Besides, there would seem to be little point to the personal "growth" consequent upon "embracing" aging if one is soon to be snuffed out altogether.
Here is another excerpt:
True personal wisdom involves five elements, said Professor Staudinger, now a life span psychologist and professor at Columbia University. They are self-insight; the ability to demonstrate personal growth; self-awareness in terms of your historical era and your family history; understanding that priorities and values, including your own, are not absolute; and an awareness of life’s ambiguities.
That's pretty good except for the bit about priorities and values not being absolute.
Suppose you are about to eat an excellent dinner when you notice that a neighbor is being viciously assaulted in her front yard. Do you finish your dinner and then go to the assistance of your neighbor? First things first! I say that it is absolutely true, and absolutely evident, that your neighbor's health and well-being take priority over your delectation of an unnecessary meal.
There are a couple of old men on my street who have made it past 90. Shaky Jake, as I call him, is 91, except that there is nothing shaky about him. I encountered him the other day on the rocky trails of the Superstition foothills, upright, lucid, happy.
Across the street from Jake lives Tim, still self-reliant and sharp at 95.
From my conversations with them, the quality of their lives is good. But attitude is everything, here as elsewhere.
More on this topic here.
We boomers are one self-absorbed generation, further evidence of which fact is a post like this. You are a boomer if you were born between 1946 and 1964. Call the elder half of that cohort the true boomers, or the classics. Call the second half the shadow boomers, or the reboots. Take this test to see where you fall.
I'm talkin' 'bout my generation. If music is the sound track of one's life, then you must admit that we boomers have the best soundtrack of any American generation.
It must have been the fall of '72. Old Carl and I were sitting in his Culver City flophouse room drinking Brew 102 after a day's manual labor . He delivered himself of a line not to be forgotten.
"Bill, once I was limber all over but stiff in one place. Now it's the other way around."
He fills up quickly, but empties slowly.
W. K. writes,
You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope. People have always sensed that the world is falling apart, because in a sense it always has been, but even greater than the mystery of evil is the mystery of goodness. Rather than regretting my being 26 rather than 62, I remember, in my Mavphil-inspired gratitude exercises, that the cruelest regime in the history of mankind fell during my lifetime.
I have always believed that Good and Evil are not opposites on a par, but that somehow Good is more fundamental and that Evil is somehow derivative or interstitial or parasitic or privative. The Thomist doctrine of evil as privatio boni is one way of explaining this relation, though that doctrine is open to objections.
So I agree with my correspondent that, in the end, Good triumphs. Unfortunately, it is a long way to the end, a long march along a via dolorosa with many stations of suffering. I don't relish making that journey. Hence my satisfaction at the thought that my life is, most likely, three-quarters over. As I said in that post-election post,
One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil. When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men.
I too am grateful that the Evil Empire fell during my lifetime. But now we have an incompetent jackass in the White House, a hard-core leftist, who was given four more years by a foolish electorate for whom panem et circenses are the supreme desiderata. Innocent of the ways of world, trapped in leftist fantasy land, he is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan. We are in deep trouble.
But I do not counsel despair. We live by hope, within this life and beyond it. We shall hope on and fight on.
As long as their health holds out and they avoid mirrors, the old can cultivate the illusion that they are still young. If the young will let them.
Old age for some is a sort of afterlife in a foreign country. One has lived beyond one's own time and now finds oneself among strangers.