I notice that as a man grows old he is more and more fond of quoting
his father,--what he said, what he did. It has more and more force or
authority with him. It is a tribute to the past. Not until one has
reached the meridian of life or gone beyond it, does the spell of the
past begin to creep over him.
Said a middle-aged woman to me the other day, “Old people are beginning
to look very good to me; I like to be near them and to hear them talk.”
It is a common experience. I have seen many a granny on the street whom
I felt like kidnapping, taking home, and seating in my chimney corner,
for the sake of the fragrance and pathos of the past which hovered
about her; for the sake also, I suppose, of the filial yearning which
is pretty sure to revive in one after a certain time.
No woman can ever know the depths of her love for her mother until she
has become a mother herself, and no man knows the depths of his love
for his father until he has become a father. When we have experienced
what they experienced, when we have traveled over the road which they
traveled over, they assume a new value, a new sacredness in our eyes.
They are then our former selves, and a peculiarly tender regard for
them awakens in our hearts. There is pathos in the fact that so many
people lose their parents before the experiences of life have brought
about that final flavoring and ripening of the filial instinct to which
I refer.
After one has lived half a century, and maybe long before, his watch
begins to lose time; the years come faster than he is ready for them;
while he is yet occupied with the old, the new is upon him. How alien
and unfriendly seem the new years, strangers whom we reluctantly
entertain for a time but with whom we seem hardly to get on speaking
terms,--with what uncivil haste they come rushing in! One writes down
the figures on his letters or in his journals, but they all seem alien;
before one has become at all intimate with them, so that they come to
mean anything special to him, they are gone. While he is yet occupied
with the sixties, living upon the thoughts and experiences which they
brought him, the seventies have come and gone and the eighties have
knocked at his door.
The earlier years one took to his heart as he did his early friends.
How much we made of them; what varied hues and aspects they wore; how
we came to know each other; how rounded and complete were all things!
Ah, the old friends and the old years, we cannot separate them; they
had a quality and an affinity for us that we cannot find in the new.
The new years and the new friends come and go, and leave no impression.
Youth makes all the world plastic; it creates all things anew; youth is
Adam in Paradise, from which the burdens and the experiences of manhood
will by and by cause him to depart with longing and sorrow. “When we
were young,” says Schopenhauer, “we were completely absorbed in our
immediate surroundings; there was nothing to distract our attention
from them; we looked upon the objects about us as though they were the
only ones of their kind,--as though, indeed, nothing else existed at
all.”
It is perhaps inevitable that a man of sensibility and imagination
should grow conservative as he grows old. The new is more and more
distasteful to him. Did you ever go back to the old homestead where you
had passed your youth or your early manhood, and find the old house,
the old barn, the old orchard, in fact all the old landmarks gone? What
a desecration, you thought. The new buildings, how hateful they look to
you! They mean nothing to you but the obliteration of that which meant
so much. This experience proves nothing except that the past becomes a
part of our very selves; our roots, our beginnings, are there, and we
bleed when old things are cut away.
After a certain age is reached, how trivial and flitting seem the new
generations! The people whom we found upon the stage when we came into
the world,--the middle-aged and the elderly people who were bearing
the brunt of the battle,--they seem important and like a part of the
natural system of things. When they pass away what a void they leave!
Those who take their places, the new set, do not seem to fill the bill
at all. But the chances are that they are essentially the same class of
people, and will seem as permanent and important to our children as the
old people did to us.
To repeat the experience, go to a strange town and take up your abode.
Everybody seems in his proper place, there are no breaks, we miss
nothing, the social structure is complete. In a quarter of a century go
back to the place again; ruins everywhere, nearly all the old landmarks
gone, and a new generation upon the stage. But to the newcomer nothing
of this is visible; he finds everything established and in order as we
first found it. It is so in life. Our children are the newcomers who do
not and cannot go behind the visible scene.
We are always wondering who are going to take the place of the great
poets, the great preachers, the great statesmen and orators who
are passing away. We see the new men, but they are not the worthy
successors of these. The great ones are all old or dead. The new ones
we know not; they cannot be to us what the others were; they cannot
be the star actors in the drama in which we have played a part, and
therefore we fancy they are of little account.
Are there any genuine old men any more? Why, the old men, the real
ones, are all dead long ago; we knew them in our youth; they were
always old, old from the foundations of the world. These old men
of to-day are mere imitations; we can remember when they were not
old,--it is all put on. The grandfathers and the grandmothers whom we
knew--think of any present-day grandparents being anything more than
mere counterfeits of them!
Hence, also, the new generation always go astray according to the
old, and run after strange gods. “And also all that generation were
gathered unto their fathers; and there arose another generation after
them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which He had done for
Israel.”
How ready we are to believe in the past as against the present; to
believe that wonders happened then that do not happen now! Miracles
happened then, but not now. The Divine One came upon earth then, but
he comes no more! Our whole religion is of the past. How hard to
believe in a present revelation, or to believe in the advantages and
opportunities of the present hour!
From the standpoint of each of us the sunrise and the sunset seem
like universal facts; it must be evening or morning throughout the
world, we think, instead of just here on our meridian. In the same way
we are prone to look upon youth and age as commensurate with human
existence; the world was young when we were young, and it grows old as
we grow old; youth and age we think are not subjective experiences, but
objective realities.
How can these youths here by our side feel as we have felt, see what we
have seen, have the same joys and sorrows, the same friends, the same
experiences, see the world clad in the same hues, feel the same ties of
home, of father and mother, of school and comrades, when all the world
is so changed,--when these things and persons that were so much to us
are forever past? What is there left? How can life bring to them what
it brought to us? But it will. The same story is told over and over to
each succeeding generation, and each finds it new and true for them
alone. As we find our past in others, so our youths will find their
past in us, and find it unique and peculiar.
The lives of men are like the sparks that shoot upward; the same in the
first ages as in the last, each blazing its brief moment as it leaps
forth, some attaining a greater brilliancy or a higher flight than
others, but all ending at last in the same black obscurity. Or they
are like the waves that break upon the shore; one generation following
swift upon the course of another, repeating the same evolutions, and
crumbling and vanishing in the same way.
Probably no man ever lost his father or his mother or his bosom friend
without feeling that no one else could ever have had just such an
experience. Carlyle, in writing to Emerson shortly after each had lost
his mother, said, “You too have lost your good old mother, who stayed
with you like mine, clear to the last; alas, alas, it is the oldest Law
of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality,
as if it had never happened before!”
Speaking of these two rare men, each so attractive to the other, how
unlike they were in their attitude toward the past,--the one with
that yearning, wistful, backward glance, bearing the burden of an Old
World sorrow and remorse, long generations of baffled, repressed,
struggling humanity coming to full consciousness in him; the other
serene, hopeful, optimistic, with the spell of the New World upon him,
turning cheerfully and confidently to the future! Emerson describes
himself as an endless seeker with no past at his back. He seemed to
have no regrets, no wistful retrospections. His mood is affirmative
and expectant. The power of the past was not upon him, but it had laid
its hand heavily upon his British brother, so heavily that at times it
almost overpowered him. Carlyle’s dominant note is distinctively that
of retrospection. He yearns for the old days. The dead call to him from
their graves. In the present he sees little, from the future he expects
less; all is in the past. How he magnifies it, how he re-creates it and
reads his own heroic temper into it! The twelfth century is more to him
than the nineteenth.
It is true that the present time is more or less prosy, vulgar,
commonplace to most men; not till we have lived it and colored it
with our own experiences does it begin to draw us. This seems to have
been preëminently the case with Carlyle; he was morbidly sensitive to
the crude and prosy present, and almost preternaturally alive to the
glamour of the past. What men had done, what they had touched with
their hands, what they had colored with their lives, that was sacred to
him.
Is it not a common experience that as we grow old there comes more and
more a sense of solitude and exposure? Life does not shut us in and
house us as it used to do. One by one the barriers and wind-breaks are
taken down, and we become more and more conscious of the great cosmic
void that encompasses us. Our friends were walls that shielded us;
see the gaps in their ranks now. Our parents were like the roof over
our heads; what a sense of shelter they gave us! Then our hopes, our
enthusiasms, how they housed us, or peopled and warmed the void! A keen
living interest in things, what an armor against the shafts of time is
that! Always on the extreme verge of time, this moment that now passes
is the latest moment of all the eternities. _New_ time always. The old
time we cannot keep. The old house, the old fields, and in a measure
the old friends may be ours, but the atmosphere that bathed them all,
the sentiment that gave to them hue, this is from within and cannot be
kept.
Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it, until it
has passed over us and taken with it a part of ourselves. While it
is here we value it not,--it is like raw material not yet woven into
the texture and pattern of our lives; but the instant it is gone
and becomes yesterday, or last spring, or last year, how tender and
pathetic it looks to us! The shore of time! I think of it as a shore
constantly pushing out into the infinite sea, stretching farther and
farther back of us like a fair land idealized by distance into which we
may not again enter. The future is alien and unknown, but the past is a
part of ourselves. So many ties bind us to it. The past is the cemetery
of our days. There they lie, every one of them. Musingly we recall
their faces and the gifts they brought us,--the friends, the thoughts,
the experiences, the joys, the sorrows; many of them we have quite
forgotten, but they were all dear to us once.
If our friends should come back from their graves, could they be what
they once were to us? Not unless our dead selves came back also. How
precious and pathetic the thought of father and mother to all men; yet
the enchantment of the past is over them also. They are in that sacred
land; their faces shine with its hallowed light, their voices come to
us with its moving tones.
Pope in replying to a letter of Swift’s said, “You ask me if I have
got a supply of new friends to make up for those who are gone? I think
that impossible; for not our friends only, but so much of ourselves is
gone by the mere flux and course of years, that, were the same friends
restored to us, we could not be restored to ourselves to enjoy them.”
In view of this power and attraction of the past, what do we mean by
saying we would not live our lives over again? It seems to be an almost
universal feeling. Cicero says, “If any god should grant me, that
from this period of life I should become a child again and cry in the
cradle, I should earnestly refuse it;” and Sir Thomas Browne says,
“For my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again
the thread of my days.” Sir Thomas did not want to live his life over
again, for fear he would live it worse instead of better. Cicero did
not regret that he had lived, but intimates that he had had enough of
this life, and wanted to enter upon that new and larger existence. “Oh,
glorious day! when I shall depart to that divine company and assemblage
of spirits, and quit this troubled and polluted scene!”
But probably the true reason was not given in either case. _We do
not like to go back._ We are done with the past; we have dropped it,
sloughed it off. However pleasing it may be in the retrospect, however
fondly we may dwell upon it, our real interest is in the present and
the future. Probably no man regrets that he did not live at an earlier
period, one hundred, five hundred, two thousand years ago; while the
wish that our existence had been deferred to some future age is quite
common. It all springs from this instinctive dislike to going back, and
this zest for the unknown, the untried. There are many experiences in
the lives of us all that we would like to repeat, but we do not want
to go back. We habitually look upon life as a journey; the past is the
road over which we have just come; these were fair countries we just
passed through, delightful experiences we had at this point and at
that, but we do not want to turn back and retrace our steps. There is
more or less a feeling of satiety. We want to go ahead, but of what
is behind us we have had our fill. What is the feeling we have when we
meet a crowd pressing into the show as we are coming out, or when we
see our eager friends embarking for Europe as we again set foot on our
native shore? Do we not have a kind of pity for them? Do we not feel
that we have taken the cream and that they will find only the skimmed
milk? We think of the world as moving on, everybody and everything as
pressing forward. To live our lives over again would be to go far to
the rear. It would be to give up the present and all that it holds; it
would be a kind of death.
Take from life all novelty, newness, surprise, hope, expectation, and
what have you left? Nothing but a cold pancake, which even the dog
hesitates over. One’s life is full of routine and repetition, but
then it is always a new day; it is always the latest time; we are on
the crest of the foremost wave; we are perpetually entering a new and
untried land. I am told that lecturers do not weary of repeating the
same lecture over and over, because they always have a new audience.
The routine of our lives is endurable because, as it were, we always
have a new audience; this day is the last birth of time and its face
no man has before seen. Life becomes stale to us when we cease to feel
any interest in the new day, when the night does not re-create us,
when we are not in some measure born afresh each morning. As age comes
on we become less and less capable of renewal by rest and sleep, and
so gradually life loses its relish, till it is liable to become a
positive weariness.
Hence in saying we would not live our lives over, we are only
emphasizing this reluctance we feel at going back, at taking up again
what we have finished and laid down. Time translates itself in the
mind as space; our earlier lives seem afar off, to be reached only by
retracing our steps, and this we are not willing to do. In the only
sense in which we can live our lives over, namely, in the lives of our
children, we live them over again very gladly. We begin the game again
with the old zest.
Who would not have his youth renewed? What old man would not have
again, if he could, the vigor and elasticity of his prime? But we would
not go back for them; we would have them here and now, and date the new
lease from this moment. It argues no distaste for life, therefore, no
deep dissatisfaction with it, to say we would not live our lives over
again. We do live them over again from day to day, and from year to
year; but the shadow of the past, we would not enter that. Why is it a
shadow? Why this pathos of the days that are gone? Is it because, as
Schopenhauer insists, life has more pain than pleasure? But it is all
beautiful, the painful experiences as well as the pleasurable ones;
it is all bathed in a light that never was on sea or land, and yet we
see it as it were through a mist of tears. There is no pathos in the
future, or in the present; but in the house of memory there are more
sighs than laughter.