CHAPTER VII

REPORT ON QUESTIONNAIRE RETURNS

Their value suggestive but only for a class--(1) Effects of the

first realization of the approach of old age--(2) To what do

you ascribe your long life?--(3) How do you keep well?--(4) Are

you troubled by regrets?--(5) What temptations do you feel--old

or new?--(6) What duties do you feel you still owe to others or

to self?--(7) Is interest in public affairs for the far future

and past, as compared with what is closer at hand, greater or

less?--(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?--(9) Do

you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of your

own age, more or less than formerly?--(10) Would you live your

life over again?--(11) Did you experience an “Indian summer” of

renewed vigor before the winter of age began?--(12) Do you rely

more or less upon doctors than formerly?--(13) Do you get more or

less from the clergy and the church than formerly?--(14) Do you

think more or less of dying and the Hereafter?--A few individual

returns from eminent people.

Perhaps no one but a genetic psychologist can realize how very widely

the successive stages of life in man differ from each other. Underneath

the tenuous memory continuum that is the chief basis of all feeling

of identity between our present and former selves, deeper even than

every unity of life plan and persistence of disposition, are the great

changes the years bring. These are, indeed, so great that although

they very commonly modulate, each into the next stage of the series

by almost imperceptible gradations, we all really live not one but a

succession of lives. Further than this, just as in dementia præcox the

normal development of the psyche is permanently arrested in a juvenile

stage, so, but far more commonly, the normal progress from maturity to

senectitude is arrested; and in the decades of involution, which is

just as progressive and interesting as evolution, the old cling to or

leave with great reluctance their mature stage and so never achieve

true senectitude. Just as the precocious dement balks in adolescence at

the growing complexity and arduousness of the problems of adulthood and

so fails to mature because he lacks the energy or hereditary momentum

to do so, so the old very often find themselves inadequate to the new

tasks involved in beating the great retreat. They cannot break from the

things that are behind and reach forward to those that are before and

they cling with a tenacity that is purely arrestive to a stage of life

that has passed. They refuse to accept old age and to make the most and

best of it, to face its tasks and to improve all its opportunities.

If they do not paint, dye, pad, or affect the fashions and manners of

the young (for old age may show traits of narcissism), when the call

comes to move on to a new phase of life, their mentality defaults. This

type of mental defect has never so far been adequately characterized

but it is probably far more common than what is usually called senile

dementia, of which it is almost the diametrical opposite, although

because of its prevalence it has a better claim to this designation.

Believing profoundly that involution is just as interesting a phase of

life as evolution and not being satisfied with the poems, essays, and

meditations of literary men and women who have addressed the public

on the theme of senescence, which are, as we saw in a former chapter,

often more or less hortatory, consolatory, or else were composed as

exercises to hearten themselves against the great enemy, it seemed

worth while to try to seek a new contact with the fresh spontaneous

thoughts and feelings of normal old people concerning their estate.

Years ago I had visited homes for the aged, held converse with many

inmates and officials, had given each inmate a tiny blue book and

asked them to answer a few questions and add anything that occurred

to them that they thought characteristic of their stage of life. The

records thus secured, although voluminous enough, had very little

value. Most who answered were uneducated and the data they supplied

were usually trivial, tediously and irrelevantly reminiscent, or else

descriptive of surroundings in earlier life, complaints, wishes, fears,

etc., so that I realized that true old age as I had conceived it was

not to be sought in such institutions. There was pathos and pessimism

galore, while disciplined tranquillity and serenity were very rare.

There is doubtless material enough in even the most inarticulate and

insignificant life to repay the longest and most painstaking study.

Perhaps, too, a psychotherapy may sometime be evolved that will launch

such stranded and arrested lives out again into the current and give

them full fruition of all the fruitage of life. But the world is as yet

far from any such beneficent ministry.

Accordingly, I turned to another source and selected a few score

of names of mostly eminent and some very distinguished old people,

both acquaintances and strangers, and addressed to each a simple

questionnaire, also inviting spontaneous impartations in addition to

responses to the points suggested. Some of those who did me the honor

of replying, and often with much detail, are people of national and

international reputation and I wish I had not promised to withhold

their names for this would have given greatly added interest to the

following report. All are cultivated Americans and thus they represent

a single class. Most are Anglo-Saxons and I have not been able to

gather much material from Oriental or non-Christian sources, desirable

and important as this would be. My data are, however, sufficiently

copious to illustrate the chief types of attitudes within their

class. To the returns from this source I have added data from less

than a score of others of the same class with whom I have personal

acquaintance and I have drawn but very little from the rich field of

autobiography for my inductions. Such data can, of course, only yield

results that are far more suggestive than conclusive, and so I forbear

from all statistics because the number of my respondents is too small.

But although what follows does not represent the great majority of old

people it does have a psychological value that I deem as unique as it

is pertinent to my theme. It is also perhaps significant that of those

who wrote expressing interest and an intention to respond, not one has

done so after an interval of several months. It should perhaps also be

mentioned here that the suggestion of attempting this book came from

nearly two-score letters from old people, which were addressed to me

through the editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_ and were evoked by an

anonymous article I published on “Old Age” in the January, 1921, number

of that magazine. I have endeavored to keep the following report of

these somewhat heterogeneous data as objective as possible, although it

would be absurd to claim that by such a method on such a theme I have

entirely escaped subjective bias.

_How and at what age did you first realize the approach of old age?_

This realization not infrequently begins in the forties and increases

thereafter, often intensively with the beginning of each new decade.

The first sign of baldness, the first touch of fatigue at stated tasks,

lapse of memory for names, waning potency in men; and the first gray

hairs, wrinkles, fading of complexion, and change of figure, etc., in

women are often specified in our returns. Such and many other signs

usually gave the first sad recognition that the meridian of life was

being crossed and that gradual declination was just ahead. In many

a man and woman this is, as has been recognized, a dangerous age and

it often comes in the middle and later thirties in women. The latter,

realizing that their summer is ending, sometimes break away from old

restraints and give themselves more liberties, not only social but

moral. The first glimpse of the specter of senility ahead puts them

in a now-or-never mood. Men ask themselves if they will be content to

go on as they are so far heading, so that there will be nothing new

to be written in the story of their life save only the date of their

death. They wonder if the future is to be as the past and perhaps make

an inventory of their unrealized ideals, hopes, and wishes, and cross

many of them off their ledger as bad debts they owe themselves but can

never collect. This crossing the line is for some so serious a matter

that it may cause an abrupt turn in their life line, which starts off

in a new direction, as is illustrated in a few conspicuous examples in

Chapter I. This touch of autumn in August, however, rarely brings frost

or blight but leaves only a trace of a new seriousness and perhaps

sadness, while otherwise all goes on as before.

In a few cases the first realization that one is getting old springs

upon the soul, as if from ambush, on some trivial occasion and

clings like an obsession that remits only to recur again and again.

The majority, however, promptly and ruthlessly suppress all such

intimations beneath the threshold of consciousness, telling not only

others but themselves that they are just as young and capable as ever,

thus refusing to recognize that age is upon them till perhaps the

sixth or seventh decade. Thus the old are often the last to recognize

in themselves infirmities that have long been patent to others. This

is one of the benignities of nature, for to no disease, not even

consumption, does she give a more effective opiate. A man of ninety

still retains his post as head of a great concern he created in his

youth, to its serious detriment, convinced that he is better than ever

and that the scores of younger men under him lack the efficiency of

those of his own generation. “He was on the verge of resigning twenty

years ago,” said one of his subordinates to me, “but now he does not

know enough to do so.”

On the other hand, some seem to take a new lease of life in this youth

of old age. It is not so much that they have a new sense of the value

of time but because they have taken in sail in other directions and,

realizing the limitations of life, have focused more sharply upon the

things they deem most essential.

_To what do you ascribe your long life?_

Good heredity is much more often specified than anything else. There is

a tendency in the old to inventory the virtues of parents and ancestors

and a deep-seated belief, even in these democratic days, that blood

will tell. Four correspondents believed their constitution was weak and

that the early realization of this called their attention to personal

hygiene, so that these individuals ascribe their long life more to

their own effort than to inheritance. Next in rating is the environment

of early life. In our land many have been born in the country and led

a laborious life in youth and later changed to urban surroundings and

to more sedentary habits, which always involves a considerable strain

of readjustment. Where this change has been successfully weathered

there is a strong disposition to place a very high emphasis upon the

beneficence of strenuous physical activity in the formative period.

Next in appreciation comes the preservative influence of good and

temperate habits, reinforced by observations of acquaintances of early

life who, by reason of less moderation, have preceded them to the

cemetery. When our own associates die we tend to draw the lessons of

their physical and moral life. One ascribes her longevity to the very

early implantation of the idea that everything must be determined by

its bearing upon her power to bring healthy children into the world.

Most mention, and many stress, the absence of worry and overwork,

although one insists that he had been chronically anxious from the

first, suffering by day for years from apprehensions of evil and lying

awake nights trying to plan the reconstruction of the universe. Several

ascribe their length of years to the fact that as they advanced in

age they learned betimes to give up former duties and lay off burdens

they could no longer carry with impunity. It is evident that this

realization of the effect of years differs very widely in different

individuals and seems almost lacking in some. Several take pride in the

fact that although they inherited a short life from both parents and

grandparents they have succeeded in greatly prolonging it, and by diet

and regimen in overcoming hereditary handicaps. One determined early in

life to make the mind rule the body. One old lady ascribes her vigor to

progressive self-forgetfulness and devotion to the service of others.

An interesting case, which I deem typical of many in these Christian

Science days, declares that he early learned that all living animals,

especially man, have “a constructive, preserving, and renewing

principle or energy within them fully competent to care for the body

in every particular, demonstrated by the evidence of a vast number of

recorded cures of so-called incurable diseases without any external

remedial agency.” This element can become amenable to conscious

control. “We are composed of a thousand billion cells, far greater

in number than that of the entire population of the globe since

man arrived and each of them infinitely complex and charged with

potencies.” With such a force man should place no limitations upon

himself, for he has inexhaustible recuperative energy, etc. If such a

faith has little justification for science, it may, nevertheless, give

a mental attitude that is conducive to a poise and confidence that in

itself has marked hygienic and therapeutic value. It is interesting

to note that cultivated men and women seem far less prone than the

ignorant to the medical fetichism that ascribes exceptional value to

some nostrum or single item of diet or regimen and this suggests how

fast the age-long quest for a universal panacea is vanishing from

modern consciousness. As men grow old and have a long experience and

youthful friends have passed away, it is inevitable that they should

seek the cause of their longevity and this urge would naturally

increase with years. Therefore, while the individual answers to this

question have little scientific value, they are of both psychological

and practical interest. Underneath them all there is a tendency to

identify hygiene with morals and most men who achieve great age thus

tend to look with complacency upon their life as a whole as a triumph

of virtue, even though in fact it may have been quite irregular.

_How do you keep well, that is, what do you find especially good or bad

in diet, regimen, interests, and personal hygiene generally?_

In the answers to this question, as was perhaps to be expected, we find

the utmost diversity. Only two report that they eat and do anything

that appeals to them, with no special attention to regimen. Some eschew

drugs, while one would wager that he had taken nearly every kind of

medicament and said he had used laxatives daily for thirty-eight years.

One had found great reinforcement of life from moderate wine drinking

and thus found prohibition somewhat reductive of his vitality. Some

entirely eschew tea, coffee, and tobacco, while most indulge in both

of the former and several in the latter in moderation. Several found

marked reinforcement when they began to rest or perhaps take a nap in

the middle of the day. All praise early retiring and insist that a

generous portion of the twenty-four hours must be spent in bed, even if

they do not sleep. Most ascribe much virtue to daily, and particularly

to cold baths, shower, spray, etc., while a very few prefer a sponge-

or only a rub-down. Most stress the importance of exercise, varied and

out-of-doors, particularly walking, while some emphasize the value

of a little all-round indoor gymnastics that call all the muscles

into moderate action. Some note the avoidance of starchy foods, while

others speak of the effectiveness of bran or other agencies against

constipation, which is, rightly or wrongly, felt to be one of the

morbific tendencies of the old, although others believe that some

degree of it is normal at this stage of life. Only one felt rejuvenated

by vegetarianism, while many found it advantageous to eat less and more

frequently. Most had given considerable attention to diet and had drawn

up a list of things good or bad for them. Some found it necessary to

regulate their lives with reference to some special morbid tendency of

kidneys, intestines, heart, lungs, etc. Some laid special emphasis upon

confining their occupation to things that were agreeable or congenial,

while things distasteful brought fatigue early. A few were so in love

with their life-work, or it had such variety, that they never felt the

need of a vacation, while others were very dependent upon a more or

less stated remission of work or change of scene and activity, not only

yearly but at every week’s end.

The problem of finding a golden mean between excess and defective

diet, exercise, work, and excitement, was almost always present. The

fads that individuals stressed were horseback and bicycle riding,

hunting, tramping, sleeping out-of-doors on an open porch, developing

a programme that kept both mind and body busy all day with objective

things, indulging in one or even several avocations often far removed

from the main line of interest, etc. Some stressed more or less exact

routine, while others found virtue in having none but always following

their inner inclination and took pleasure in breaking up old habits.

One old man loved skating; another, when he was seventy-three, took

up automobiling with great zest. A man of ninety has a rub-down by

a nurse every night and morning, with some massage. Another is so

dependent upon the food to which he is accustomed that he always takes

his cook with him in his private car and even if he goes out to dinner

must be served with viands prepared by this particular servitor.

Then, after exactly half an hour, he leaves the table, even when he

is visiting, for a brief siesta. DeSaverin tells us that old people

are liable to develop Epicurean appetites and, as they advance in age,

can distinguish liquid and solid viands with far greater acuteness

than when they were younger. Our data do not, however, confirm

this but suggest that gustatory inclinations grow more amenable to

reason. Appetite, we are told, is the safest guide, pointing true as

the needle to the pole, to the nutritive needs of the body. It is,

nevertheless, very modifiable, and the old often easily come to like

the food they have learned is good for them, although they very rarely

adopt dietaries suggested for their benefit by nutrition laboratories.

It does seem, however, that there should be institutions where old

people can go periodically for personal surveys of all their habits

and receive suggestions that, based upon their idiosyncrasies, would

doubtless be marked by very wide individual variations. It is certain

that the diet and regimen most advantageous for the person of one

diathesis would be very deleterious to another.

_Are you troubled with regrets for things done or not done by or for

you?_

In these returns there is no vestige of tragic remorse of either the

old classic or theological kind, although only one disclaimed every

trace of regret for anything in the past. This is not because he had

not made mistakes but because he believed, as nearly all did, that

regrets were vain. Most admitted serious errors both of omission

and commission, while many specified waste of time and energy,

misdirection, bad advice, lack of method, continuity, and system. One

bitterly regretted her choice of calling, which had made her daily work

a “crucifixion.” Several regretted that they had not been more generous

and deplored the too absorbing efforts they had made for acquisition.

Others deplored their training as children, the effects of which it

had taken years to overcome; while still others regretted the way in

which they had brought up their own children. Some thought they had

done too little for or given too little attention to their families.

Some had made special efforts to cultivate forgetfulness of faults and

especially rankling injustices they had suffered from others. One felt

that he had come into the world not by his own will but as an accident

of sexual passion and therefore felt himself under no obligations to

his parents and not responsible for his life or its conduct. Some had

even learned to rejoice in their mistakes because of the wisdom that

had thus been taught them. Not a few took occasion to reflect upon

their satisfactions, which offset the dissatisfaction with what life

had brought. Many reproached themselves that they had not done more,

worked harder, had more to show, etc. Other old people have a dull

and sometimes corroding sense of sexual errors in their past that may

have impaired the quality of all their family relations and even the

constitution of their children. Some are prone to turn to thoughts of

specific instances of outrageous injustice, so that their most poignant

regret is that they have never been able to wreak vengeance upon those

who had wronged them.

Many specified the long hardships to which they had been subjected by

too strict religious and moral regimen and blamed their parents for not

giving them instruction betimes during the stage of pubertal ferment.

A few had been through the crisis of business failure, made mistaken

alliances, or been mismated, or regretted that they had not married.

Not infrequent is the regret of having been a spendthrift, wasted a

patrimony; and still more frequent are the mentions of injuries to

health by unhygienic habits. A few chiefly deplored the fact of not

being able to believe what they felt they should. Other few deplored

the dullness and languor of their emotional zests and that they take

less interest in things than formerly. Most who make decided breaks in

middle life do not seem to regret them, although more regret a series

of circumnutations among various occupations before they found the

right one.

It would seem that the very fact that man has succeeded in living and

conserving tolerable health till advanced years gives a feeling that he

has, on the whole, succeeded despite errors and lapses, and there seems

to be at least a tacit agreement on the part of all that it is idle to

regret what it is too late to help. Old age does not, therefore, seem

to be a time of repentance for youthful follies and if this exists at

all, it is more than compensated for by a complacency that things have

not been worse than they were, and even the possibilities of the latter

bring no disquietude.

_What temptations do you feel, old or new?_

More of my respondents failed to answer this question than any other

and most answers were brief. It is very interesting and significant

to note that resistances to anything like confessionalism increase

with age. If the old have long walked in ways that society condemns,

their secrecy about it has been too long and habitual to be readily

broken. This is one reason why psychoanalysis totally fails with the

old, so that most analysts refuse to take patients over forty. The

German jurist, Friedrich, said that everyone was a potential murderer,

because at some moment in his life he had been angry enough to kill and

probably would have done so if every circumstance had favored. So the

candid and conscientious man who looks back upon a long life realizes

that he has done or nearly done, at least in heart, about every crime

and yielded and felt promptings to about every vice. Probably everyone,

too, had actually done things that if known would expose him to

obloquy. Thus the old almost never go to the confessional. Moreover,

there is a benign but deep instinct in us to forget things we have

done that would disgrace us and perhaps especially those things at

which our own moral sense and self-respect most revolt, where qualms of

conscience would be so painful that we refuse to face them. And this is

connected with the fact that in those churches that stress a radical

change of heart, with deep conviction of sin, conversions of the old

are very rare. Martial[192] says of the fortunate old Antonius viewing

the years behind:

Back on their flight he looks and feels no dread

To think that Lethe’s waters flow so near.

There is no day of all the train that gives

A pang; no moment that he would forget.

A good man’s span is doubled; twice he lives

Who, viewing his past life, enjoys it yet.

All, of course, want to do just this, so that “the good men do” may

live “after them,” while “the bad is interred with their bones.”

Edgar Lee Masters, in a little volume of clever poetic skits,[193]

describes the dead in a country churchyard as sitting up, one after

another, in their graves and belying their epitaphs. One says in

substance, “They called me good and pure but I was a villain”; another,

“They called me philanthropic and generous but I ground the faces of

the poor and all my charities were to camouflage my selfishness and

extortion”; and so on through a long list of rectifications, showing

that while men generally follow the precept of saying nothing but

good of the dead there may be, after all, at the bottom of the soul a

certain impulse to have all the worst in us known. But this is not true

of modern life, if it ever was so in the past.

Some of our respondents specified temptations to overeat, to

under-exercise, to take life too easy or to be too tardy in throwing

off responsibilities, to read or think too much, to be censorious

and intolerant, irritable, to resent the cocky infallibility of the

young, the excessive urge to speed up, the danger of getting cranky, of

brooding; and a few speak vaguely of temptations of the flesh. Nearly

all say that they are less prone to yield to temptations than in middle

life.

It is perhaps from this standpoint that we see most clearly the

danger to which the old are subjected in the progressive loss of

self-knowledge. It is very hard for any but the strongest mentalities

to realize the changes that age brings, to adjust to, feel at home in,

and come to terms consciously with it, so that most would probably be

surprised if they knew how clearly those closest to them understood

their weaknesses, tolerated their idiosyncrasies, and made allowances

for their failures. Self-control, poise, a calm, judicial state of mind

even with regard to things that concern us most deeply, are among

the chief, if also among the rarest, virtues of senescence. Everyone

carries with him to the grave many a secret that it is well for him and

for the world is buried with him; and the impulse to be known even by

God Himself exactly as we are, although it has so many expressions in

prayers and religious formulæ, lacks in our day, we must conclude, any

real depth of sincerity.

_What duties do you feel that you still owe either to those about you

or to the world?_

Some place first the duty of providing wisely and well for their

families and friends after their death. A few are oppressed by the

thought that they still owe the world far more than they can pay,

although one who has lived a life of very large usefulness thinks

the world owes him now far more than he owes it. Some have a dread

amounting almost to horror of being useless and wish, above all things,

to be not a burden but serviceable. A few feel the same old duties,

with no change. Others feel called to give to the world, or at least

to those about them, advice and admonition based upon the rich lessons

of experience. Some who have been lifelong slaves to duty resolve that

they will now emancipate themselves and live henceforth according to

their own pleasure. Some feel that their time and strength for doing

good have so abated that it is vain to try to accomplish anything more

and that they must devote themselves to being, instead of doing, good,

and would thus cultivate every grace of character and let their light

so shine as to be examples to others, so that self-development must

henceforth be their chief effort.

In such answers as are before me two things stand out with special

prominence. The first is that the men of science, who constitute about

one-third of all, have unfinished studies, which they feel it is their

supreme duty to complete before their powers abate. It is less often

new themes to which they would consecrate their energies than old ones

on which already very much work has been done and that they rightly

feel no one else could properly finish and that would thus be lost to

the world unless they themselves were able to complete it. These men

are less intent upon public reforms or special civic duties than upon

adding at least a tiny stone to the great temple of science, although

only a few in their own specialty will ever appreciate or be benefited

by their work. The world has certainly lost much, although probably

less than those concerned think, by the death or the incapacitating

senility of savants who left an unfinished window in their Aladdin

tower. We all think of great novels, which the authors did not live

to complete; of promising, intricate researches, which were perhaps

bungled by the imperfect reports of the half-competent who undertook

to present them to the world; of papers left by the old to be edited

by their children or their advanced students, some of which had better

have remained untouched; of belabored manuscripts, which survivors can

make nothing of and which are perhaps piously preserved for years and

eventually consigned to the flames. It is such fates for the children

of their brain that some of our respondents seem to dread chiefly and

it is this that prompts them to dreams, which are generally fatuous, of

literary executors or post-mortem publications.

The most general conclusion from these data is that the old are very

prone to develop, if they have not had it before, a kind of educational

instinct in the larger sense of this word; they wish to admonish or

exhort, if not the world at least some section of it, to better and

wiser living, to the acquisition of the knowledge that is of most

worth, to the cultivation of peace and amity, or to a simple and

perhaps more strenuous and efficient life and to the development of

good habits. The lessons they would teach often impress the young as

being trite and commonplace, but if they are so, they are charged with

a depth of conviction and enriched by a wealth of experience that give

them a greater significance than the young can appreciate.

_Is your interest in public, community, or in far future or past

things, as compared with interest in persons and things right about

you, greater or less than formerly?_

Here we have two very distinctly opposite tendencies. On the one

hand, more frequently in women than men and much more common in the

uneducated classes, the horizon of interest tends to narrow to the

immediate environment and to the here and now of each day and if health

is impaired, the chief concern may be personal well- or ill-being,

in which case we see the egoism and selfishness of old age in its

extreme form. On the other hand, and as we would fain believe more

normally, we have an increase of breadth of view and of interest not

only in local affairs of the community but of the state, country,

world, and humanity, which may be intensified as decline necessitates

withdrawal from more active participation in affairs nearest in time

and place. Two great events have had an incalculable influence in

this direction that often appears in our data. The one is the World

War, the new era of history it has opened, and the whole problem of

the future fate of civilization. This has made a tremendous appeal to

those of contemplative habits and has stimulated them to follow the

course of world events, to study the past and peer into the future as

never before, as well as to want to live on to see the next act in the

great drama. Suffrage and the new enfranchisement of woman have marked

a great increase in public life and opened new spheres of influence

for her sex in political, civic, and moral fields that are proving so

absorbing that the former tendency which advanced years brought--to

focus on persons at closer range and on narrower human relations--is

superseded by a new and larger humanism. Not only have these tendencies

greatly enriched old age but there is no reason to think they will ever

be transcended or reversed. In this sense there has been no age in the

world in which it was so good to be old and the last decade or two have

contributed far more than any other to give old people a stronger hold

on life and to bring it more of just the kind of culture needed for its

legitimate development, as well as to very greatly strengthen the will

to live.

_In what do you now take your greatest pleasure?_

While a few find it only in the same sources as before old age

supervened, most have discovered new sources of satisfaction or at

least find joy in more abandonment to inclinations that had to be

more or less sidetracked or almost tabooed before. Reading is most

often specified. A few who used to read novels voraciously have

lost all interest in love stories and turned to biographies, which

they now pursue with almost the same zest as they formerly felt for

romance. A few turn to history in general or perhaps trace the earlier

stages of the development of their own field of work. Several find

a great resource in meditation or even reverie, giving more time to

day-dreaming than before. A very few feel a new urge to give some

message to the world before they die, and perhaps try, with or without

success, to write for publication, while some do so merely for their

own edification. Two old professors who have taught successfully all

their lives, on ceasing to do so were impelled to address a larger

public by print and were dismayed to find their efforts unsuccessful.

Others confess to a loss of ambition to do anything to better the

world but would confine their efforts to making those about them wiser

or happier. Many find a new charm in nature, for example, walks in

the open, gardening, birds, stars, celestial phenomena, or perhaps

reading the works of naturalists and out-of-door observers of animals,

flowers, plants, trees; while others, like Socrates, prefer human

relations and indulge more freely than before in companionships,

correspondence, or perhaps things that absorb them in their immediate

environment, or in a wider rapport with current events, and give more

time to newspapers, etc. It is not uncommon for cultivated old people

to reread the classic standard literature they perused in their youth

and sometimes to abandon themselves to the study of the best things

in ancient literature, which they had only known before by name and

always felt inclined but never had time to indulge in, feeling perhaps

that they are thus tardily making up for lost time. Only a few specify

greater keenness of æsthetic enjoyment for works of art, music, drama,

etc. Men very rarely, and women somewhat more frequently, confess to

taking greater pleasure in dress, so that while we only seldom find

dandified old men who affect the fashions and dress of youth, women

not infrequently feel that as their personal charms decline they

must compensate by richness of attire, jewels, and perhaps lavish

ornamentation, coiffure, etc. One old lady in the eighties regretted

bitterly that lavender was the only color in which she could now dress

without criticism. Perhaps excess in this direction is, on the whole,

more pleasing than the growing neglect of these things with years,

which is so much more common.

Of the three muses, solitude, society, and nature, while all have a

new if not stronger attraction it is the first that, from our returns,

would seem to increase most with age. Deafness, or perhaps impatience

with the overactivities of the young, may weaken the social bonds

and physical infirmity may limit contact with nature but nearly all

our respondents seek and find solace in themselves more than before.

We find few old people who, like many younger ones, have a horror of

being alone. Several have daily periods of retreat or retirement when

they are “at home” only to themselves, perhaps to digest what they

have lately read or to adjust with more equanimity to changes within

or without. Thus the old generally find resources within themselves

that more or less compensate for their growing isolation, although

some reproach themselves or others that they find these resources too

meager. One old philosopher says in substance that, realizing that he

must sometime meet death absolutely alone and reach a point where he

must take final leave of all and everything about him, he feels that

he must strengthen his soul by practising for the most solitary of all

experiences. Thus there is a certain hermit or recluse motive, which of

old sent so many aging persons into the desert, wilderness, mountains,

etc., a motif that may possibly have received some psychogenetic

reinforcement from the dangers of ill-treatment by their fellows to

which in cruder stages of life the old were exposed. It is entirely

impossible for youth to fully sympathize with age because this would

mean nothing less than to anticipate it, and so the aged often feel,

deep in their souls, that there is a slight falsetto or conventional

note, even in the greatest consideration shown to them. This condition,

in morbid cases, may amount to suspicions of insincerity or a sense

that kindness masks the opposite feeling. Happily, however, most of the

aged do not seem to suffer acutely from this feeling but accept what is

done for them at its full face value.

Nature, on the other hand, is probably at no stage of life felt to

be so motherly, so sympathetic, or so full of moral meanings. Quite

apart from the nature that science teaches us, the old seem to feel a

recrudescence of the old anthropomorphic feeling that once made the

nature-myths and has inspired so many of the parables, similes, tropes,

and what are now called anagogic interpretations, by which man has

read into nature’s phenomena the experiences of his own life. The old

man feels in a new way that not only all bibles but humanity itself

came straight out of the heart of nature, so that contemplation of her

various aspects may become for him again a kind of navel-gazing. He

sometimes becomes an annotator of weather and temperature, to which he

has a new susceptibility, and feels a new kinship not only with the

sun, storm, forest, mountain, shore and sea, but even with celestial

phenomena. He welcomes the advent of spring with a trace of the old

jubilance once expressed in many vernal festivals; feels and is perhaps

depressed by the analogy between his period of life and winter; often

indulges the hope that he may die in his favorite season and not be

buried when the world is ice-bound; and is in the closest rapport with

climate and often makes much sacrifice to live in one he has found most

favorable. In general, he is responsive, probably far more deeply even

than he realizes, to all the moods and tenses in which nature expresses

herself. Perhaps his very wakefulness gives him a new rapport with the

night through all its watches.

The old who have access to the country often select favorite and

generally retired nooks where they can sit for hours and be alone

with nature and thus entertain their souls. One old man who did

this habitually every summer in a spot in what he called his coign

of vantage told me that at each successive year, on revisiting this

spot, he was conscious of some deep change, of a certain new sense of

closeness to nature’s heart, which, although he could not define it,

seemed to mark a new step in his development and which he thought

somehow normative for his whole life during the year, for he often

went to sleep thinking of the charm of this place, etc. The psychology

of solitude, both chosen and enforced, shows that it often brings an

almost rapturous delight in the contemplation of some simple object

of nature--a flower, shrub, insect or tiny animal, which causes for

a moment a kind of temporary focalization that gives it something of

a fetishistic power. All this, however, does not lessen but perhaps

rather augments, by the law of change and alternation, the growing

charm that humanity in the large sense always has for old people who

conserve their faculties. The sphinx riddle, what is man and what is

the worth and meaning of all his strivings, never fails to come over

the matured mind, despite the fact that it is the most baffling and

insoluble of all problems, for “age brings a philosophic mind” and with

it comes a new realization that the greatest study of mankind is man.

_Do you enjoy the society of children, of young people, adults, or

those near your own age more or less than formerly?_

Responses here differed very widely but certain common traits appear.

Those who grow deaf are often condemned to a progressive solitude

and this affliction has a pathos of its own. The friends we knew in

youth and college are scattered and most of them, and perhaps most

members of our own family, are dead, so that associates of our own

age are generally very few. But besides this the old often develop

idiosyncrasies highly distasteful to others and we find complaints

of the stupidity or querulousness of other old people. Despite the

fact that we have occasional instances of intimate friendships in the

latest decades of life, the herd instinct that prompts each to flock

with those of near his or her own years is less insistent, while with

happily married pairs even love seems to take on the character of

friendship. There is, indeed, no doubt that the gregarious instinct

tends to wane, and as men advance in years they tend to withdraw from

clubs and associations, not only because of infirmities but because

increased individuation is itself isolative. On the other hand, I think

we detect, not only in these returns but in life, a tendency to prefer

associates of the next generation, that is, those of such an age that

they might have been our own children. Some old men especially state

that they prefer the society of men of middle life and it has often

been thought that young teachers are best for young and older teachers

for older children and that the young have a certain attraction for

those near the age limits of their parents. A few of the very old

like children, but often with reservations or best at a distance, and

are prone to be annoyed by their noise or too great familiarity. It

is pretty clear that age does incline to youth and perhaps becomes

dependent on it for a kind of vicarious rejuvenation. Old professors

often feel in a peculiarly close rapport with those of student years

but this is partly due to habit. The old sometimes take, with peculiar

interest, to pets and not infrequently have strong likes and dislikes,

which they can only explain on the basis of congeniality or antipathy.

There can be no question that old people to-day are just as fond

of acting as mentors for the young as they were in ancient Greece,

although now it takes the very different form of a propensity to give

advice and warnings. But our civilization has not yet found effective

ways of making even god-fathers and -mothers really sponsors or

assistant parents, although the teaching instinct is closely allied to

the parental and is more or less developed in all. It is the testimony

of those familiar with old people’s homes that their inmates do not

tend to fraternize and although crony friendships are not infrequent,

there is no analogy to “mashes” or “crushes.” Indeed, pessimists have

often intimated that no one could really love very old people and so

far as this is true we could hardly expect them to love even each other

in return.

The above applies more to men than women and the case seems quite

different with the latter, who are much more prone to be interested in

the young, even in the very young, than are old men. The grandmother

may lavish too much, while the grandfather gives too little, attention

to the grandchildren. On the other hand, both are often very critical

of the larger liberties allowed to and taken by children and find it

hard to adjust to new notions and social customs and especially to the

now rapidly increasing license given to both their conversation and

conduct, which can hardly be said, in its turn, to involve greater

respect for age than formerly.

_Would you live your life over again?_

All answered this question, but three could not decide. One had found

it all so enjoyable that he would gladly start over again and repeat

all identically. One recoiled “with horror” at the thought and rejoiced

every week that it was ended forever. Even the pleasant experiences had

such an alloy or aftermath of pain that one subject could not bear the

thought of repeating a moment of it.

“What is the use?” said another. “I would probably do the same thing

over again.” Some would live parts of their lives again or begin at

a certain stage. Most would repeat it if they could start with some

of their present knowledge or experience and thus improve upon what

they had been or done. Most, too, had such a sense of progress that it

would seem painful to them to go back to more primitive conditions.

Two felt so assured of progress beyond the grave that the future

drew them more than the past. One did not see how his life could be

materially improved for he had fallen victim to no temptations, made

very few mistakes, etc.; while many specified often radical changes

they would make, errors or mistakes they would avoid, etc. There were

no expressions of remorse; no bitter imprecations of fate, heredity,

or nature; no vain longings for rejuvenation; and these data suggest

that the vivid pleasures of childhood, the joys of youth, and the

intoxication with life that characterizes its immature stages had

vanished and left no trace in the memory of these respondents, or

perhaps that life had palled and brought a certain satiety. One said:

I have lived three more or less independent lives, as

naturalist and explorer for the love of it, as science teacher

for the love of it, and as administrator because I knew men

and the value of money; and finally, as a matter of duty, as a

minor prophet of democracy. If I had the chance I would take

them all again. There is pleasure in it and the world badly

needs men willing to be counted in the minority.

In the attitude of these old people to this problem the psychologist

can glimpse a little of the _tedium vitæ_ that perhaps first produced

and then discarded the Oriental doctrine of eternal recurrence of

life and death, a psychic trend that gave birth to and vitalized

metempsychosis and that impelled the Buddha to break away and find a

goal beyond it. It needs little psychology to see that such attitudes

of mind imply a deep dissatisfaction with any form of future existence

that would be in essence a repetition of life here, even with moderate

improvements on our present state of existence. A postmortem form of

survival or revival that is, in any large sense, a reduplication of

this could never bring a deep satisfaction. All ancient creeds and all

modern philosophies of recurrence, for example, that of Nietzsche, have

always been strongholds of pessimism and are really anti-evolutionary,

although they are sometimes said to presage modern theories of

development.

To the genetic philosopher it would seem, from such data, that

senescents tend to lose the sense that infancy and childhood are more

generic than adulthood, that the latter brings the “shades of the

prisonhouse,” and that every stage of individual development brings

added limitations, so that our matured consciousness is only a very

partial expression of the vaster life of the race, most of which is

more and more repressed and incapable of coming to consciousness as

life proceeds. If each of us might have lived very different lives

from what we have done, and if many and varied lives are required to

express all the possibilities with which we all start, it would seem as

if each individual would have chosen, when he had played one part, to

assume another in the _comédie humaine_ and then another, and so on;

that the slave would want to complement his defects of opportunity by

becoming king--if not, indeed, _vice versa_. When the psychic life of

the race was young and rank, great minds did dream even of living out

every phase and stage of life: of being animals, of experiencing every

lot and station of humanity. But now that the world is older and the

hyperindividuation that comes with age has supervened, this passion to

taste everything possible to our estate is lost. Instead of sampling

every dish we make a full meal of one and other viands are refused for

we are sated. Biology teaches, as we have seen, that specialization

is death and a hypertrophied personal consciousness is psychic

specialization.

For myself, I confess I even retain in old age some vestige of my

strong childish desire to be a horse, lion, ape, dog, fish, and even

insect; or, in a word, to know how the world looks from under the

skull of our older brothers, the beasts. Still stronger is the wish to

have lived as a troglodyte, Indian, to have been a fire-worshiper,

totemist, a woman, millionaire, tramp, or even a moron or a genius--if

not, in some moods, to have experienced various insanities and even

diseases. But strangest of all is the wish that I could be set back

to happy childhood, even if it had to be with the smallest modicum

of the experience I have acquired, and try the game of life again.

It has been, on the whole, so fortunate that I would even repeat it

identically, if I had to, rather than to face the future I do. But the

chief charm would be not so much to improve it and avoid errors but to

vary it and give my more generic self a less one-sided expression so as

to bring out latencies that are suppressed or slumber and to invest the

same old self with a new set of attributes. I have only seen one very

small aspect of life and know but a single corner of my own soul and

my knowledge of the world is too limited to my own narrow specialty.

The future not only of my department but of all lines of human activity

is so full of possibilities yet unrealized but which have aroused such

eagerness of interest, that I would accept another life here under

almost any terms in order to see the swelling drama unfold; while I

revolt unspeakably at the realization that I must be cut off when so

many things in which I have the keenest zest are in the most critical

or interesting phase of their development.

Of course I am answering my question in a different sense than that

understood by most of my correspondents. In fact, in a way it was

an idle and perhaps foolish question, because to exactly relive a

present life is so impossible that it is hardly conceivable. But let

us oldsters realize that if we are sated, it is because our appetite

has flagged and not because viands are scantier or less toothsome.

Perhaps we all wish we had been born later so that we should be now

in our prime. Most of us would probably have sacrificed a few of

the earlier, if by so doing we could add a few more to the later,

years of our life. Perhaps the very restlessness of old people, their

retirement from activity, their propensity to a change of scene or

mode of life, or their not infrequent _Wanderlust_, is the result of a

blind instinct to exploit unused and submerged faculties and thus to

complement or vicariate for the loss of certain possibilities always

involved in realizing other careers. Certain it is that even those who

do not make a clean break with their past develop views, interests,

habits, modes of life, personal associations, or perhaps take pleasure

in becoming novices, apprentices, or amateurs, in new fields and find

thus a certain rejuvenation, the strong instinct for which has found

so many unworthy forms of expression that the term “second childhood”

as applied to age is commonly one of reproach and the affectations of

youth by the old are ridiculous. We all tend to live our lives over

again in our children and grandchildren and this impulse is another

expression of the deep instinct for renewal and living other lives

again. How shall we explain, too, the so common inclination of the old

to plant trees they will never see mature or build houses they can

hope to live in only a short time; or to get into and keep in such

sympathetic rapport with the young; to engage in works of charity;

or to grow tolerant of errors, of persons, and of opinions they once

bitterly opposed. What can all these phenomena mean save that the

barriers of egoism are falling down and that we tend to live more and

more not only for but in others by a kind of sympathetic identification

with them. Three of my correspondents had a period of reorienting

themselves to new interests as if to find themselves again, which is

suggestive of the period in youth when one vocation after another is

taken up and abandoned before a fit life purpose has been found.

Whether these tentatives in the old were a recrudescence of a series of

earlier circummutations, like those of a climbing vine seeking a fit

support, our data do not show.

_Did you experience an “Indian summer” of revived energy before the

winter of age began to set in?_

Only five responses were affirmative to this question. One of the

most eminent men of science with a world-wide reputation reported,

at seventy-two, that he had never worked so effectively and was now

engaged on a program that would require from ten to twenty years of

strenuous activity for its completion, besides answering several

scores of letters daily. Another scarcely less eminent, at the age of

seventy-three, had lately undertaken an arduous line of investigation

that would “require many years to complete” but was confident that he

could finish it, for “a task is a life-preserver.” My returns suggest

that men engaged in scientific research have more power to “carry on”

than any other class and that those engaged in the professions are

perhaps least likely to do so when they cease active practice. Several

specify greater mental clarity in seeing through delusions, shams,

and vanities. Others feel a certain exaltation at times, dependent

perhaps upon digestion or the weather. Others specify new and deeper

self-knowledge. Others find much satisfaction in the settling of a

few fixed and cardinal ideas or convictions. A few feel new ambitions

to begin new enterprises. Several found in the war and its results

a mental stimulus that they felt to be rejuvenating and longed and

believed that they must live on to see the settlement of some of the

great questions now so wide open. Four had observed such awakenings

in others. Most, however, felt themselves going on about as before,

with no change save gradual abatement of energy. Some felt as strong

physically and mentally as ever until they set themselves to some

serious task and then realized that this feeling was illusory. Others

were sure they would have felt a revival of springtide but for some

infirmity or disaster. It is, however, hard for others to judge on this

matter and harder perhaps for the individual to answer the question for

himself.

The remission of responsibilities and the dropping of burdens would of

itself give a certain sense of exaltation, because all such changes

involve a new balance between ambitions and accomplishments. Retired

clergymen often feel a great relief from being no longer accountable

to others for their opinions and some often find a joyful sense of

emancipation from old doctrines surprising, not only to others but most

of all to themselves. One writes, “I found, on sober second thought,

I no longer really believed certain dogmas I had preached all my life

and that in my inmost heart I really believed certain things I had

often condemned as heresies.” He found an intense mental stimulus in

thus reconstructing his own creed. A clergyman of seventy-nine once

told me he had ceased to preach, even as a supply, because since his

resignation his new views gave offense. Old physicians, too, sometimes,

though far more rarely and to a less extent, drop as illusions certain

fundamental principles by which the practice of a lifetime had been

regulated.

Again, the new lines of interest to which the old, set free from the

tasks of their lives, sometimes turn show that there is a half-delusive

and half-real sense of psychic rejuvenation associated with the pursuit

of a new topic. On the whole, however, it would seem that withdrawal

from exacting duties, the freedom from the necessity of self-support

and the leisure thus resulting, the abatement of the _vita sexualis_

and the storm and stress this is now known to cause, the fact that

one is now no longer anxious lest he do or say anything that would

interfere with his own future career, and the sense that he can both

live and think as he lists, would altogether constitute a loud call

to revise his views, to get down to fundamentals, be more sincere and

independent, to get better acquainted with his inmost self, review his

past life, and draw from it its lessons. Morale, as I have elsewhere

tried to show,[194] consists in keeping ourselves, body and mind,

always at the tiptop of condition and this is ever harder to do as age

advances. But I think we may conclude that just in proportion as this

is done there is a perhaps prolonged and delightful “Indian summer”

that is caused by the kind of mental housecleaning that dispenses with

all non-essentials and consists in warming up the deeper emotions,

quickening the intellect and reinforcing the will, and that this period

combines uniquely the charm of summer and fall without excessive heat

and without dangerous chill. All invites to synthesis, for the age of

excessive and diverting specialization that is forced upon the young

and immature in our day is past and the season for harvest has come.

And it is just this that our distracted world now most lacks and

needs. Sane and ripe old age has a new sense of values, relations,

perspectives; and no form of culture man has ever produced is ripe

until the fruitage it contributes to morals and life has been garnered.

To show how all our achievements affect human conduct is the thing the

world most needs to-day and needs far more than at any other period

in history. This is what our age calls so loudly upon the old to

supply. Just in proportion as civilization advances and life becomes

more and more complex and distracting, the need of older and wiser men

increases, for only from their outlook tower can things be seen in

their true perspective. Wells’s new conspectus of history represents

the old man’s view and one of my correspondents writes that in a long

literary life he has never come upon anything quite so stimulating and

absorbing. It is this sort of work that should have been done by an old

man and such tasks can only be accomplished by those younger men who

have the rare power of genius to anticipate the choicest gifts of age.

Plato saw that the proper business of old men was to philosophize; and

what is religion, to which so many senescents turn, but a condensed

philosophy put in the form of symbol, myth, and rite.

Old women, perhaps even more than old men, seem to enjoy an “Indian

summer” of life. The best of them grow serene, tolerant, liberal,

often devote themselves with great assiduity to charity, to causes, to

helpful and intelligent ministrations to others, perhaps with utter

self-abnegation; while others carry on affairs, conduct enterprises

of moment, and really guide all about them without their knowledge

and without realizing themselves that they are doing so; still others

read with an abandon that they have never experienced before and

are often wise in counsel, even subordinating their own daughters,

husbands, and perhaps sons in a way that suggests the possibility of

a new matriarchate. They sometimes develop a therapeutic skill that

is a modern analogue of the old grandmother’s medicinal herb-lore

and is as unexplained as the old countryman’s weather wisdom. They

are almost always more religious than old men but rarely dogmatic or

theological and often grow indifferent or almost oblivious of the

creeds they affected in their earlier years. Thus they illustrate at

every stage of life what is true of all its stages, that woman lives

nearer to the life of the race, is a better representative of it, and

so a more generic being than man, and is thus less prone to dwarfing

specialization.

_Do you rely more or less on doctors or find that you must study

yourself and be your own doctor?_

In the answers to this question there was a general consensus to the

effect that doctors were resorted to only in emergencies of illness,

accident, or perhaps surgery, and several mentioned the old saw to the

effect that in the fourth or fifth decade a man is either a fool, an

invalid, or a physician to himself. Only a few followed the practice

of having a look-over at intervals as a prophylactic. Two had special

friendships for a particular doctor, except for whom they would

have no use for the profession. Several expressed their gratitude

to physicians who were responsible for a vacation, a tour, or other

change. Several had turned away from the regulars to homeopathy,

osteopathy, or Christian Science. Some allowed doctors to examine and

prescribe and then used their own judgment as to how much of their

medicines should be taken or prescriptions followed. Some relied much

upon physicians who had known them personally for a long period or

practiced in their family but had little faith in new physicians.

One doctor professed loss of confidence in his profession and had

“returned to nature.” A few had found fasting of from twenty-four

to forty-eight hours beneficial for most of their ailments. None

doubted, and several expressed very special gratitude to specialists,

particularly ophthalmologists and even surgeons. There is a very

general aversion to drugs, although a few dosed themselves for years,

tried many patent medicines, and one thought he had exhausted almost

all the pharmacopœia. Aging people often regret the replacement of the

old family physician by experts who in prescribing for one defective

function ignore and perhaps injure others. Occasionally old people of

both sexes retain or revert to old family traditions of the virtue

of herbs, which played such a great rôle in the ancient days of the

herbalists. We find, too, outcrops of the fear that surgeons are too

ready to operate. One old man told me that in a recent illness it

took him a month to get over the disease and three months to recover

from the effects of the medicines the doctor had prescribed. Another

followed the precept of young doctors for special and acute, and old

doctors for general, troubles and for prescriptions of regimen. It

is often deplored that while women’s diseases, troubles of sight,

throat, lungs, abdomen, and children’s disorders, have each their own

specialists, there are almost none who have specialized on old age and

that when the old are seriously ill, there is a general tendency in the

profession to give up hope too soon, to pay less attention to those

who because of age and its feebleness will die soon anyway. We have

frequent illustrations of remarkable recoveries of old people who had

been given up by physicians.

It must not be forgotten, however, that medicine has made great strides

in the last few decades and that the older generation now passing

has not yet come to a full realization of the new resources that the

advances of modern pathology and the other sciences that underlie

the healing art have brought to it. Perhaps we might commend to the

aged, when they first fully realize that they are old, the course of

one of our respondents, who made a round of the specialists for the

different organs to reinforce his own hygienic self-knowledge, although

he found the prophylactic prescriptions of the different experts

so contradictory as to be often practically impossible. Unhappily,

however, we have no agencies to examine the whole ensemble of parts

and functions and suggest modes of life fit for each individual, as

for example, the Life Extension Institute should do. Nothing is more

certain than that every senescent should, with increasing frequency,

have himself looked over that he may anticipate, at as early a stage

as possible, the onset of the many physiological failures that impend.

_Do you get more or less from the clergy and the church than formerly?_

All answered this question, with surprising unanimity and but slight

reservations, negatively. A few still loved church services, had

clerical friends whom they loved and respected, went to church for

the music, enjoyed university preachers, reread portions of the Bible

with edification, etc. Many thought the clergy insincere or ignorant,

too absorbed in money-raising, preposterously antagonistic to science,

or found the same uplift in reading other great literature as in the

Scriptures. Over and over we find statements to the effect that the

writer has become his own high-priest, minister, oracle, captain of

his soul, no longer in need of ecclesiastical mediation with the

divine, etc. “Why is the church still so apologetic when science does

not apologize for Copernicus?” “Why has the church waged such bitter

warfare against Darwinism, when evolution is only another and better

name for the revelation of the divine and should have brought such

enlargement and reinforcement to religious thought and feelings?” One

eminent artist finds all the religion he needs in art; students of

science find it in nature; students of the humanities, in the study

of the deeper nature of man. The beautiful is just as religious, if

not more so, than the good or the true. “There is only one great word

in the world and that is _love_.” “I preached all the doctrines and

found some truth in many of them but have rejected most, and perhaps

the form of all, as pulp and rind.” “Each of us must work out our

own salvation.” “My religion is the Red Cross.” Several who had been

brought up pietists and had attached themselves to various churches in

turn had, in later years, withdrawn from all and come to depend on

their own reading and meditation. “The clergy are blind leaders of the

blind.” In one case church was discontinued because the assumptions of

pulpiteers aroused “all my porcupine quills.” Some had ceased to attend

divine services because they seemed irreligious compared to the deeper

religion they find within. The higher criticism has brought insights to

some that the church knows not of and “my real conversion was from, not

to, the church. It knows and can teach us nothing about the hereafter.”

Thus, in general it would seem, if our meager returns are at all

typical, that the clergyman makes less appeal to the old and knows less

about ministering to their nature and needs than do physicians. It must

not be forgotten, however, that, as one of our respondents says in

substance, the views of those this questionnaire appealed to, people of

intelligence and culture, are exceptional, and probably the majority

of the uneducated have at least a falsetto belief in some institutions

and teachings of the church. Our returns indicate, however, the same

growth of skepticism with years as that found by the far more extensive

conspectus of J. H. Leuba,[195] from which he gathered that the

percentage of those who believed in God and immortality decreased both

with age and with education.

_Do you think or worry about dying or the hereafter more or less than

formerly?_

Here, as was to be expected in our age of transition and

_éclaircissement_, there is the utmost diversity. All my respondents

answered but only four of them (three women) found anything like

the orthodox religious consolations afforded by the hope of a

personal immortality. Most were agnostic. “I know as much about

it as anyone who ever lived, which is absolutely nothing.” Four

were distinctly pantheistic and found pleasure in the belief of

extinction, annihilation, or absorption into the cosmos like a drop

of water returning to the sea. About one-half had lost confidence in

sacerdotalism and had no connection with any church and a few were

bitter against ecclesiastical assumptions. Most had ceased to worry

about death, a few professed never to think of it, two dreaded the

pain they associated with the act of dying, and one prayed that the

end might be instantaneous. Men of science wished and hoped that they

might go on “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” with renewed facilities

and incentives for getting nearer to the soul of the great _Autos_.

One’s life-long religion seems to have been based on the analogy of

the chick in the egg who regarded hatching as its death, when it was

really coming into a vaster life. Most disclaimed all terror, although

two in their youth had felt that this might recur in second childhood.

The attitude of most might be described by the phrases: “one world at

a time and this one now;” “consider the duty of the present moment

and leave the rest;” “never be anxious concerning anything beyond our

control,” etc. One wished to die like a pious Buddhist in thinking on

his good deeds. One expressed a strong contempt for a god who would

tolerate an orthodox hell and several felt that they would sooner or

later become wearied to the point of ennui with a heaven according to

any conception of it. Most had reckoned with the chance of death in the

plans of their business, making their wills, etc., but believed that

all thought concerning the hereafter was a waste of energy. Several

found consolation only in influential immortality and wanted to live

on in the memory of their friends and in the service they had rendered

to others, although this idea was generally connected with thoughts of

plasmal immortality or living on in their offspring. One good old lady

I knew who had spent a life doing good works and had always attended

church said, in answer to this question, that she had been so occupied

in active services that she had never found time to think much about

theology but in her heart doubted all doctrines, was not at all sure

that she believed in either God or immortality, and was convinced

only that whatever happened would be all right. Old clergymen seem

particularly prone to suffer from doubts, sometimes of the most radical

nature, and even wonder if after a life of zealous propaganda they may,

after all, have been wrong. Several professed themselves more deeply

religious, as they understand religion, than the church itself, and

even insisted upon a larger, deeper faith than orthodoxy dreams of.

It would seem, from these and other data, that the fears of death are

by far most intense in youth, and that in moments when the tide of

life ebbs and there are great griefs or disappointments--not only in

love, where it is most marked, but along other life lines--a terrible

and sudden envisagement of death often arises, although this mood is

generally flitting and soon passes. When in age the forces of life

abate, death has already begun its work and if belief in personal

immortality remains it is sustained and fed chiefly by poetic metaphors

or similes that have little justification before the bar of reason and

are essentially tenuous and sentimental. Certain it is that inhibitions

of the life tide do not so readily prompt thoughts of suicide; though

if they do so, as statistics show, the thought of it is more likely to

prompt the act of self-destruction in the later decades than it is in

youth, when nearly all coquette with these thoughts. The curve has two

crests, one in adolescence and the other in senescence.

The chief psychological inference seems to be that the old generally

refuse to face squarely and come to terms with the death-thought

consciously because it is more fatal to them than to the young, but

fly to every kind of relief from it by diversion to other things and

themes. In age there is often a narrowing of the intellectual horizon

to the immediate environment and this itself is opiative. Thus nature

alleviates in the old the fear of death, which impends and which they

know to be near. They sometimes wonder just how it will come but rarely

dwell upon such details as their own obsequies or leaving last messages

and think more often, if their thoughts stray to such subjects, of the

effects their demise will entail upon the course of life of others. The

fact is, the race has always found death too terrible to be faced in

all its horrors and has camouflaged and disguised its grim details by

tombs and avoided the direct envisagement of it by focusing attention

upon the soul that survives in ways we shall see more clearly hereafter.

Some individuals’ returns transcended my rubrics and have a value

in themselves that merit, and I hope will find, publication in full

elsewhere. One man known and loved wherever the English language is

spoken, who died in 1921 in his 84th year, had the supreme good fortune

for nearly thirty years to have the almost daily association and

assistance of a sagacious lady physician who entered sympathetically

into all his interests and became his literary executor and biographer.

This venerable man, so buoyant in his writings, grew depressed as

age advanced, especially toward nightfall, although this is nowhere

expressed in his books but abounds in his diaries. He developed an

interest that seems abnormal in everything pertaining to diet, tried

scores of new foods and drinks, only to discard them one after another,

and became so averse to tea, coffee, and smoking that it was hard for

him to tolerate those addicted to them. But it was on the problems

connected with constipation and evacuation that his interest seems

to have become most exaggerated. In his converse even with the young

but especially with those near his own age he constantly reverted to

this subject and his favorite theme of conversation seems to have

been on topics of personal and especially dietary hygiene. He studied

the chemistry of nutrition and corresponded with experts upon the

subject and attempted to carry out upon himself all their findings as

he understood them. Eggs he thought more or less poisonous and for a

time he seemed almost to think that the hens that laid them could not

be suitable food. His idiosyncrasies in this field would constitute

a unique theme for study that would have lessons all its own. He was

always checking his appetite and experimenting upon and observing

himself. There were, in this case, somewhat unique signs of an Indian

summer. He wrote twelve books from the age of 30 to 64, and fifteen

from 64 to near 84. At 64 he felt that he had written himself out but

soon struck other veins, so that his later books cannot be called

inferior to his earlier ones. In editing poems of Nature at this time

he found so many aspects of it that poets had overlooked that he

undertook to supply the gap and had a period of rhyming that lasted

about a year.

This suggests another octogenarian I knew, a great leader in

mathematics and a man of international fame, who in his latest years

believed that he had poetic gifts and wooed the muses, even the goddess

of love, with canticles that amazed his friends, who wondered whether

he was just making his acquaintance with poetry for the first time

or had known it more discriminatingly earlier in life and lost his

standards. Another eminent man I knew whose name is known throughout

the literary world, and who was also a physician, believed in and

practiced frequent naps, in which I have seen him indulge between the

courses of a long public dinner, in the intervals of which he would

converse with all his old sprightliness and vigor and at the close

make the best speech of the occasion. There was no record of even

midday sleeps with the naturalist above described. He usually did his

best work in the forenoon but occasionally, even in the last years of

his life, worked till late at night and resumed early in the morning,

doing this for some days as with a kind of afflatus. He also kept up

an active interest in public affairs until his increasing illness

compelled him to narrow down his interests more and more, so that

toward the end they seemed to center entirely in himself.

A man of eighty ceased manual work at fifty and had a marked

intellectual renaissance and became an author. He has come to realize

the limitations of doctors and, although he employs them, is his

own ultimate judge in all matters pertaining to his health. He has

withdrawn from the influence of the clergy. “My science and reason

say that there is no hereafter while my faith says that there is but

I do not give myself any trouble about their quarrel for it will all

be decided soon enough.” “I am more disposed to take the far view of

things and try to estimate wider relations than formerly.” “I feel

that my duty is to the race and to humanity rather than to any section

of it.” He reads science and occasionally a good story, although the

latter “must have some interest besides that of love.” “I formerly was

fond of hunting and fishing but the killing instinct has faded with

age, as it does with most people; but the forest and field, the sea and

land, are beautiful beyond compare and their infinitely varied forms

are more bewitching than ever.” Everyone, he thinks, should have some

Bohemia into which he should retreat when overtaken by age and has

leisure, and his has been genealogy, mainly getting acquainted with his

own ancestors and trying to visualize them as men and women, feeling

that he owes to them all his qualities, mental, moral, and physical.

A liberal clergyman approaching the eighties after a life of unique

eminence and service writes: “As for a future life for the soul of

man, I believe it is a moral necessity to explain and justify his

ethical conduct in the present sphere of existence. If, nevertheless,

after death there should be no continued existence, individually and

consciously, I am ready to accept this solution as also wise and right

because ordained by Him who is all-wise and good--‘I cannot drift

beyond His loving care.’” He believes that his devotion to great

causes that he has seen advance, while “conserving divine ideals

below, which ever find us young and ever keep us so,” has contributed

to his exceptional vigor and his message to the young is to prepare

for old age physically, economically, intellectually, morally, and

religiously. He grows more charitable and appreciative, feels deep

personal gratitude to physicians, who have more than once saved his

life; blesses his long-lived parents for the rare constitution that

has not only carried him through but given him a recuperative power at

which he has often marveled, dreads the excess of sentiment he often

notes in others of his age, who too readily become lachrymose; deplores

the excessive freedom and growing self-affirmation, lack of restraint

and modesty, courtesy, and thoughtfulness for others in the rising

generation; thinks, with Goethe, that if as he grows older he has less

keenness of sympathy for suffering, he thrills more deeply in the

contemplation of every noble and disinterested act; finds satisfaction

in knowing that his ashes (for he has long been an advocate of

cremation) will lie near other dear ones on a beautiful hillside in

sight of the Pacific; and takes satisfaction in reviewing his life from

a large ethical standpoint.

A naturalist of seventy-two of international reputation, who has done

perhaps more creative work for the benefit of the human race in his

field than any other living man, first realized that he was old at

sixty-five, when digestion and elimination were very slightly reduced.

Feeling the need of companionship he married at sixty-seven and found

increased happiness and rejuvenation. Frail when young, he learned

early to take better care of himself, restricting the amount of starchy

foods and stressing the importance of the daily use of one ounce

of agar-agar, one ounce of wheat bran, and half an ounce of liquid

paraffin, which has become an absolute necessity. He writes three hours

and works his head and body outdoors eight hours per day, covering

rarely less than twelve miles. He is not only his own doctor but has

often helped others by his experience. “I never worry about dying or

think of the hereafter,” he says. “I have done good work for my fellow

men, have never injured, over-reached, or cheated a human being in

all my life and hope to live in the hearts of others so that my works

and words may be of value to those who follow.” “I have no earthly or

heavenly use for the clergy or church; am my own minister to my soul.”

“I have no regrets whatever for anything I have ever done through life

but have been ‘done for’ several times by others.” “Since about fifty I

have taken more interest in public and community affairs and the future

life of those who are to come after.” His great temptation is physical

and mental overwork, which it requires constant care to curb. “I am now

in the ‘Indian summer’ of mental clarity, finding myself able to do

very much heavier and better work than at any other time in life, and

only wish I could continue to carry on these experiments throughout the

ages but am limiting myself to experiments that will not last more than

ten or twenty years.” He receives several score letters a day and is

editing a comprehensive work of eight volumes describing perhaps the

most complicated creative work that has fallen to the hands of man to

do.

One of America’s most eminent educators and leaders in science, and

the creator of a great university, who has made his mark on the world

as an advocate of peace, believing, however, that when we were once in

the war we should push it with the utmost vigor, regrets only that he

has, on one or two occasions, been misunderstood. He has traveled and

lectured very extensively and is widely known by his books outside his

own specialty. He ascribes his vigor to his early life on a farm and

his outdoor life as a student of nature. Although he became a doctor of

medicine in 1875 he has had occasion to feel the deepest appreciation

of the services a few other members of that profession have rendered

him. He says: “I have good friends among the clergy and often preach to

them. They have no special pull on my future. I shall probably have to

go out alone; I came in that way.” He writes:

When man shall come to Manhood’s destiny

When our slow-creeping race shall be full-grown

Deep in each human heart a chamber lone

Of holies, holiest shall builded be;

And each man for himself shall hold the key,

Each one shall kindle his own altar fires,

Each burn an offering of his own desires,

And each at last his own high-priest must be.

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.

In his dealings with such cases the physician needs a special sagacity.

He must realize the great satisfaction it gives his aged patients to

have him listen patiently and sympathetically to all their ills and

should encourage them to trust him fully and with no reservations.

This not only shields others but by humoring the wise doctor can not

only gain full confidence but may be able to bring such patients to

see their own selfishness and thus effect a real cure even in their

physical condition. I have known cases where such ministrations were

a benediction to the family. Where old patients have thus built up

a system of half-fancied ailments, placeboes may work wonders, the

therapy being in fact chiefly mental. Such insidious dangers to which

the aged are exposed cannot be reached by medicaments but rather

by pithiatism in the sense of Babinski or persuasion in the sense

of Dubois, Merchenowsky, Rosenbach, or Herbert Hall, who heal by

prescribing activities, physical and mental, found possible after

painstaking analysis. The old often feel a falsetto invalidism that may

be cured by a vigorous appeal to their moral sense or, again by changes

in their daily program or regimen or by exposing them to fresh streams

of rich outer impressions that correct the mental stagnation to which

they are prone or keep their attention from themselves by giving their

minds a larger field and a far-off focus, as against their inveterate

tendency to mental short-sightedness.

In youth erotic fetishes and pet, instinctive aversions are now

known to play an important if half-unconscious rôle in love between

the sexes. Eyes, hair, lips, cheek, neck, or any of her little ways

of movement or speech may become a focus of special charm to the

young amorist. Conversely, other or even the same features, traits,

automatisms, or habits may mediate no less unconscious dislike.[196]

Some of the same rapports or repulsions exist between the old and

the young. The former may even have their favorite children or

grandchildren and dislike others in ways they themselves could only

inadequately justify. This partiality is most pronounced between

fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. It is the chief factor not

only in what is called love at first sight but of first impressions of

strangers, which are proverbially so hard to efface. Thus what we deem

trifles may loom large.

The old are particularly prone to develop peculiarities which, if

they do not unconsciously alienate those nearest and perhaps dearest

to them, are real handicaps to their devotion. Of this the old are

rarely aware, and if attention is called to them they minimize their

importance. These might be listed and weighed like their analogues in

the erotic field. The roster of them on the negative side would be

long. There are faults in table manners, modes of eating and drinking,

using table utensils from the napkin on, etc. Mastication may be noisy

or otherwise subtly disagreeable, or there is slobbering, clumsiness,

or neglect of common conventionalities once observed. The toilet may

be neglected, the attire soiled or spotted or imperfectly put on, and

so a look-over needed before we go out. We do things or make noises

in the presence of others that once we only permitted ourselves when

alone and there is a new indifference to personal appearance. The

voice is impaired in volume, richness of inflection, and articulation;

our face or form are no longer æsthetic objects; we mislay things

and invoke those about us to help find them; and are tediously slow

in mind and body. If, in addition to all this, we become pryingly

overcurious, fault-finding, exact, and forgetful, we give our friends

more to put up with than we realize, and the best of them would be

shocked if they became conscious of how much they repress in their

psychic attitude toward, if not in their treatment of us. On all such

matters we should make frequent self-surveys. On the other hand, if

we cultivate not only order and control but, above all, the poise and

repose of those seeking the Great Peace, striving always to do, be, and

say only our best things, we may make ourselves not only respected but

loved in a new way, so that we shall be turned to not only for advice

but for companionship and help in emergencies and make some of even

the most obtrusive signs of physical decay attractive by association

with the higher qualities of soul, as the ugliness of Socrates came

to be almost loved by his disciples. Art understands this and many

of its masterpieces depict old age in its glory. The same is true of

literature and even of the drama, despite the fact that actors who

specialize in old women’s and particularly old men’s parts so often

make age repulsive and ridiculous, for it has always been a most

attractive field for caricature.

The old are subject to certain fluctuations, new in kind, degree, or

both. Sleep is less regular. They have good and bad nights, one or

more of each alternating, which make the next day clear or cloudy with

dregs. If fatigue comes more quickly, so does recuperation by rest.

They are often refreshed by a very brief nap or by recumbency, or even

by a period of solitude during the day. Thus on the periodicity of day

and night is superposed one of less amplitude or briefer duration,

perhaps after one or each meal. Thus the distinction between the

sleeping and waking state comes to be less sharp, slumber is not so

deep or long, and the dreamy states of reverie invade mentation by day.

The great restorer does not quite make losses good and the accumulation

of these deficits explains very many of the phenomena of old age,

which might be characterized as sleepiness for death, the rest that

is complete and knows no waking. Capitulation to the siesta habit is

marked in some by a distinct improvement of condition. They speak of

a new balance between activity and repose and sleep all the better

nights, while others resist such tamperings with nature’s rhythm and if

they acquire the midday habit find themselves nervous or less refreshed

the morning after. Some retire and rise with the sun and find a certain

elation of spirits in this reversion to nature and praise the morning

hour or even sunrise, of which the urbanized world about them knows

little and ever less; while others find a virtue in lying abed late.

While we know too little of the hygiene of the aged to prescribe, it

is certain that they tend to break with the old regulations and really

need some of the indulgences they are often too inclined to permit

themselves.

The appetites fluctuate and may readily become capricious. Some would

eat more and less often than before and love to experiment with new

viands. Some think some items of diet once beneficial become harmful

and so eliminate them, while some like and can digest things impossible

before. Sometimes they indulge for days or even weeks in a favorite

dish that at intervals they cannot touch with impunity, as if there

were spells of immunity broken by intervals during which the same

article produces deleterious results. One says that what is at one

time a food becomes for him at another time a poison. This seems

particularly true of certain fruits, while the acid balance seems very

liable to upsets. Most tend to overeat and are always struggling with

their appetite. Yet they often have periods when foods lose their

attraction, as if Nature decreed a fast. Here she is often right and a

day or more of relative or even entire abstinence may prove helpful. So

the former diet periods do not need to be observed; nor need the old be

coaxed at such times with tempting food.

Springtime is hard on the assimilative processes of all but

especially on those of the old. This is partly because the tides of

life everywhere set toward genesis rather than toward individuation

but still more because the calorific elements of food need to be

essentially reduced and also because winter’s supplies grow a little

stale before summer ripens her produce. So, too, with the abated

activity that years bring the need of food is reduced and hence the old

can often thrive on a small percentage of what they formerly needed.

Most, too, not only learn to avoid hearty meals at night but find it

best to lay in most of their rations earlier in the day. Very many find

in diet their chief center of interest and solicitude and the most

active theme for theorization, so that in many cases more and more

mentation seems to center about alimentary functions. There are very

active inductions from experience and constant modifications of views

hard to change in other fields. There does seem to be often a change

toward either increased sensitiveness or torpidity of the alimentary

tract. A few grow especially susceptible to seasoning, condiments,

flavors, and even confectionery. They may become even connoisseurs in

wine, tea, coffee, tobacco, while others grow indifferent and insist

that they like and can eat almost anything. Nutritive ups and downs

are thus more marked than before. Tendencies to decrease in weight are

distinctly more favorable for prolonged life than the opposite tendency

to obesity. Indeed, the former seems normal.