The physiology of old age is well understood--general sluggishness of
all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called
rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing
hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the
psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons
well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert,
the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old
man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and
experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their
relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a
person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he
remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may
go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of
those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them
from their graves: There was G----; how distinctly he recalls the name
and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was
B----, a name only. There was R----, and the memory of the career he
had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat
accident; but of his looks, his voice--not a vestige! It is a memory
full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls
his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly--voice, look,
manner--all complete. Others are only names associated with certain
incidents in school.
[Footnote 7: These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand
into an article, were among the very last things he wrote.--C. B.]
Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his
life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt
slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then the next moment, away it
goes again! Or, shall we call it a kind of mental anæsthesia, or
mental paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about
Georgetown, South America. I repeated the name over to myself a few
times. "Have I not known such a place some time in my life? Where is
it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" The name seemed like a dream. Then I
thought of Washington, the Capital, and the city above it, but had to
ask a friend if the name was Georgetown. Then suddenly, as if some
chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came!
Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it?
(I had lived in Washington for ten years.)
So we say, old age may reason well, but old age does not remember
well. This is a commonplace. It seems as if memory were the most
uncertain of all our faculties.
Power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in
the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we
octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not
grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only
need to focus upon you a little more completely.
Of course both sight and hearing are a little blunted in old age. But
for myself I see as well as ever I did, except that I have to use
spectacles in reading; but nowadays the younger observers hear the
finer sounds in nature that sometimes escape me.
Some men mellow with age, others harden, but the man who does not in
some way ripen is in a bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what it
lacks in repose.
To grow old gracefully is the trick.
To me one of the worst things about old age is that one has outlived
all his old friends. The Past becomes a cemetery.
"As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, "they grow more foolish and
more wise"--wise in counsel, but foolish in conduct. "There is no fool
like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is equally true that there is
no fool like the young fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to
middle age.
As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting to collate many wise
sayings of many wise men on youth and age.[8]
[Footnote 8: Here followed several pages of quotations from the
ancients and moderns.--C. B.]
Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is
certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any.
They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent,
the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of
pleasures is gone and another takes its place.
Emerson published his essay on "Old Age" while he was yet in the
middle sixties, and I recall that in the "Emerson-Carlyle
Correspondence" both men began to complain of being old before they
were sixty. Scott was old before his time, and Macaulay too. Scott
died at sixty-one, Macaulay at fifty-nine, Tennyson at eighty-three,
Carlyle at eighty-six, Emerson at seventy-nine, Amiel at sixty.
I have heard it said that it is characteristic of old age to reverse
its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them;
it revises them. If its years have been well spent, it has reached a
higher position from which to overlook life. It commands a wider view,
and the relation of the parts to the whole is more clearly seen....
"Old age superbly rising"--Whitman.
Age without decrepitude, or remorse, or fear, or hardness of heart!