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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 as for men 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 ... constitute, as I have elsewhere tried to show, probably the very greatest need of our civilization to-day. ... 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. ... The old are very dependent upon weather, climate, and seasons. Winter is hardest on them. Not only does it mean more indoor life and less activity but cold is one of the chief enemies of the old and winter is also supercharged with subtle and profound symbolisms of their own stage of life which deploy more beneath than above the threshold of their consciousness. What old person does not shudder at the thought of being buried in snow and ice. Even the autumn is for them full of somber analogies of the stage of the sere and falling leaves, of the ripening and garnering of the fruits of the earth, of the first blighting frosts. All the old long for the rejuvenation of springtime and perhaps dream of it when nature is snowbound. Some keep diaries of wind, temperature, and storm and become weather-wise, while those who can, seek warmer climes, especially when winter begins to break, a season statistics show is most fatal for the old. ...
Thus the old need a higher kind and degree of self-knowledge than they have yet attained. ... This is all the more needful now that the intensity of modern life with its industrial and managerial strain compels earlier withdrawal from its strenuosities. We live longer and also begin to retire earlier, so that senescence is lengthening at both ends. Hence, again, the need of midwives to bring us into the new world of higher sanity now possible to ever more of us. Both we and our civilization now so checked, disoriented, and misled by immaturities are in such crying need of a higher leadership that is not forthcoming! We are suffering chiefly from unripeness. The human stock is not maturing as it should. Life is so complicated that the years of apprenticeship are ever longer and harder, so that we are exhausted ere we become master workmen in our craft and the rapid age turnover this involves robs us of too many of the choicest fruits of experience.
Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a new vitality, physical and mental. If we are normal and not too spent, we feel new hopes, ambitions, and make plans to surpass our old selves and at last to be, do, say, enjoy something really worth while. As we pass our life in review, stage by stage, up to the present, it seems so incomplete, fragmentary, tentative, and altogether unsatisfying that we almost wonder whether it was we ourselves who really lived it or someone else whose career we are following with an objective detachment never felt before toward our own ego. Certain it is that a new veil falls between us and our past, gauzy and transparent though it be. Our psychic nature did not intend for us the role of reminiscence so persistently assigned to and so commonly accepted by us. Our juvenile memories are but the ragbag vestiges of a vaster experience that had to be forgotten to be completely incorporated in our personality and to ascribe too much significance to them is the fetishism of senility. If we write up our lives, we can make them interesting and valuable only by using our better information about and more sympathetic rapport with ourselves with the same impartiality that a close and discerning friend would do if he had all our data. It is for the things of the present and for the problems of the future that our mental vision becomes clearer than ever before. Our wish and will to achieve and make our insights known and prevail acquire new force.
How different we find old age from what we had expected or observed it to be; how little there is in common between what we feel toward it and the way we find it regarded by our juniors; and how hard it is to conform to their expectations of us! They think we have glided into a peaceful harbor and have only to cast anchor and be at rest. We feel that we have made landfall on a new continent where we must not only disembark but explore and make new departures and institutions and give a better interpretation to human life. Instead of descending toward a deep, dark valley we stand, in fact, before a delectable mountain, from the summit of which, if we can only reach it, we can view the world in a clearer light and in truer perspective than the race has yet attained. It is all only a question of strength and endurance. That is the great and only, but when we squarely face it, a staggering proviso. In all essentials we are better and more fit than ever before save only for the curse of fatigability, for age and death are nothing but fatigue advancing and finally conquering life. One single example of a hale old man dowered by nature and nurture, as immune from tire as youth is, would give the world a new idea of senectitude. ...
This brings me to the main thesis of this book, which is that intelligent and well-conserved senectitude has very important social and anthropological functions in the modern world not hitherto utilized or even recognized. The chief of these is most comprehensively designated by the general term synthesis, something never so needed as in our very complex age of distracting specializations.
In the first place, it has been noted that withdrawal from biological phyletic functions is often marked by an Indian summer of increased clarity and efficiency in intellectual work. Not only does individuation now have its innings but the distractions from passion, the lust for wealth and power, and in general the struggle for place and fame, have abated and in their stead comes, normally, not only a philosophic calm but a desire to draw from accumulated experience and knowledge the ultimate, and especially the moral, lessons of life—in a word, to sum up in a broader view the net results of all we have learned of the comédie humaine. ...
My own conclusion that death is the end of the body and soul alike ... also brings me, I frankly confess, a new joy in and love of life which is greatly intensified by contrast with the blankness beyond. As a dark background brings out a fading picture, so whatever remains of life is vastly more precious and more delectable day by day and hour by hour than it could possibly be if at the door of the tomb we only said au revoir. The very minutes seem longer because the departure into eternity is so near. Although death treats our psyche just as it does our soma, this is not so bad on our present views of the universe and insight lifts us above the need of consolation and even gives a sense of victory though Death do his worst, which those who expect another personal life never attain. And so I am grateful to senescence that has brought me at last into the larger light of a new day which the young can never see and should never be even asked to see. ...
Footnotes
Excerpted from G. Stanley Hall, Senescence: The Last Half of Life. New York, NY: D. Appleton & Co; 1922:367–438.
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