Growing Old
Horizon recently did an episode on Growing Old, different theories on why it happens, how it might be slowed or prevented. It wasn’t the most interesting Horizon episode I’ve seen, apart from suggesting that studies had proved, or strongly suggested, that antioxidants have little benefit to slowing the aging process, as many products and adverts proclaim. It inspired a few thoughts within me though, like how I want to have a white beard when I’m old. I’ll probably wear tweed too, so I look like some old professor, and maybe I’ll even be one.
When you’re young, you feel your youth will last forever, you can’t ever imagine being old and achey and not able to do things. When you’re young, summer holidays last forever, at the start at least, six weeks is forever. Often, I feel, people, unless it’s just me, can’t imagine feeling any different to how they feel at a certain time. If you’re in the depths of a dark depression, you can’t imagine ever feeling happy again. When you feel happy, you wonder whatever you were so down about. For a few days before Christmas I was ill, some sort of flu or a strong cold or something. It was only three, maybe four, days, but when I was lying in bed all congested and nauseous, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not feel like that. Now I’m in my final year of university, Childhood’s End, and yet the days and weeks and months, what’s left of them, stretch out before me and I can’t imagine them ever ending, that there will ever be anything other than the house I live in now, and the people I live with now, and the course I’m on now.
I wonder how I’ll grow old, I wonder too what will happen in my lifetime. I was talking with my grandmother the other day about her life and the times she grew up in, and it seems unlikely the twenty-first century will contain anything like the technological advancement that was seen in the twentieth. And yet scientists are a lot more technology savvy, and futurists seems more confident in their predictions. I remember Ray Kurzweil recently talking about the possibilities of matter teleportation in the next hundred years and I think he said something about time travel, though he though Faster-than-Light travel was still at least five-hundred years off, if it was at all possible (it was on a recent Guardian science podcast if anyone’s interested).
Anyway, my grandmother is old, though it’s easy to forget. Right now she’s closer to her eightieth birthday than her seventieth, but she often seems about twenty years younger. Sometimes I think she works too hard, does too much, but then, as far as I can tell, that’s what keeps her going. She dyes her hair, doesn’t have many wrinkles, frequently gets my ten-year-old cousins off to school, cooks, cleans, tends the garden, and meets weekly at a lace society. Perhaps she is like a shark in that if she ever stops, she’ll die, but I can’t imagine either of these things happening, she seems far too tenacious to ever succumb to the reaper, at least for a good few years yet. Maybe everyone feels that way about their grandparents, their parents, that because they always have been around, they always will be around, but I can only see my grandmother going in the next ten, twenty years through illness or some accident, not age, which of course I most strongly hope against.
That’s what happened to my grandfather. He died of cancer four or five years ago, younger than my grandmother is now, but if he hadn’t, I think he’d have gone on for another decade: his father was eighty or ninety when he died, and his father’s father about the same. Seventy years is a long time, an almost impossibly long time to a twenty-year-old. “Life is long and you are young and there is time to build again, but then one day you find ten years have got behind you, no-one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”
This post is perhaps getting rather morbid, but maybe that’s not uncommon for me. Maybe it’s just my Victorian Sensibilities coming through. But from time to time I wonder, as I imagine everyone does, what I’ll be like when I’m older. I suppose it depends entirely on the sort of life I lead. People with money, who live comfortable lives, often seem rather more radiant than people who don’t, though this might an impression formed from a few examples. I fear I’ll look gaunt, or more gaunt, when I grow old. I look a lot like my father, but I think my face is thinner and sharper, and I have more prominent cheek-bones, which makes my eyes appear more heavily set. I’ll have dark insets below my eyes, and sallow cheeks. I’ll have lines where my dimples are, but probably not too many crows feet because I don’t smile enough. Or maybe it won’t be so bad. I don’t think I’d mind so much if I went bald, but I’d rather be properly bald than just have thinning hair on top, like my grandfather had and my father is getting. Maybe I’d just close-shave my head and wear more hats. I’d definitely try a beard though, and I’ll be disappointed if I can’t grow a good one by then.
But enough about me, for now at least. The Horizon programme got me thinking about some of my favourite literary passages about growing old, and I’ve thought of three of them, which I shall now divulge in no particular order. The first is from that bastion of English poetry Alfred Lord Tennyson, and from one of my all-time favourite poems, Ulysses:
“I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all Experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
…
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
we are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
This next is from one of the most poignant short story’s I’ve ever read, William Faulkner’s Tomorrow:
“Uncle Gavin rose, and I remember how he looked at the jury – the eleven farmers and store-keepers and the twelfth man, who was to ruin his case – a farmer, too, a thin man, small, with thin grey hair and that appearence of hill farmers – at once frail and work-worn, yet curiously imperishable – who seem to become old men at fifty and then become invincible to time … The lowly and invincible of the earth – to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
Finally, a few lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin -
(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
…
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?
.
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
.
I do not think they will sing to me.”
Finally, to close this off, and relating back to the Faulkner quote about men who are old at fifty and never grow older, I’ve noticed before now that the animals and plants that live the longest always seem to be the ones the look the oldest to begin with. Tortoises and elephants for example, living up to two-hundred years and eighty years respectively. They start out all wrinkly and old-looking, then never get older. Same with really old trees, the ones that live the longest always seem to grow as gnarled, twisted things and remain that way for hundreds, even thousands of years (there was one tree in Attenborough’s The Secret Life of Plants which was almost five-thousand years old and is believed to be the oldest living thing on the planet). Whereas other animals, like say dogs and cats, never really look old until usually the last sixth months of their life, they tend to look just the same once they’ve grown to adult size and then they die after ten or twenty years. Maybe the key to growing old is looking old…
Tags: family, Growing Old, Old, Poetry, short stories, T. S. Eliot, Tennyson, Tennyson's Ulysses, Tomorrow, Ulysses, William Faulkner
