At Seventy-Three and Beyond

I

I AM seventy-three to-day. That is well along toward the four-score mark. I remember that the Psalmist refers to the strength which brings us to eighty years as ‘labor and sorrow,’ and yet, curiously enough, I have no sensation which squares with his dictum. To be sure, I am not robust. I do not see as clearly as of yore, and Tom avers that I am slightly deaf. But I’m as full of the joy of living as ever. There’s more beauty in the sunset than there used to be, and the songs of the birds, if heard more faintly, have a sweeter cadence. Spring has never before borne such fragrance in upon me, nor have I ever perceived as great a glory in the autumn or found more comfort in the winter.

If I have retired from active business, it is not because of incapacity. I notice, indeed, that when a particularly perplexing problem faces Tom, who succeeded me at the store, he comes to Father for advice, and to this date he has rarely failed to heed my counsel. But why should I toil on in the market-place? My modest fortune suffices. It gives me books, lectures, art, and the theatre. It affords me the leisure for which I have toiled all my life long, the leisure really to busy myself with the big things which face me as a man. And I submit that there is a joy in it all that is very far removed from ‘labor and sorrow.’

Seventy-three. Ah, how the years are flying! It seems hardly a month from birthday to birthday. I remember to have heard my grandfather make this remark. I was a child then and the words seemed unbelievable. Years afterwards, Father, sitting by the fireside, used to express the same sentiment very frequently. I understood it more perfectly by that time, for right in the thick of business strife the days were all too short for me. But now that I’ve taken my place at the fireside, and the shadows seem to be lengthening, I understand to the full just how swiftly the years are slipping by.

‘A thousand years in thy sight,’ said one of old, ‘are but as yesterday when it is passed and a watch in the night.’ That is God’s outlook upon time. He has always lived. He will live forever. To Him there is no past, no future, only one eternal NOW. It is because He has always been, that the Eternal Presence looks upon a thousand years as ‘a watch in the night.’ And the longer we finite beings exist, so I take it, the shorter the years to our view. It is not that our days are drawing to an end that we have this outlook, — it is that they are receding from a beginning, that they are piling, one upon the other, until each seems small in comparison with the mass. At three-score and thirteen, a year is but a seventy-third. Indeed, I am more and more firmly convinced that with advancing years one approaches, as nearly as a finite being can, the point of view from which the Infinite One regards time, and in all reverence I cannot avoid the conviction that the shortness of the years as one looks at them in old age demonstrates one’s kinship to the Almighty, and is an earnest of unending life.

The Reverend Mr. Smithers, who preaches hell-fire and damnation to a little congregation of people who are frightened into denying themselves the brightness of living that they may ‘ get to heaven’ sometime, will hardly see any logic in my thought. Deacon Jones would regard it as akin to blasphemy; but a quiet game of whist is ‘gambling’ to Deacon Jones. It agonizes his soul to see the young folks dance, and I’ve more than once heard him say how hard it is for ‘the Lord to save an old man.’ These good people may be right, although it would grieve me to discover it; and yet, I can’t help thinking that time seems shorter to me in old age because the years have brought me into at least a subconscious realization of my immortality.

The reader needs not to be told that I have busied myself with selling hardware most of my life rather than in delving into theology or metaphysics. My reading has been limited and desultory, and I dare not believe that I ’ ve thought out any solution for the greatest of the problems that confront me in common with all my kind. My intimates know me as a practical man and are kind enough to credit me with more common sense than, I fear, I really possess. I am fully conscious of my limitations; more so, perhaps, than these pages would indicate. Nevertheless, the very fact that weeks get more and more like days to me as the years multiply, and days seem to shrink into hours, warms my old heart with what I believe to be an assurance of unending existence.

That assurance strengthens, too, when, looking within, I am able to discover no trace whatever of decay. That is to say, I feel as young as I did at forty, at twenty, at ten. In speaking of age, we invariably make the mistake of thinking only of the body. When I wrote just now, ‘I am seventy-three to-day,’ I meant only, of course, that that is the age of my physical being. There is no assurance that I am not centuries older. I do not dabble in the occult, and cannot express myself with scientific exactness. I feel very timid about venturing an opinion on matters concerning which so many wiser than I are in doubt, but dares any one say that his life began in his mother’s womb or that it ends at the grave? If so, how does he know it?

When I say that I do not feel old, I mean I, not my body. My body is not I. If it is, why do I say my body? I speak of my hands, my feet, my eyes, my tongue, my stomach, just as I do of my spectacles, my cane, my clothing, my store. These things belong to me. They are my tools. I use them as I see fit in accomplishing the purposes of everyday life. Into the warp and woof of our very language is thus woven the divine conception of our being. It is an interesting fact that the materialist rarely converses for an hour without unconsciously denying his creed. No matter what one’s professed faith, his everyday language is an acknowledgment that, however closely he may be bound to the material and however dependent thereupon, he, himself, is not material.

As the body ages, and it ages rapidly, of course, it is subject to a multitude of infirmities, most of which are rare in its youth. We have grown accustomed to associating these infirmities with old age, therefore, and are quite likely to view their presence as a demonstration of advancing years. Such indeed it is, but only in relation to the body. ‘I feel old,’ is a very common expression, but one which is very far from the exact truth. To illustrate: I notice that the rheumatism grips my shoulder quite frequently of late, especially in damp weather, although such an attack was quite unknown in the first sixty years of my life. Old age? Of the body, perhaps, but not of me. Tom had the rheumatism when he was barely fifteen. The sensation was to him precisely what it is to me and the treatment differed very little, if at all. I need spectacles now, but many children need them, too. My step is not as sure as it used to be, but so far as I can observe, the effect is the same as it would have been had some weakness attacked my legs fifty years ago. My hair is thin and white, but I know many bald heads under thirty, and young men have turned gray over night.

And so I might run through the list of the so-called infirmities of age, but it is enough to say that they are purely bodily and by no means confined to those who have passed the meridian of life. They do not affect me, myself, in any way differently from what they would do were I forty, or in the cradle. They occasion inconvenience, pain, chagrin, just as they would have done at any period. Through it all I survive, consciously the same man that I have been all along. And it is this consciousness of an unchanged and unchanging I, which gives me the very strongest assurance of the immortality which all men crave.

I do not deny for a moment that my tastes and habits have been greatly modified during the years. I go to the theatre more rarely now, and do not enjoy the comedies that once captivated me. An occasional evening at whist quite fills the place of the sports to which I was formerly addicted. I find an increasing interest in literature of the solid sort, although my fondness for the humorists does not abate. Serious conversation appeals to me more forcibly than the brightness and repartee I loved in my youth. If my circle of friends is narrower than of yore, those within it are closer to my heart. My love is the stronger because it has been purged of its passion and I find it increasingly difficult to harbor hatred.

But in all these changes and many others to which I might refer there is no sense of age or decay. They have characterized every stage of my life. At twenty I was fond of hunting. Five years later no angler was more enthusiastic than I. Photography captivated me at thirty. I have always ridden hobbies and cannot bring myself to believe that the substitution of one of them for another was at all due to the period of life at which the change was made. There has been no sensation of ageing in it all. To myself I still seem young, and every year strengthens the conviction that this sense of youth is to remain forever.

It happens to some that bodily decay reaches a point which renders participation in the activities of life impossible. The senses no longer guide. The faculties fail. The whole brain deteriorates. The unfortunate victim becomes imbecile to all appearance and must be cared for as if he really were. This catastrophe is usually associated with extreme old age, although it may happen at any time, and is not infrequently used to point the argument of the materialist. At first blush, too, it seems to serve the purpose admirably.

I have not reached that deplorable condition. I pray the good Father that I never may. My dread of it is not because of any fear that in decrepitude I shall begin to feel age. It arises rather from an aversion to the imprisonment of myself in the ruins of a body so old that it is tumbling down and rotten.

The tools we work with are clumsy at best. The windows through which we view the world are very small and clouded. The acutest of our senses is blunt indeed. We are everywhere debarred from light and sweetness and beauty. We are slow and awkward and halting. Our ideals are above and beyond us. We fall short of our ambitions, no matter how we try. All this is inevitable because the body in which we are housed and with which we labor is nothing but matter. If I am so circumscribed when my physical being is in comparative vigor, I often ask myself, what darkness will descend upon me when it crumbles into the ruins of senility? It is not a pleasant question, except that it takes for granted the undying youth of him who asks it.

‘Second childhood,’ this tumbling down of the body is called, and the term is entirely accurate. In infancy and senility the man prattles and totters and must be cared for by others. The chief difference is that the body of the baby is weak because of its immaturity, while that of the old man fails by reason of age. In one the materials are being assembled, in the other they are falling apart. But it is the same man. This is the thought that I hug to my soul until that soul glows with the hope of eternal life. In infancy, youth, manhood, and old age, man is conscious of all the ills due to his physical environment, but down in the depths of his inner self is the sense of unfading youth.

And this sense is certainly strengthened by the analogies of the case, which seem to show that a second manhood follows the second childhood. That which succeeds the first is shut in by the body, then building, and conditioned by it at every turn. The second escapes from the ruined tenement to exercise its functions immediately. That is to say, it sees without eyes, runs without feet, and knows without a brain. This, I take it, is what the good book means when in discussing the resurrection it says, ‘it is raised a spiritual body.’

The more I ponder these matters, — and at seventy-three one is intensely interested in the unknown realities which he is approaching, — the stronger is my conviction that the infirmities of age are but incidents necessary to that largeness of life which lies before me. The man in a dungeon does not complain when the windows dim, the bolts and chains corrode, the walls crumble, and the roof begins to fall. These changes may entail much inconvenience and acute pain, but he welcomes them as the precursors of the liberty which means life to him.

It is even so with me, a youth shut up in an old body. Failing eyes tell me of the day when I shall see what neither telescope nor microscope reveals to me now. This dullness of hearing prophesies the hour when such harmony as the masters never dreamed will break in upon me. As my limbs fail I turn to the time when my movements will not be hampered by legs and feet. Better than all, as I sit here trying to think out these things, just as millions upon millions of old men have tried before me, I joy in the thought that when the brain has perished, I, myself, face to face with naked truth, shall know.

To others this may seem only the vagrant fancy of a mind already impaired by the ravages of time. Perhaps there is little countenance for it in the books. I do not doubt that any of the scientists or theologians could easily show that it lacks foundation in logic. It satisfies me, however, and in a matter so vitally personal, that is the chief consideration after all. It enables me to endure advancing infirmities, if not cheerfully, at least with composure. Are they not the forerunners of immortal health? If I do not wish to die, I have no fear of death, because I look upon it as only the removal of the last barrier between me and the very fullness of life. In a word, my sense of youth at seventy-three not only assures me of youth never ending, but fills me with hope that makes even extreme old age gentle and full of cheer.