Must 65 Be Fatal?

by HOLLO WALTER BROWN

1

BECAUSE I am one myself, I am becoming a little sensitive to this talk about the grayhead. We hear that there are now about eleven million persons—eleven million of us in the United States who have come to be sixty-five years old or older. We read that unfailing money is to be made in the treatment of the diseases of the aging, and note that geriatricians are taking their place right next door to the morticians. It is startling to catch the words on a physician’s card: “Chronic diseases a specialty.”We notice, too, that laborsaving gadgets are reported to be making the aging less needed for the doing of family chores. We see that a new style of house is proposed to meet the requirements of the aging. We seem easily to hear about more and more arrangements for caring for the aging where the aging turn over a part or all of their private property and settle in as permanent guests.

Statisticians estimate that by 1960 there will be nearly fifteen million who have reached the present customary deadline age of sixty-five; and by 1975 nearly twenty million. Some businessmen believe that the needs of a new wartime economy may require— or at least justify-the lifting of the deadline in many activities to sixty-eight or seventy, and that an expanding industry will hold it there, lint there is also much quiet prediction that because of laborsaving machines the customary line will sooner or later be at sixty rather than sixtyfive. In any event, men and women in great numbers, who had always supposed that they were human beings, must wake up some morning to find themselves labeled “a problem,'’ or worse still, “a unit of inev itable discard.

Certainly many men and women of sixty or sixtyfive ought to be retired. There are men and women who ought to have been retired at thirty-seven. And if certain ones had been put on the retired list at birth, the act would not have been destructive of civilization. There are men, too, who have worked in the underground darkness of coal mines, let us say, who can enjoy late years of open air very much as an ancient workhorse enjoys perpetual days of pasture in the sunshine. Sometimes, too, men have by nature a short life span and are decrepit at sixty or sixty-five. No one would enforce continued toil on these — or on any others who honestly hunger for rest. But before we go on in the practice of retiring whole generations of laborers, schoolteachers, college professors, employees in commerce, assistants or executives in business offices, workers in hospitals, clergymen, in mass-production style, ought we not to consider what the aging have to contribute to life when they are unhampered, and what the present practice does to them — and in consequence to their younger contemporaries?

Without any self-exaltation, one who has had the experience of living through the customary deadline age unhampered can say that it may be the most interesting period in life — at least up to that point. Usually any such declaration is greeted by the bright reply that the old boy is kidding himself; that anyone knows just by looking that sixty-five is not like twenty-five or sixteen. And it is just there that the whole misunderstanding arises. The interestingness of the life of a person at sixty-five rests not in any simple prolongation of earlier pleasant experiences. It is deeper than that; it is also, perhaps, a little graver. It centers in new elements that make this period unique.

One of these—a very important one — is the eventual sharp a ware ness that life has an end as well as a beginning. Always before, it has been possible to say, “If only I come through this, there will be clear going. But what could be thought of formerly as a hazard has now become an inescapable certainty — always just there ahead. I have listened to a group who talked about a young woman who was experiencing what they rightly called a tragic ordeal. From the best physicians available she had learned that she was suffering from a difficult ailment that would not let her live longer than six years. “How perfectly petrifying!” they exclaimed. “And to think that she works heroically on while she is under sentence of death!” Well, old people all live “under sentence of death.” The respite may not be as long as six years. And if there is something heroic in working on when one knows that the end cannot be too far off, the old are heroic every morning when they face the new day. They do not quail. They are filled with the love of life that was intended to be used in living, not in contemplating death. In addition, through long years they have formed the habit of living. So they live on — with the implacable fact

They learn to live with such a fact without having their lives made funereal. But constantly there are intimations that the fact exists. They perhaps glance through the wide doorway in the brightness of morning and wonder in a warm flash what will eventually become of their enjoyment of a favorite picture — somew hat as a young grandson w ished to know from his grandmother what had become of last Tuesday. Or the gladness with which they hear favorite music is suddenly touched with the slightest melancholy. Or they go to look from a hilltop visited long ago and are troubled at finding the sturdy old house gone, and the cellar hole full of lush young birches. They may even discover some day that they are noticing the great red second hand of the clock in the jeweler’s window as it races round the dial in too precipitate haste.

Something related to this that affects the grayhead’s outlook, and that is not to be known by younger persons save dimly through imagining, is the swiftly mounting departure-list of friends. Suddenly, after a long presence, they begin to go, like birds that set out in large numbers on migrant wings. In a period of five years I have had to see the departure of thirty-seven of my older good friends. In noisy groups of superficial talkers, on overcrowded busy streets, in the enlarged quiet of a wakeful night, the loss comes home to one. And it is not just t he loss of this or that person; it is the loss of a world in which to think or feel as one thought and felt before, a breakdown of the environment in which one has operated. There is a foreshortening of every view. Many future events will now remain permanently out of sight. The map grows smaller — and many matters cease to be distant ly academic, and become almost painfully real.

2

BUT there is something more positive: the experience may bring one into a steadied or mounting productivity. For this period marks the rise of psychic power that has been freed from the dominance of top-heavy physical demands. A man who worked on till he was ninety mentioned this fact to me when I was forty — as if I had better know it! Later I saw how many others had long regarded the fact as very significant. After Dr. William Osler had made his immature remark early in this century about the uselessness of the aging, W. A. N. Dorland came forward with a list of four hundred of the distinguished of history — in philosophy, in poetry, in science, in statesmanship, in invention, in music — to show just how much the world would have missed if all among these had been stopped at fifty, at sixty, at seventy. And since that time, new lists of late workers have constantly appeared everywhere, from the writings of Jean Finot down to the latest Sunday newspaper. Without any effort at special hunting, I have come upon a thousand or more instances of men and women who have lived on, worked on, to be septuagenarians, octogenarians, nonagenarians, centenarians.

In five minutes anyone can make up a list out of the times in which we live: Gandhi, whose greatness increased to the end; Albert Schweitzer, who works on and engages in new explorations in his seventies; Alfred North Whitehead, who began publishing his books in philosophy very late, and worked well on into his eighties; Dr Harvey Cushing, who finished off a distinguished career at Harvard with a late distinguished career at Yale; Dr. Percy R. Howe, who continued to spread the news of a new conception of dentistry and health very literally all over the world until he was eightyfive; Bernard Baruch, who serves his country unselfishly at eighty; Mrs. Edward MacDowell, who marches steadily through her middle nineties; Charles Holden, who was called upon in his seventies to replan Canterbury, and parts of London, and other areas in England; Edward T. P. Graham and Frank Lloyd Wright, who are busy with their sharply contrasting styles of architecture as they approach or pass eighty; Robert Frost, who bears the glad news of poetry to every part of the country at seventy-five; Justices Holmes and Brandeis and Hughes, who late became three great symbols of righteousness in a democracy; Winston Churchill, who still fights valiantly enough at seventy-six; Bernard Shaw, who is very much Shaw in his nineties; George Santayana, who has been very busy through his seventies and eighties; and on and on We know — whenever we stop to consider — that such men are a natural development in any life that is untrammeled.

And it is more than mere bulk of production; it is an unobtrusive originality, a quality, that results from certain maturer ways of looking at things. In some degree the graying man is a crucified person, for he has known ridicule, he has known failure, he has known suffering. He is quite certain to express himself with less fanfare, with deeper humility, with an elemental kind of refining that is too often taken for weakness. This contrast in late work with earlier can often be readily seen in the painters or sculptors, but it can he seen wherever men of energy are permitted to work on, as in the late decades of Thomas Hardy. They are inclined to deal more exclusively with essentials, to reveal the poetry of existence without burdensome displays of means employed, to be content with less violent effects. They have learned that there is little reason for being clever when one can be unpretentious.

The positive view comes to be expressed in other ways. The mature man is not too much upset by the vogue of the hour, for he knows that vogues follow one another, and that something basic survives vogues. He comes logically to a deeper reverence for all life. He is not so eager to kill — anything. His pleasure is in seeing life come, not in seeing it go. He enjoys seeing the college girls bounding out of their houses with much life ahead and hurrying down the street to class in growing and dissolving bright clusters. He hates to read the casualty lists of boys no older, who will now never have the opportunity of seeing “a thought in youth wrought out in ripening years.”He appreciates anew Hazlitt’s “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” for he has come to see how important it is that this feeling be kept.

Life itself grows to be the great positive phenomenon. He feels it himself, and he sees the same feeling expressed in others, when he is back for college commencement festivities. He winces a little when he notes which men are missing in the steadily shortening line ahead of him in the procession, just as the others do. But these men above forty or fifty have begun to look into each other’s eyes with a cordial understanding that at last they have made a secret great discovery. A twenty-five-year man, back for the first time when the cordiality of a few thousand men was increased by one of the last commencement appearances of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, declared: “I’ll never miss this again as long as I live. I didn’t know men ever got to be like this.”

To be sure, there are plenty of grayheads who have been soured by life, and grunt or growl their way along through the years in disapproval of everything done by the young, by the world at large. Yet if a graying man chooses to look about him, with occasional verifying glances at his own state of spirit, he can know as well as he can know anything that the period of the imposed deadline does have its own disciplines, its own distinctive powers and masteries expressed in what it produces, and its own ways of revealing its understanding and good will.

3

Now the millions who are by nature open in some degree to late enlargement of life are the ones that we insist on calling “a problem’ and herding together in a kind of mental concentration camp. Life, we should have heard often enough by the middle of the twentieth century, is oriented to the future. The greatest guarantee of life is the fresh new thing to do. But what kind of “life” is it when in the interest of a mass-production efficiency the grayheaded are artificially isolated so that they have nothing really important to look forward to except death? A famous professor emeritus answered the question. He put on his hat late one evening and walked homeward with me. When he was ready to turn back, he said, “You are earnestly requested to come again. For this business of sitting around with nothing to do but contemplate the inevitable is a hell of a life.”

Only go out and see: former skilled men in industry who now sit on the front porch; teachers who could contribute wisdom as well as knowledge, restlessly squeezing in as census-takers, assessors, babysitters, companions for other elderly persons, or trying more individually to face whatever is ahead in self-respect; study groups — and study is a godsend — who can make little use of what they learn, save as inner soothing; “homes" filled with the aging where even the most energetic of them cannot touch life that seems quite the real thing; winterresort university clubs of hundreds of “castoffs,”who can have meetings and lively discussions, but cannot move to any effect; men holding important posts who are going to an industry’s “school” to be told how to get along on a hobby, how to make “the necessary adjustment,” how to view everything with serenity. Men and women such as these are free to face the terrifying fact that there is no real substitute for participating in life in a way that has personal meaning and recognized importance.

The gray headed have become the most tragic — and probably the largest—of all the numerous mass-production blocs that negate the value of individual lives. They have been made to accept their own frightening segregation. Recently when I stood before a Never Too Late Group where nearly ev eryone was above seventy and the moderator w as eighty-five, I was overwhelmed by the unusual alertness and intelligence of my questioners. It was a brave group. But it was like a lost battalion. There was nothing that anyone could do about anything that required action, for all these men and women were cut off from the normal processes of carrying ideas into effect —on the too simple basis of age.

How, then, when the aging in general are in this manner made into a great bloc so that they are excluded from their various customary ways of entering into life, can human tradition remain either unified or continuous? It is not only that they are put in a class; it is that they are looked upon as a class apart in life, now for all time — as no other class is looked upon. Why should we expect anywhere the subtle, cumulative understandings that spring from having all ages active to some extent in the same enterprises? How may we hope for any league of youth and ago that would merge enthusiasm and wisdom to important effort?

There is a loss in life all round. But as in every other mass-production process, the greatest tragedy comes to the variant who has the strength and the will to go on fighting. The weary or the lazy or the weak of will may subside into sitting in the sunshine and watching the world go by. But the man who is alive all through still, who has ideas in his head, who has not yet had enough of it, is asked to do what for him is impossible impossible, that is, if he is to retain his self-respect: he is asked to change from living by honest inner authority to accepting an external authority—to surrender his own creative mind and accept the dominance of someone else’s manipulative mind. Nor is it that alone. This dominance that takes over his destiny is exclusively the dominance of those who have had only the experience of being younger. Always it is someone who cannot know what he faces who answers the telephone, who greets him in every office he enters, who explains very casually what he must, of course, remember. Sometimes this younger person suffers only from the great freedom of total unacquaintance. Sometimes he is a cool inhuman being who professes to believe that atom-bomb shelters for persons beyond sixty might as well be forgotten. But whatever the specific circumstances, the clearintimation always comes through to the grayhead that he is now in the class of the finished. Despite mountainous sums contributed every year to education and philanthropy, no one hears much about any foundation established to help the late of years go on with their work. The isolation in slow death must be made complete.

4

IT would be pleasanter if the grayhead who possesses full energy could lose himself permanently in the ridiculous. He can enjoy the resentment among the sagging middle-aged when they see him active and healthy, and friendly with the young. He can enjoy their greater resentment stilt when they hear that his waistline at sixty-five or so is just what it was at thirty. No less does he enjoy their half-pitying great smile of skepticism at the mention of a woman who is still active at eighty-six in an important art enterprise which she has long nurtured, or the man of ninety who stood up at his grandson’s wedding reception and sang “Drink to me only w ith thine eyes.”Such things are a little soft, aren’t they? And even more he enjoys the inquiry of two youngish and well-massaged but noticeably deteriorating women who wished to know — questionnaire fashion — of a sturdy ancient how old he was, since he looked so well: and the man’s reply, as he lifted his chin slightly for inspection, “I am ninetytwo years old, and I haven’t one wrinkle on my damned neck.”

But always one comes back to seriousness. The situation is not to be smiled away or laughed away permanently. For a procedure has developed that says insistently to every energetic aging person: “You, too, are in the prepared casualty list.” It takes away from life all heartening indefiniteness of reach, and circumscribes what one can hope to do into something puny when compared with the great unlimited lives. It creeps back smotheringly. “I am fifty-three; so I’ll not try to take up anything as big as that. It can’t be done in the dozen years before I settle down to building ships in bottles.”

To be sure, there are possibilities of survival — wherever the mass-production idea has not yet come to apply. Farmers and lawyers and other selfemploying persons — I know some of them — work on to eighty, to ninety—till they are ready to stop. Occasional colleges and small businesses engage “castoffs” and make good use of them for years — and thereby prove the absurdity of the customary wholesale practice. I know one man who retired from college teaching and became the president of a bank. Certain colleges have been turning toward the practice of carrying men beyond the customary deadline on a sliding scale of part-time work. The implacable sweep, though, that has established our negligent ways of regarding age has been in the ot her direct ion spearheaded by something like this: We retire men in order that with all “obsolescents” out of the way and with eager — and often less expensive — new men in their places, we may increase savings or earnings ever so slightly in order that more may be deducted to maintain greater numbers of the “obsolescents” in the artificially produced slow death —this on and on without end.

This kind of hopeless logic — it may even turn out to be had business —calls for a complete faceabout in our thinking. For we have elevated something above the human spirit, when the human spirit should have the high place. The mass-production idea where it does not belong has treated the human spirit in the aging as inconsequential. It has nullified the last figure of speech that exalted age into something to be held in reverence — as all life should be. Age is no longer even a serenely moving river on its way out to open sea. The river has been despoiled into a great sluggish malarial delta which everybody is called upon to help pile higher and higher, while everybody talks about “feeding them,” “ housing them,”“amusing them,” “treating their diseases,” “helping them to put in the time.” The consternation at what is taking place should be greater than we have yet seen. For we are not only losing values that are essential in civilized life, but losing sight of what a value is — unless somebody sees wit h something of a crusader’s vision that what the gray millions in the long procession require is not a pittance and a forgetting, but a fair chance to finish out their individual fives.