“but why, you ask me, should this tale be told
to men grown old, or who are growing old?
it is too late! ah, nothing is too late
till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
what, then? shall we sit idly down and say
the night hath come; it is no longer day?
the night hath not yet come; we are not quite
cut off from labor by the failing light;
something remains for us to do or dare;
even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.
for age is opportunity no less
than youth itself, though in another dress,
and as the evening twilight fades away
the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
—longfellow: morituri salutamus.
63old age depends largely upon the attitude of men toward the whole of life. old age is not a joke nor a bore nor a trial nor a calamity, though it may be any one of these as all of life may be. but what needs to be stressed is that old age has no content in itself apart from the whole of life. old age may be as nothing else a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven where faith and hope may meet and love crown all. but little can come to old age that was not in and throughout life. alas for the old age of the self-centered and self-serving! if life have built walls that shut out, these cannot be razed by age, which will forever have made itself captive.
the crown of old age is a term that trips lightly from our tongues. are we 64not in danger of forgetting that there must be something to crown? for in old age inheres no magic to redeem and transfigures all that has gone before. old age purges the precious metal of life’s substance of its debasing dross, but the precious substance must be there to be purged. age, like happiness, is neither to be sought nor evaded. it is a by-product of life rather than life’s end. not the aim nor goal of life, but the way of life must it be.
in the matter of reverencing old age, we rest historically upon the firmest jewish foundation. for the jew as no other man before or after him taught the world how to magnify childhood and to glorify old age,—to rise up before the hoary head and honor the face 65of the old man. and this revering solicitude for the aged is still one of the marks of jewish life. jewish teaching has urged and jewish practice has confirmed the truth that blessing rests upon that home in which the aged have found shelter.
indeed, one is almost disposed to hold that there is a possibility of overdoing reverence for old age as old age, of becoming indiscriminating in the honor which one metes out to the hoary head. if the people of israel have erred in any part with respect to old age, they have revered the aged head too much irrespective of the head and the man. i would not if i could break with that fine tradition, but, sometimes, it were well to ask whether old age is to be respected 66as a virtue in itself, whether length of days should be regarded as a merit apart from what has gone before. old age is judged compassionately on the principle that nothing but the good should be spoken touching the dead or the nearly dead.
one is sometimes moved to believe that if the aged are unhappy it is because age brings with it not only opportunity for quiet meditation and serene retrospect, but the necessity of thinking about the great issues of life. and many of us have never learned how to think. we have put off the evil day of taking thought upon life so that, when it at last comes, its imminence appalls. men and women put off their questions and their problems to the end of life 67and when the end is nearly come, they lack the strength and will to think them through. the need of solutions is then cruelly pressed upon unpracticed and undisciplined minds.
though i ask the question, how to grow old and how not to grow old, are we not, if we will be frank, more interested in the question how not to grow old than how to grow old? in the question, pressing a little farther, how to seem not to grow old rather than how not grow old? seeming not to grow old may be attained by artificial means. not to grow old may be achieved by inward grace alone. need it be said that no one is ever deceived by external methods of averting age, nor is any one profited or helped save perhaps the 68chemist and the dye-maker, save the babblers and praters of new substitutes for old faiths? whosoever thinks of old age aright, whosoever has fitted himself for the dignity of the burden of many days will resort neither to renewing cosmetics nor novel cults as a refuge from old age.
men speak of the penalties of old age and penalties there are, but what of its rewards, rich and abundant and wondrous, richer indeed in most cases than its desert? the old, because they are old, are treated for the most part as if they were travelers returning richly laden with stores of varied treasures from a voyage over remotest seas to some strange and wondrous spot. old age in itself is no more a reward 69than a penalty. and yet what rewards, paraphrasing shakespeare, accompany old age, and how fitting that these rewards, friendship-bearing, honor-bringing, should wait upon what might elsewise be life’s melancholy end!
the truth is that old age is not a period of rewards nor penalties in themselves. it is a time of duties, as every period offers life’s cup with duties brimming o’er. duties there are,—but there are privileges beyond estimate. and the privilege of privileges is to offer an example to others in all ways and most of all in the way of facing life with serenity. finer far for old age to claim its duties than to enjoy its privileges for the old ought to shun being pitied as weak and seek rather to be admired 70as strong and honored as serene.
when old age has the grace of exalting duty and subordinating privilege, it ceases to be the period of mute resignation. from one point of view, it is the age of resignation, for one wittingly resigns in part what death is wholly to take away, but, be it made clear, resignation is not inaction, renunciation is not willlessly surrendering torpor. these things imply will, action, choice, not merely an awaiting of the end without murmur or complaint. for old age waits not but wills; old age surrenders not but whilst life is renders return for life.
while different types of laws seem to obtain for youth, maturity and old age, 71these yet are one and one spirit seems to pervade and dominate all. let youth hold high its aim and pursue high aims through holy means. let maturity serve and achieve and above all achieve only that it may serve with unimpaired admiration and undimmed ideals. and let old age be nobly wise and unafraid and unselfish to the end!
much, if not everything, of the content of old age depends on the things for which one cares. if one care for the things that cannot survive youth or middle age, whose value is inevitably lessened with the flight of years, then old age must become barren and empty. whether your old age is to be void and meaningless depends almost wholly not upon what you have and care for at 72seventy or eighty, but what it was you sought to have at twenty, what you cared for at thirty, what you cherished at forty. certain things may be harmless, even admirable in themselves, and yet are destined to be woefully disappointing if they are suffered to become the pursuits of a lifetime and men give themselves to things for which they cannot care when the years have multiplied.
myopia may interfere with one’s zest for looking upon motion pictures, limbs may become too rheumatic for dancing, tragic though this may sound, the hazard of games of chance may lose its fascination, even money-making, the accumulation of things, may pall or become impossible. but certain things there are that can never grow stale nor 73wearying nor seem unprofitable. upon these let men fix their vision and their aim, the pleasures of the mind, the tasks of the spirit, the possibilities of serving. it is almost life’s greatest danger that life will be lived with care for things interest in which cannot survive youth and middle age. what if a man were so to train himself physically that he could run and do nothing else, so that after the period of running had passed, he could not walk! would not such modus vivendi seem unwise and sadly blundering?
would you avoid growing old? do you will even to seem not to grow old? then have a vision of life and amid a multiplicity of things have and hold, cherish and pursue an ideal. to the 74man of ideals, to the man who in other words lives, age comes not. age cannot touch nor wither nor blast the life pervaded and smitten through by ideals. would you grow old, or rather would you not grow old, then live, and live by the stars. such are the lives of the unaging. in order not to grow old, i say again, grow on in faith and hopefulness, in vision and serviceableness. being without these things, some men cannot grow old, they are old. unhappily for them, they were born old, as other men, whatever be the number of their years, die young. having these things, age cannot ravage the spirit.
such men and women are age-proof, their heads may be silver white, their frames bowed, their limbs palsied, but 75age they know not,—the men i have in mind, such men as that great physician who, after sixty years and more of unwearied and unrivaled service, is still an impassioned pleader for the right of the child, of the merest, puniest babe. who will dare say that he is aged, who at fourscore and more spends himself utterly in the service of the least of these? i am thinking of yet another friend of fourscore and more, whose life is nobly dedicated to the furtherance of amity between faith and faith, who serves all men as brothers, who proves that he is a christian by the love he bears the jew. and i am thinking of yet another man who likewise has lived for fourscore years, perhaps the foremost educator of our generation, a publicist 76of matchless felicity in utterance and conduct alike, a man who at eighty and more steps into the arena with all the power and eagerness of youth in order to take up arms on behalf of another great though much wronged servant of the nation.
it was once said of theodore parker that he gave himself unreservedly and with abandon to whatever truth, duty, love, the three sublime voices of god,—the real trinity in our souls,—commanded. truth, duty, love! have you tried these things? have you dared to live by them and for them, by and for any one of them? does not this word bear out what was recently said by a great american physician about a noble social worker,—that individual, 77who has no object in life, who simply works day by day, with the idea that he is making a dollar and is going to use the dollar for his own comfort, cannot have a very peaceful mind. but if one has an object in life, to attain certain things which will be helpful to others, and whose day is filled with that sort of work, that individual deserves,—and other things being equal,—will have an old age.
truth, duty, love,—obey their command and when you do you shall find age a fiction and life alone a reality. what if old age be without teeth and eyes if it be not without hope and faith and fadeless memories!
“to suffer and endure,
to keep the spirit pure—
78the fortress and abode of holy truth—
to serve eternal things
whate’er the issue brings
this is not broken age, but ageless youth.”
if then life be centered on self, old age may rest in the certitude of disappointment and disillusion. but if self be centered on life, then may come what morley described, touching edmund burke, as “an unrebellious temper and hopes undimmed for mankind.”
twofold must be the hope of man,—for a future for self and for the future for all. and when the soul is so freighted with hopes, then shall it be said of a man as it was said of the great poet: “he was one of those on the lookout for every new idea and for every old idea with a new application, 79which may tend to meet the growing requirements of society; one of those who are like men standing on a watch-tower to whom others apply and say, not ‘what of the night?’ but ‘what of the morning and of the coming day?’”
my one word of counsel is,—let life not be centered on self, for to live for self is to invite cruel disaster in old age. the saddest, in truth the most tragic, lives i know are those of old men and women who have nothing to live for because they have lived for self and self alone,—and self is nothing. their lives are piteously empty. for the restlessness and excitement of youth may hide this truth, but age, like death, is a revealer. and there are many types of selfishness. i speak of two 80which must suffice. there are those who live for self,—for selfissimus, giving not the utmost for the highest but all for the nighest,—self, self, self, self’s pleasure and profit and power and vantage and fame. these are the most crude and obvious types of the selfful, who shall pay the penalty of their folly and their moral disease.
but, though it be said to your dismay, there are other types of selfishness, though less obvious,—the selfishness of those who project self into and magnify self in family relationship. for there are those who simply extend the horizon of self enough to include other forms of self, one’s own, one’s nearest, one’s flesh and blood. and here, too, disillusion is bound to come and ought to come, for 81one’s own cannot and ought not to fill one’s life forever. one might well excuse our mothers and fathers for giving their thought and attention to their own, for these were many and life was hard and life’s struggle ofttimes bitter. but for the fewest is such excuse valid now,—if ever it was valid—especially seeing that we concentrate upon the giving to others of things rather than upon helping others to their highest and best. in truth, people concentrate upon self, upon their own interests and wishes, and these things pass and little or nothing is left in life save self. live for yourself, and you live two years in one; live in the life of others, and you divide your years with another.
is not all this a paraphrase of what 82emerson has said better than any other? he who loves is in no condition old. not lives and lives for self, not loves self and self alone, but he who loves! emerson, building better perhaps than he knew, has voiced the deepest truth of the soul. love cannot die and love will not let die nor yet grow old. and yet as a final word, and more needed than all else, i would say that there is only one way to grow old, and that too is the only way not to grow old. that way is to know, to love, to serve.
“grow old along with me!
the best is yet to be,
the last of life for which the first was made;
our times are in his hand
who saith, ‘a whole i planned,’
youth shows but half: trust god: see all nor be afraid.”
