Since the time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, our Western civilization has been dominated by two images: the travel and the fight eidola, both of which are hostile auspices for the respectability of age. Both are refulgent with light for the paths of youth and middle age. Migrating from different tribal centers, men have historically met one another in various parts of the globe. To travel far was always to meet; and to meet was sooner or later to fight; for those who are met at the boundary are barbarians, each to the other. The only thing to do to barbarians is to fight them, and if possible to annihilate them. To annihilate them we have not been able; but in fighting them we have all done our share. Children of migratory ancestors, we sophisticated simians dream of traveling even when there is no further place to go; and children of warriors, we dream of fighting even when our arms have been thrown away. Our poetry is warlike--Homer, Milton, Shakespeare--and our fiction--Tolstoy, Hugo, Hemingway--goes forward in the haze of battle. Because of the sheer hardships of travel and the harsher incidence of war upon vital statistics, as well as the backwardness of science, men have not historically lived to be old. When by chance they did, they supported themselves on errands in a self-supporting family group. Poorhouses were few, and were for the uprooted and the piteous. A worn-out pedagogue could not respectably go to the poorhouse; not even yesteryear.
So much so has our past been of traveling and fighting that if the news were suddenly broken to our subconscious that the migratory days of humanity are over, that indeed there isn't anywhere else to go, few of us would know what to do with ourselves--until we happened to bethink ourselves, with our television children, of the moon or Mars. The mind can keep up an occupation which the body has long since discontinued. We can and we do make life itself a "pilgrimage" and the competition of virtue we transform into a metaphysical fight. "Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war." This is what I mean in saying that we are a journeying troupe, dominated by these two ancient eidola.
Symbolic of our culture, to the point of utter neatness, was the couple who met Orson Welles's cosmic scare by rushing out of the house with their suitcases hastily packed! Whether our fighting days are as passé as our migratory days remains to be seen. Certainly, the travel image remains lustrous long after it ceases to be functional. But if we continue to fight, we'll hardly continue to travel; for there won't be many of us left-and we'll be busy picking berries outside our mountain caves. Either way, it is the dominance of images which today we still have mightily to contend with.
Now these concrete images--of travel and fight--achieve abstract form in our philosophies of life. I have spoken already of our career-line itself conceived as a pilgrimage from this to a better (or worse) world. The political emphasis of modern times (both of democracy and of communism) upon equality envisages a leveling-up, never a final downgrading. I hesitate to think what our loyalty to equality might prove to be if through misfortune the only transformation possible should come to be a leveling-down.
Diverse though our individual philosophies of life be, our Western philosophy of history has concentered upon the notion of progress. That apostle of modernism, John Dewey, has gone so far as to say that if there be a single moral end, that end is "growth." Justice Holmes writes to Sir Frederick Pollock--one octogenarian to another--that the death of the aged does not grieve him. They've had their day, he says. But the death of the young is grievous: it is tragic, he adds, to die before you have had a chance "to try out your powers." The emphasis upon growth is clearly the ideal which befits youth and those still rising to a climax of their capacities.
This leaves anomalous those of us who are on the decline. Growth reached, what then? Well, then the call would seem to be for one to surcease. Why worry about a falling star in a rising world? But the doctors won't let us older people die, short of suicide; and the theologians won't let us commit suicide with dignity and proper peace of mind. How to be old and still to be respectable becomes a question for all who are well past their prime.
At the mercy, as we are, of both medical men and the medicine men of the race, we aged must keep on being, and being for a longer and longer time. But we are anomalous even as we grow more numerous. From our situation arise many problems. There is a sociological problem, but that we leave in a specialized age to the sociologists. There is an economic problem but we don't want the economists to be without a job. There is a political problem, especially in Florida and California; but why should we do the politician's work? He's paid, or pays himself, to do it. None of these problems represent, I suspect, what we as "retiring" individuals are most interested in. We're not interested in merely existing; we want to go on living as people who matter. The problem-mongers would turn us into "cases" long before we have ceased to be persons.
Shall we, then, like another ancient of days, live to preside at the funeral of our own reputation? We are quite willing to retire. Certainly I am. And all the more because I find myself of late, in the heat of lecturing, forgetting what the lecture is about and even forgetting what the subject of the sentence is to which I am vainly and publicly trying to hitch a predicate. I can see that for me to get out would solve problems for those anxiously awaiting signs of my dotage; but to solve their problems does not properly dispose of me.
It is quite a situation we are in, and it deserves a large-minded survey. It is not merely that our culture is, as I have said, dominated by the images under which we aged can play little constructive part. It is not merely that we lived in a period which glorifies beauty and prematurely casts able-bodied men, and even more so women, upon the heap. It is that we lack a philosophy which makes old age respectable and which would prevent the normal process of decay and death from appearing as a surd in the life of reason.
To call it a day, however, does not automatically ring down the night. There is still work to be done and light, albeit failing light, in which to do it. Certain vital juices still course through the gnarled trunks of many of us, albeit they course more gently than before. Or, to change the figure, when the old fire horse hears the bell, he may still involuntarily flex his muscles and even try to trot alongside the steaming steeds. . . .
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