Quote of the Day: On Old Age

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

Today’s quote of the day comes from a prolific novelist, Thomas Hardy, who was born 184 years ago, on June 2, 1840.  He’s known for his stories of rural life in Victorian England, and his portrayals of the sufferings  and difficulties facing ordinary people living in what were often oppressive and constrained circumstances.  His novels were quite controversial, dealing as they did with themes of religion, sex, and class, and because Hardy’s sympathies were with the downtrodden–the fallen woman, the struggles of the lower classes, and with the hypocrisy hidden under the guise of the outwardly religious or professional do-gooders.

While his novels are expansive (that’s a ten-cent word meaning rather long and wide-ranging), and sometimes beautifully depict their rural settings, I find them most of them tedious in the extreme.  There’s something very plodding about Hardy’s prose.  It’s a case where–IMHO–it’s almost always better to watch the movie or the BBC adaptation.

His poetry doesn’t suffer from the same defect, though, and some of it is sublime (see The Darkling Thrush, and The Blinded Bird).  His war poetry was influenced–among others–Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.  (Like Kipling, Hardy voiced much of his war poetry in the voice of the common soldier.)

Thomas Hardy died, probably of  a heart attack, in January 1928, at the age of 87.  His heart was buried in the village of Stinsford, along with his first wife, Emma, and the rest of him was cremated and his ashes placed in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.

Now to the matter of the quote: I think Hardy’s right when he says that the perceived value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it.  I’ve known many who embrace it, many who merely tolerate it, and many who fight against it every step of the way.

I don’t so much agree with him that it’s a binary proposition, though.  Hardy says that men (we’ll assume that here he means “men and women”) who succeed/peak too early in their lives find it all downhill from there, and–I think he’s saying–they’ll consider themselves more and more in a stage of “uselessness” as they age, likely resentful at never being able to recapture the glory of their youth.

I’ve certainly known folks like that.

And I’ve known the other kind Hardy mentions, those who are “late to develop” and who are still working on completing “the job” as they age.

But I think there’s a third way to look at it, and that’s from the perspective of a person who is generally content with who she is, where she’s been, where she’s going,  and what she’s accomplished along the way at every stage in her life. For her there isn’t a “pinnacle ” in life that she’s either already experienced and on which she looks back with regret at her current diminished state, or which she’s still desperately striving to discover before she dies.  Her life is something of a sine wave, linear motion over time, with its ups and downs, its successes and failures always age-appropriate and forming the backdrop for the next phase.

Eventually, that “next phase” is old age, and by then it’s just a part of the continuum of her life, as welcome as all the other stages, neither the pinnacle, nor the nadir; neither good nor bad, but as good and as bad–in its own way–as all the rest, and possible–despite ever-encroaching limitations, difficulties, and weaknesses–to come to terms with and approach, for as long as humanly possible, with a modicum of gratitude, good humor and grace.

Working on it.  How about you?