Читать книгу Aging - Harry R. Moody - Страница 65

Florida Scott-Maxwell

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise, I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago, I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.

Old people are not protected from life by engagements, pleasures, or duties; we are open to our own sentience; we cannot get away from it, and it is too much. We should ward off the problematic and, above all, the insoluble. These are far, far too much, but it is just these that attract us. Our one safety is to draw in and enjoy the simple and immediate. We should rest within our own confines. It may be dull and restricted, but it can be satisfying within our own walls. I feel most real when alone, even most alive when alone….

Age is truly a time of heroic helplessness. One is confronted by one’s own incorrigibility. I am always saying to myself, “Look at you, and after a lifetime of trying.” I still have the vices that I have known and struggled with—well it seems like since birth. Many of them are modified, but not much. I can neither order nor command the hubbub of my mind. Or is it my nervous sensibility? This is not the effect of age; age only defines one’s boundaries. Life has changed me greatly, it has improved me greatly, but it has also left me practically the same. I cannot spell, and I am overcritical, egocentric, and vulnerable. I cannot be simple. In my effort to be clear, I become complicated. I know my faults so well that I pay them small heed. They are stronger than I am. They are me….

Another day to be filled, to be lived silently, watching the sky and the lights on the wall. No one will come probably. I have no duties except to myself. That is not true. I have a duty to all who care for me—not to be a problem, not to be a burden. I must carry my age lightly for all our sakes, and thank God I still can. Oh that I may to the end. Each day, then, must be filled with my first duty, I must be “all right.” But is this assurance not the gift we all give to each other daily, hourly? …

Another secret we carry is that, although drab outside—wreckage to the eye mirrors a mortification—inside we flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable. In silent, hot rebellion, we cry silently—“I have lived my life haven’t I? What more is expected of me?” Have we got to pretend out of noblesse oblige that age is nothing, in order to encourage the others? This we do with a certain haughtiness, realizing now that we have reached the place beyond resignation, a place I had no idea existed until I had arrived here.

It is a place of fierce energy. Perhaps passion would be a better word than energy, for the sad fact is this vivid life cannot be used. If I try to transpose it into action, I am soon spent. It has to be accepted as passionate life, perhaps the life I never lived, never guessed I had it in me to live. It feels other and more than that. It feels like the far side of precept and aim. It is just life, the natural intensity of life, and when old we have it for our reward and undoing. It can—at moments—feel as though we had it for our glory. Some of it must go beyond good and bad, for at times—although this comes rarely, unexpectedly—it is a swelling clarity as though all was resolved. It has no content, it seems to expand us, it does not derive from the body, and then it is gone. It may be a degree of consciousness which lies outside activity and which when young we are too busy to experience….

It has taken me all the time I’ve had to become myself, yet now that I am old, there are times when I feel I am barely here, no room for me at all. I remember that in the last months of my pregnancies, the child seemed to claim almost all my body, my strength, my breath, and I held on wondering if my burden was my enemy, uncertain as to whether my life was at all mine. Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.

Easter Day. I am in that rare frame of mind when everything seems simple—when I have no doubt that the aim and solution of life is the acceptance of God. It is impossible, imperative, and clear. To open to such unimaginable greatness affrights my smallness. I do not know what I seek, cannot know, but I am where the mystery is the certainty.

My long life has hardly given me time—I cannot say to understand—but to be able to imagine that God speaks to me, says simply—“I keep calling to you, and you do not come,” and I answer quite naturally—“I couldn’t, until I knew there was nowhere else to go.” …

I am uncertain whether it is a sad thing or a solace to be past change. One can improve one’s character to the very end, and no one is too young in these days to put the old right. The late clarities will be put down to our credit I feel sure.

It was something other than this that had caught my attention. In fact, it was the exact opposite. It was the comfortable number of things about which we need no longer bother. I know I am thinking two ways at once, justified and possible in a notebook. Goals and efforts of a lifetime can at last be abandoned. What a comfort. One’s conscience? Toss the fussy thing aside. Rest, rest. So much over, so much hopeless, some delight remaining.

One’s appearance, a lifetime of effort put into improving that, most of it ill judged. Only neatness is vital now, and one can finally live like a humble but watchful ghost. You need not plan holidays because you can’t take them. You are past all action, all decision. In very truth, the old are almost free, and if it is another way of saying that our lives are empty, well—there are days when emptiness is spacious and non-existence elevating. When old, one has only one’s soul as company. There are times when you can feel it crying, you do not ask why. Your eyes are dry, but heavy, hot tears drop on your heart. There is nothing to do but wait and listen to the emptiness which is sometimes gentle. You and the day are quiet, and you have no comment to make….

I don’t like to write this down, yet it is much in the minds of the old. We wonder how much older we have to become and what degree of decay we may have to endure. We keep whispering to ourselves, “Is this age yet? How far must I go?” For age can be dreaded more than death. “How many years of vacuity? To what degree of deterioration must I advance?” Some want death now as a release from old age; some say they will accept death willingly, but in a few years. I feel the solemnity of death and the possibility of some form of continuity. Death feels a friend because it will release us from the deterioration of which we cannot see the end. It is waiting for death that wears us down and the distaste for what we may become.

These thoughts are with us always, and in our hearts we know ignominy as well as dignity. We are people to whom something important is about to happen. But before then, these endless years before the end, we can summon enough merit to warrant a place for ourselves. We go into the future not knowing the answer to our question.

But we also find that as we age we are more alive than seems likely, convenient, or even bearable. Too often our problem is the fervor of life within us. My dear fellow octogenarians, how are we to carry so much life, and what are we to do with it?

Let no one say it is “unlived life” with any of the simpler psychological certitudes. No one lives all the life of which he was capable. The unlived life in each of us must be the future of humanity. When truly old, too frail to use the vigor that pulses in us, and weary, sometimes even scornful, of what can seem the pointless activity of mankind, we may sink down to some deeper level and find a new supply of life that amazes us.

All is uncharted and uncertain; we seem to lead the way into the unknown. It can feel as though all our lives we have been caught in absurdly small personalities, circumstances, and beliefs. Our accustomed shell cracks here, cracks there, and that tiresomely rigid person we supposed to be ourselves stretches, expands, and, with all inhibitions, is gone. We realize that age is neither failure nor disgrace, although mortifying we did not invent it. Age forces us to deal with idleness, emptiness, not being needed, not able to do, helplessness just ahead perhaps. All this is true, but one has had one’s life, one could be full to the brim. Yet it is the end of our procession through time, and our steps are uncertain.

Here we come to a new place of which I knew nothing. We come to where age is boring, one’s interest in it by-passed; further on, go further on, one finds that one has arrived at a larger place still, the place of release. There one says,

Age can seem a debacle, a rout of all one most needs, but that is not the whole truth. What of the part of us, the nameless, boundless part who experienced the rout, the witness who saw so much go, who remains undaunted and knows with clear conviction that there is more to us than age? Part of that which is outside age has been created by age, so there is gain as well as loss. If we have suffered defeat we are somewhere, somehow beyond the battle….

A long life makes me feel nearer truth, yet it won’t go into words, so how can I convey it? I can’t, and I want to. I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say, “Of what?,” I can only answer, “We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery.” I want to say, “If at the end of your life you have only yourself, it is much. Look, you will find.”

Source: The Measure of My Days by Florida Scott-Maxwell. Copyright © 1968 by Florida Scott-Maxwell. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.