Читать книгу Senescence, the Last Half of Life - G. Stanley Hall - Страница 6

Somebody should found a vast and charitable sisterhood for women between forty and fifty, a kind of refuge for the victims of the years of transition, for during that time women would be happier in voluntary exile or at any rate entirely separated from the other sex.... We are all more or less mad, even though we struggle to make others think us sane.

There are moments when I envy every living creature who has the right to pair—either from hate or from habit. I am alone and shut out.

Women’s doctors may be as clever and sly as they please but they will never learn any of the things women confide to each other. Between the sexes there lies not only a deep, eternal hostility but the involuntary abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal comprehension.

It would be better for woman if she walked barefoot over red-hot ploughshares for the pain she would suffer would be slight, indeed, compared to that which she must feel when, with a smile on her lips, she leaves her own youth behind and enters the region of despair we call growing old.

It may safely be said that on the whole surface of the earth not one man exists who really knows woman. If a woman took infinite pains to reveal herself to a husband or a lover just as she really is, he would think she was suffering from some incurable mental disease. A few of us indicate our true natures in hysterical outbreaks, fits of bitterness and suspicion, but this involuntary frankness is generally discounted by some subtle deceit.

If men suspected what took place in a woman’s inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague or knock us in the head like mad dogs.

Are there honest women? At least we believe there are. It is a necessary part of our belief. Who does not think well of mother or sister, but who believes entirely in a mother or sister? Absolutely and unconditionally? Who has never caught mother or sister in a falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes seen in the heart of mother or sister, as by a lightning flash, an abyss which the boundless love cannot bridge over? Who was ever really understood by mother or sister?

I envy every country wench or servant girl who goes off with her lover while I sit here waiting for old age.26

The author has been spoken of as a traitor to her sex, revealing all its freemasonry. Certainly no female writer ever emancipated herself more completely from man’s point of view. There is no masculine note here. It would seem as if she aspired to be a specialist in feminine psychology. M. Prévost calls it a cinematograph of feminine thought set down without interposing between the author’s mind and the paper the vision of a man. No extracts or epitome can do justice to the precision of style, the acuteness of self-observation, the range of social experience, and the depth of insight here shown in depicting the psychological processes that attend the beginnings of old age in women.

It is well at any stage of life, and particularly at its noonday, to pause and ask ourselves what kind of old people we would like, and also are likely, to be—two very different questions. In youth we have ideals of and fit for maturity. Why not do the same when we are mature for the next stage? Why should not forty plan for eighty (or at least for sixty) just as intently as twenty does for forty? At forty old age is in its infancy; the fifties are its boyhood, the sixties its youth, and at seventy it attains its majority. Woman passes through the same stages as man, only the first comes earlier and the last later for her. If and so far as Osler is right, it is because man up to the present has been abnormally precocious, a trait that he inherited from his shorter-lived precursors and has not yet outgrown, as is the case with sexual precocity, which brings premature age. Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more and more so, an afternoon and evening worker. The coming superman will begin, not end, his real activity with the advent of the fourth decade. Not only with many personal questions but with most of the harder and more complex problems that affect humanity we rarely come to anything like a masterly grip till the shadows begin to slant eastward, and for a season, which varies greatly with individuals, our powers increase as the shadows lengthen. Thus as the world grows intricate and the stage of apprenticeship necessarily lengthens it becomes increasingly necessary to conserve all those higher powers of man that culminate late, and it is just these that our civilization, that brings such excessive strains to middle life, now so tends to dwarf, making old age too often blasé and abgelebt, like the middle age of those roués who in youth have lived too fast.

There are many who now think more or less as does H.G. Wells27 that the human race is just at its dangerous age and has, within the last few years, passed its prime; also that henceforth we must trust less to nature and place all our hope in and direct all our energy to nurture if the race is to escape premature decay. There is only too much to indicate that mankind, in Europe at least if not throughout the world, has reached the “dangerous age” that marks the dawn of senescence and that, unless we can develop what Renan calls “a new enthusiasm for humanity,” a new social consciousness, and a new instinct for service and for posterity, our elaborate civilization with all its institutions will become a Frankenstein monster escaping the control of the being that devised and constructed it and will bring ruin to both him and to itself. Progressive eugenics, radical and world-wide reëducation, and the development of a richer, riper old age, are our only sources of hope for we can look to no others to arrest the degenerative processes of national and individual egoism. At any rate, we have to face a new problem, namely what is the old age of the world to be and how can we best prepare for it betimes?

As contrasted with Ireland, in which Ross28 tells us “one-eighth of her people are more than sixty-five years old,” we have considered ourselves as par excellence the land of young people and ideas. Our growth has been phenomenal and began and proceeded most opportunely, so that we profited to the full by steam, rapid transportation, invention, by our coal, oil, forests, and virgin soil, and especially by the ideals of liberty that were brought here by the first waves of immigrants to our shores. These were followed later, however, by those who had failed in the old world, by inferior and often Mediterranean stocks imported as tools or coming only in the hope of gain; but even this tide is now ceasing to flow. We are within measurable distance of the limits of our natural resources. Although the great war, the most stupendous, was also the most inconclusive ever fought, and although we reached our pinnacle in the idealism of Wilson’s first visit to Europe, when the world came nearer than ever before since early Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire, and Comenius, to a merger of national sovereignty and a new world law backed by a new world power, this brief vision of a federated world has faded and we now realize that if we cannot make a break with history and leave much of it to the dead past, if we cannot transcend the boundaries that, especially in Europe, are now far too narrow for modern conditions, and if we cannot fearlessly enter upon the longer apprenticeship to life, which is now too short for mastery, we shall drift into far more disastrous wars that will leave even the victors exhausted, and mankind will either sink into an impotent senility or into a Tarzan bestialism, which from the standpoint of Clarence Day (The Simian World) would seem not impossible.