Chapter III · LITERATURE BY AND ON THE AGED (continued 2)
Reading edition
Many a man passes his youth in preparing misery for his age, and his age in repairing the misconduct of his youth.
It is easy to die but difficult to die at the right time.
The danger of shipwreck is less in mid-ocean than near to shore.
Time wears out masks; the old show what they are.
The misfortunes of life are that we are born young and become old.
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made! What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me. Browning: Rabbi Ben Ezra.
What is age but youth’s full bloom And retiring, more transcendent youth?
Old men must die or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.—Tennyson: Becket.
Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.—Disraeli: Coningsby.
See how the world its veterans rewards! A youth of frolics, an old age of cards. Pope: Moral Essays.
Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things—old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.—Bacon: Apothegms.
Dr. Clara Barrus, who for many years has labored in the closest personal contact with John Burroughs, has kindly sent me, along with much other information, the notes he made during the last months of his life for an article that he never lived to complete on Old Age. The quotations and aperçus that he collected and that most impressed him were such as the following:
As men grow old they grow more foolish and more wise.
Young saint, old devil; young devil, old saint.
A man at sixteen will prove a child at sixty.
When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil’s leavings.
Nobody loves life like an old man.
An old young man will make a young old man.
Old age is a tyrant who forbids men, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
Reckless youth makes rueful age.
Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be so.
The evening of life brings with it its lamps.
A youthful age is desirable but aged youth is troublesome and grievous.
To me the worst thing about old age is that one has outlived all his old friends. The past becomes a cemetery.
It is characteristic of old age to reverse its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them; it revises them. If its years have been well spent it has reached a higher position from which to overlook Life; it commands a wider view.
Old Age may reason well but old age does not remember well. The power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder. We only need to focus upon you a little more completely.
I probably make more strenuous demands upon him who aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes honey. The quality of the man makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn greatly.
We in our generation have become so familiar with a universe so much larger than that known to the Ancients that we naturally wonder how the wise men of Greece and Rome and of Judea could have had or seem to have had so little curiosity about the earth upon which they lived and of which they were so ignorant.
Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues if we have any. They are unloosened, and when the young or middle-aged sit silent the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of pleasures is gone and another takes its place.
The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old man tricks.
Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt slipped and the wheel did not go around. Then the next moment away it goes again. Or shall we call it a kind of mental anesthetic or paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about Georgetown, S. A. I repeated the name over to myself a few times. Have I not known such a place some time, in my life. Where is it? “Georgetown.” “Georgetown.” The name seems like a dream. Then I thought of Washington, the Capitol, and the city above it, but had to ask a friend if its name was Georgetown. Then suddenly as if some chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came! Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it; I had lived in Washington for ten years.