Dichroic Reflections

on aging

I've been mulling over youth and age, spurred on by The Once and Future King, Cat Stevens, a few very young LiveJournalers, a couple of older Diarylanders, Studs Terkel, my own aging, and a sense that too many people, of any age, keep their passions wrapped in cotton wool or let them sleep entirely.

T.H. White wrote about the seventh sense that comes in middle age, the sense of balance. That's not how I'd describe it, but I think I know what he means. His characters in their midlives have had to make compromises. The ones who were pure achieved the Grail and left the world, too perfect to stay in it. Those who were left had to fit their ideals in among their reality, and could only do their best with what tools they had. They had lost their idealism, yet still held to their ideals.

There are a couple of journals I read, where the thing that keeps striking me is how young the writers are. I don't mean by that that they're not bright, not educated, or not thoughtful; if any of those things were true I wouldn't be reading them. It's something about the intensity of each experience, and about the way they never forget to wonder or care, as older people sometimes do. There are other people I read because they're members of an LJ community Im in, who also keep reminding me of their youth by the black-and-white harshness of their judgements. I once started a poll about people's ages just to check my hypothesis that some of the most frequent posters there were in their late teens and early twenties (I didn't say that's why I was polling) and found that my guess was right.

I should say here that youth and age, at least in this essay, are not strictly defined by chronological age. I can think of a certain middle-aged U.S. President who shows all the harshness of youth's unblunted opinions, if none of its generosity or idealism.

The canonical picture of the difference between youth and age is the one Cat Stevens wrote, in Father and Son. A couple of representative verses:

Son	Father
All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it. If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me. Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away. I know I have to go.	I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy, To be calm when you've found something going on. But take your time, think a lot, Why, think of everything you've got. For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.

Stevens was young when he wrote that. I don't know if he just couldn't see the other side, or if he didn't have any good older people around, just those who were too tired or disillusioned to care. But that's a horrible thing to tell a young person: "You will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not." Age doesn't have to mean abandonment of dreams. Studs Terkel's book, Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It makes that clear. The old people he interviewed who once lived and fought for a dream still burned with that fire: old unionists, old gay rights activists, old workers and lovers and people of passions. They were a lot like T.H. White's Arthurian characters, actually: some burned out early, some died young, some gave up, and some kept on struggling. (One of them I remember could have been the original of the 'fairy' on Fire Island in Peg Kerr's The Wild Swans.) They came to their accomodations with the world and tried to build their dreams within the bounds of its possiblities. I picture one of them telling Cat Stevens' young man, "You will still be here tomorrow - and so will your dreams, if you don't do anything too stupid today."

Aging, it seems to me, is a matter of coming to grips with your limitations and those of the world - and, if you don't become jaded, of the possibilities of transcending them, and the knowledge that it can happen, just not easily or often. It's realizing that other people are colored in shades of gray, not all one way or all the other. It's also realizing you may be wrong. I don't think some people ever get there. I think some just become ossified and give up or forget they ever did care - in some cases, very early on. Some have their dreams snuffed out early and become bitter. Some just forget, or never find their passions in the first place. Either way, not caring becomes a cocoon. A few people finally leave that hibernating phase and break out of it though not many. The best ones keep caring and keep fighting, balancing priorities and picking their battles, and if sometimes they have to bend a little, they stay unbroken to fight another day.

Being proud of being strange, as Mrissa's comments reminded me today, is another characteristically young thing. I think the aged version of that is being proud to be part of a community (which may be out of the mainstream) or being proud to have held to values that matter to one, even when they're not popular ones, rather than taking pride in strangeness for its own sake. (Again, "age" and "youth" here aren't strictly bounded by years. I remember a 50-year-old coworker who always talked about what a rebel he was, when as far as I could tell, the only rebellious thing he ever did was to wear black a lot.)

Anyway, that's how it looks to me today. I'm only 38. I have no intention of either dying or of becoming encased in amber anytime soon, so there may be further phases I don't know about yet. I think there are. I see hints of one in White's Book of Merlyn or in Denver Doug's writings, which seems to be about looking at the world, backwards and forwards, and letting it be what it will. I may not be understanding that one entirely. There may be others. I don't know - but I hope to live and grow long enough to find out.

Posted by dichroic at August 22, 2005 01:41 PM