Aging: “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”

Abstract

The two epigraphs above represent significantly disparate musings on the benefits or pitfalls of the experience of aging. From as early in my postsecondary education as I can remember, I have tended to gravitate toward the former, less sympathetic mindset about getting old. While I was still a teenaged undergraduate, I was keenly aware that I would invariably feel the effects of time in a painful way, and I routinely entertained fears that I would, someday, cease to be. I wasn’t sure about why I had these anxieties, or whether others shared similar fears, but I was aware of the shaping influence they had on my life. I suffered my first full-blown “midlife” crisis at 25, and spent a considerable amount of time negotiating the ways in which art, literature, music, film, and other humanistic endeavors engaged ideas of both growing up and growing old.

Some think it a matter of course that chance

Should starve good men and bad advance,

That if their neighbors figured plain,

As though upon a lighted screen,

No single story would they find

Of an unbroken happy mind,

A finish worthy of the start.

—W. B. Yeats, “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”¹

Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”