You’re Looking Very Well

by Lewis Wolpert

  Respect for the old was an important principle in Judaism. The Old Testament says that we must cherish parents in their old age: ‘Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God’ (Leviticus 19:32). This has been taken to mean that when an old man or woman passes by, you should stand up as a token of respect. Old age may be one reward of those who honour their parents: ‘Honour your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee’ (Exodus 20:12). The Koran takes a similar view: ‘Be good to parents, whether one or both of them attains old age with thee… neither chide them, but speak unto them words respectful.’ To Buddha, born in 565 BC, old age was a spectacle of misery and sorrow which needed to be eliminated. Against this, the Upanishads, the sacred texts of Hinduism, speak of active and joyful ageing.

  Since Jesus was young, this could have made youth more important than old age for early Christians, and early Christianity did little for the old, though the building of hospitals and asylums may have helped them. In the Middle Ages the young ruled the world; even the Popes were mainly young. There were exceptions: Charlemagne ruled until he was 72, and Enrico Dandolo, the twelfth-century Doge of Venice, is infamous for his role in the Fourth Crusade at the age of 90. But in 1380, when Charles V of France, died aged 42, he was regarded as already old.

  Eastern civilisations in old times showed respect to the old. The high position of the old in China is due to Confucius (551–479 BC), who gave superiority to the elderly; for him the whole household owed obedience to the oldest man, who had the right of life and death over his children. On his 70th birthday Confucius said: ‘I could follow the dictates of my heart without disobeying the moral law.’ Confucius stated that filial piety ‘… is the root of all virtue, and the stem out of which grows all moral teaching.’ The Chinese wanted to grow old, or at least to appear old, because of the privileges enjoyed by older people. When two people of different ages were together, the elder spoke freely and the younger listened respectfully, so the younger man wished to grow older so that he might talk more and listen less. In family life, age brought authority. The young saw the advantage of honouring and obeying their parents; even the middle-aged could profit by the wisdom of the old and feel repaid for supporting them. Several Chinese proverbs illustrate this view: ‘If you wish to succeed, consult three old people’; ‘He who will not accept an old man’s advice will some day be a beggar’; ‘If a family has an old person in it, it possesses a jewel.’ As a result, a man’s 50th birthday in China was marked with reverence. Fathers had the right of life and death over their children.

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  The old are rarely seen in Western literature in the Middle Ages, though La Morte D’Arthur has the king aged over a hundred and Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, makes an old man’s sexual activity revolting. Most seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers are said to have viewed old age as a time of physical decline, and thought that old people were peevish, garrulous and forgetful. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) is one of the earliest novels in which a woman’s life is followed until she reaches seventy, and which shows the strength of her character. Moll’s lifestyle was lurid, but her closing words are that she and her husband had determined ‘to spend the rest of our lives in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived’. For Moll, age was a time of cheer and good humour, where one can make up for the failings of a lifetime. Goethe, who wrote Faust at the age of 65, also took a positive line:

  So, lively brisk old man

  Do not let sadness come over you;

  For all your white hairs

  You can still be a lover.

  Charles Dickens objected to the comparision of old age to childhood, reckoning it as similar as death is to sleep. In The Old Curiosity Shop, little Nell’s grandfather is very kind, but gambles too much. Victor Hugo’s plays had many old characters with positive features. In Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘All Over’, an old man meets again a woman he loved, but is shocked by how she has aged—only her daughter resembles his early love.

  Shangri La is a fictional place in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which may have been inspired by Hilton’s visit to the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan, where the inhabitants have been reported to live long and healthy lives. Exercise is an important part of their life, as the mountains are extremely rough terrain. They eat mainly fruit and wheat, barley and millet. They have been called by some researchers ‘The Happiest People on Earth’. The main characters in the novel are taken to a secluded monastery where the monks practice a combination of Christianity and Buddhism and where some are immortal.

  The novel Memento Mori by Muriel Spark in 1958 marks the beginning of a sustained interest among novelists in what V. S. Pritchett called ‘the great suppressed and censored subject of contemporary society, the one we do not care to face, which we regard as indecent: old age.’ Earlier novels had often just included a mid-life decline. All the characters in Memento Mori are over 70, and most in their 80s, and are in a nursing home. The novel centres around the anonymous callers who phone and say, ‘Remember that you must die.’ Old age is presented as a confusing mix of feelings, memories and inabilities leading to death: ‘I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment—there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die.’

  Since Memento Mori many novels have appeared with central figures over 70, but they deal almost exclusively with the isolation, impotence and decay which are regarded as intrinsic to the ageing process. The closing lines of the final story in John Updike’s last book, My Father’s Tears, describe a man in his late 70s raising the glass of water he uses to wash down his nightly medications—his cholesterol-lowering pill, the anti-inflammatory one, his sleeping pill, his calcium supplement—in a toast ‘to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned’.

  W. B. Yeats was infuriated by old age, which he recognised as inescapable, but his famous poem is wonderful and encouraging:

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

  How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true,

  But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

  And bending down beside the glowing bars,

  Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

  And paced upon the mountains overhead

  And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

  T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding is pessimistic:

  Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

  To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.

  First, the cold friction of expiring sense

  Without enchantment, offering no promise

  But bitter tastelessness of bitter fruit

  As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

  A recent survey by Age Concern found that older people are often stereotyped as ‘warm and incompetent’, or ‘doddery but dear’, and younger people are stereotyped as relatively cold but competent. The rating of young people as more competent than older people can perhaps be explained by attributing memory failure to laziness in the young but incompetence in the old. A key finding from the survey was that older people themselves hold self-stereotypes and values which are likely to result in age-based prejudice. Specific findings supporting this view are that people over 65 are as likely as the rest of the population to hold the ‘warm but incompetent’ stereotype of the old, and those over 75 particularly are more likely to agree that competence declines with age. Those over 75 are the least likely to want to extend equal opportunities for older people. Results overal
l showed that many people did identify with, and felt a strong sense of pleasure in belonging to, their own old age group, but about a quarter did not. Even the elderly population has a tendency to stereotype their own age group. While older people were stereotyped as friendlier, more admirable and more moral than younger people, younger people were viewed as more capable. In general people held more positive views about their own age group and almost all had most friends of their own age.

  People across all age groups tend to agree that older people are admirable to some extent, and friendly to a greater extent. Moreover, older people see themselves as more likely to be viewed as moral, intelligent and capable than younger groups. They also see themselves as less likely to be viewed as pitiable or disgusting. A widely held view is that people over 70 should be valued and cherished; there is almost universal agreement on this. Many feel that equal employment opportunities for older people have not gone far enough. While American children have a positive view of older adults in their own family, they may have a negative world view of ageing. One explanation is that the stories the youngest of children are introduced to often portray older people as wicked or weird, like the evil old witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the scheming Rumpelstiltskin. Overall, children do have positive perceptions of the old. Older men are generally perceived more positively than women.

  Only a quarter of those asked in a survey on work thought people over 70 were at all likely to be viewed as capable of working competently, compared with nearly half who thought people under 30 were likely or extremely likely to be capable. Other research findings, however, indicate that younger workers are often no better at their jobs than older workers, despite the widespread perception that this is the case. It has been shown in experiments that there is no significant difference between the abilities of younger and older workers, with each group performing particularly well or poorly in different areas. It is suggested that less good performance by the old due to reduced cognitive processing is counter-balanced by increased ability because of previous relevant experience.

  Most people would be more comfortable with a suitably qualified manager of over 70 than one of under 30. Almost half think that employers avoid having older people on their workforce because it spoils their image. It was generally accepted that a good way to reduce prejudice and discrimination between old and young groups is to foster close personal friendships between members of each age group. Good relationships between grandchildren and grandparents could certainly help.

  Writing in the Sunday Times, the TV critic A. A. Gill offered a more forceful view, describing the old as ‘zombies at the end of our own home horror movies… Ageing is so frightening in part because we treat the old so badly, and we treat them badly because we are so frightened of them… This is the greatest shame and horror of our society and of our age.’

  Germans tend to view ageing much more negatively than Americans, and Americans consider themselves to be ‘old’ at a much younger age than Germans. Yet elderly people in the United States today are not treated with the respect and reverence to which they were accustomed earlier in history. The gerontologist David Hackett Fischer notes that literature from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century colonial America stressed deference and respect for the elderly. He maintains that the elderly were viewed with a feeling of deep respect and reverence, with contrasts with more modern views. Today the elderly have become virtual outcasts of society, many living on the fringe, often in retirement communities or in nursing homes.

  In modern industrial societies emphasis and value are placed on youth, with advertising geared towards and glamorising the young. To the extent that advertising acknowledges the elderly individual at all, it attempts to make him or her appear younger. The elderly are victims of mistaken beliefs and irrational attitudes promoted largely through the various mass media. It has been claimed that the most flattering thing you can say to an older American is that he ‘doesn’t look his age’ and ‘doesn’t act his age’—as if it were the most damning thing in the world to look old. But at least many of we oldies are looking very well, as we are repeatedly told.

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  Many negative but influential views about ageing continue to derive from the media, including films and TV as well as books. Simone de Beauvoir, in an important book on ageing, wrote:

  It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time… I have never come across one single woman, either in life or in books, who has looked upon her own old age cheerfully.

  She uses the example of Leon Trotsky to show that even the body’s signals can be ambiguous, and there is a temptation to confuse some curable diseases with irreversible old age. Trotsky dreaded growing old and he was filled with anxiety when he remembered Turgenev’s remark, one that Lenin often quoted: ‘Do you know the worst of all vices? It is being over 55.’ In 1933, when he was exactly 55 himself, he wrote a letter to his wife complaining of tiredness, lack of sleep, a failing memory; it seemed to him that his strength was going, and it worried him. ‘Can this be age that has come for good, or is it no more than a temporary, though sudden, decline that I shall recover from? We shall see.’ Sadly he called the past to mind: ‘I have a painful longing for your old photograph, the picture that shows us both when we were so young.’ He did get better, and he took up all his activities again.

  John Updike, in Self-Consciousness, wrote:

  As I age, I feel my head to be full of holes where once there was electricity and matter, and I wonder if, when my head is all hole, I will feel any more pain or loss than I do now. What we don’t know, we don’t know: the Stoics are right at least about this. Ignorance is a kind of bliss, and senility, like drunkenness, bothers beholders more than the bearer.

  In Ageing and Society (2000) Elizabeth Markson and Carol Taylor found 3,038 American films made between 1929 and 1995 which featured male actors over 60 years of age who had been nominated at least once for an Oscar. (We are used to seeing well-known older male actors wooing women stars half their age; it’s less common—if not unknown—the other way round.) But a random sample of these films showed that whereas older men were portrayed as ‘vigorous, employed and involved in same-gender friendships and adventure whether as hero or villain’, women remained ‘peripheral to the action or were portrayed as rich dowagers, wives/mothers or lonely spinsters’. They concluded that film roles have remained remarkably static in age and gender stereotyping despite changes in society.

  Well-known films featuring older heroes include Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which makes use of reminiscence to explore the disillusionment of an elderly physician as he reflects on his life and his mortality. Driving Miss Daisy won Jessica Tandy an Oscar at the age of 80 for her portrayal of a testy Southern Jewish woman’s relationship with her chauffeur. On Golden Pond featured the veteran actors Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an elderly couple sorting out their relationship with an estranged child. More recently there have been films which have picked up on the theme of Alzheimer’s, notably Iris, based on the life of the writer Iris Murdoch, and Away From Her, in which Julie Christie plays a sufferer who insists on entering a rest home, which greatly upsets her husband as he cannot communicate with her or visit her for a long period of time. And most unexpectedly, a 78-year-old man, a bit grumpy but tough and kind, is the hero of the 2009 Walt Disney animated film Up. He sets out to fulfil his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America but he isn’t alone on his journey, since an 8-year-old boy, a wilderness explorer who is trying to get a badge for assisting the elderly, has become a stowaway on the trip. They have amazing and amusing adventures, and encounter talking dogs, an evil villain and a rare bird. The boy gets his reward.

  Research in the US has found that during prime-time television shows, only 3 per cent of the characters are aged 65 or older, while this age group act
ually accounts for 9 per cent of the American population. Older people portrayed on television are often marginalised, comical, or based on stereotypes. Fewer elderly women were shown, although the number of older women outnumbers that of older men. Television has featured the situation of older people in series such as the American The Golden Girls, which featured four older women sharing a home and earned multiple Emmy Awards, and the British series As Time Goes By, with Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer as a couple who meet again after a gap of 38 years. And of course there is the redoubtable figure of Agatha Christie’s sharp-witted detective Miss Marple to remind us that not all old people need be peripheral to the action. In the long-running BBC radio serial The Archers, June Spencer, at the age of 90 still playing matriarch Peggy Woolley, was involved in a storyline about the dementia of her fictional husband which echoed her own experiences with her real-life husband; and Betty Driver was at 90 still paying a role in Coronation Street. The BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave was so popular that its main character, Victor Meldrew, has become shorthand for a constantly bitter and complaining elderly man.