by Mardy Grothe
The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer,
(like the cover of an old book,
its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding),
Lies here, food for worms;
But the work shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed)
appear once more in a new and more elegant edition,
revised and corrected by the Author.
Franklin, a printer by trade, was a voracious reader and one of America’s first great bibliophiles. When he died in 1790, at age eighty-four, his personal library had grown to more than four thousand volumes, the largest private collection in the colonies. Given Franklin’s great love of books, it is not surprising that in his famous epitaph he would liken himself to a worn and weathered volume destined to be improved in a Second Edition.
Franklin returned to the book analogy in his autobiography, which made its first appearance in 1791 (in an unauthorized edition and, amazingly, not in English, but in French). When the first English version appeared a few years later, the very first page of the book featured a reappearance of the theme:
If it were left to my choice, I should have no objection
to go over the same life from its beginning to the end:
requesting only the advantage authors have,
of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
In the late nineteenth century, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the world’s most famous writers. Best known as the author of great adventure novels, to literary types he was also an admired essayist. In his most famous collection of essays, Virginibus Puerisque (1881), he wrote beautifully on a host of subjects. One observation on aging stands out:
For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life
we find the ice growing thinner below our feet,
and all around us
and behind us
we see our contemporaries going through.
When I read this for the first time, I had a flashback to something Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Eloquence is a painting of thought.” When a writer paints a verbal masterpiece, as Stevenson does here, the result is an unforgettable mental picture that lingers in the mind long after the words have been processed by the brain.
The image of people falling through ice also brings to mind the expression skating on thin ice, which has been used since colonial times to refer to the act of placing oneself in a potentially dangerous situation. The actual practice of skating on ice that has not frozen to a safe thickness has always had an allure for thrill-seekers. Ralph Waldo Emerson may have even had this risky activity in mind when he wrote: “In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”
Some of the most impressive metaphorical observations on aging aren’t about death and dying, but about simply getting older. In his 1992 novel When Nietzsche Wept, psychotherapist-turned-novelist Irvin D. Yalom weaves a fascinating fictional account of a relationship that develops between Dr. Josef Breuer, a founder of the talking cure that became known as psychoanalysis, and a little-known, poverty-stricken, and suicidally depressed young philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. While working in Vienna in 1882, Breuer is persuaded to take on Nietzsche’s case. He agrees to do so, despite a major stumbling block—the young philosopher is far too proud to seek help.
Breuer concocts an ingenious ploy to cure Nietzsche without Nietzsche knowing it—he will pose as a person struggling with his own existential problems, and ask the philosopher for help. Nietzsche, of course, is happy to oblige, and the result is a thoroughly engaging yarn. Breuer’s ploy is not a complete ruse, however, for he has just turned forty and is in the middle of a full-blown mid-life crisis. At one point, he looks in a mirror and is dismayed by the sight:
He hated the sight of his beard…
He hated also the outcropping of gray that had insidiously appeared
in his mustache, on the left side of his chin, and in his sideburns.
These gray bristles were, he knew,
the advance scouts of a relentless, wintry invasion.
And there would be no stopping the march of the hours, the days, the years.
By viewing the emergence of gray hair as the initial foray of an unstoppable army, Breuer experiences the dread that small and vulnerable countries must feel when they are about to be invaded by an invincible enemy. The seventeenth-century poet Thomas Flatman also used a military image to convey this realization:
Age…brings along with him
A terrible artillery.
As you peruse the observations in this chapter, you will notice that many—even though expressed eloquently—are sad, poignant, or even a little depressing:
A man in old age is like a sword in a shop window.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Old age is an island surrounded by death.
JUAN MONTALVO
Old age is an incurable disease.
SENECA
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
But you will also find observations from people who approach age, not with dread and a sense of foreboding, but with grace and good humor. In Samuel Butler’s 1903 novel The Way of All Flesh, a character says:
There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle.
In writing this, Butler may have been influenced by a similar English proverb that was popular at the time. Proverbial wisdom has often celebrated maturity. And in the grand tradition of indirect communication, proverbs often appear to be about other subjects when they are, in fact, observations about age and aging:
Just because there’s snow on the roof,
it doesn’t mean the boiler’s gone out.
AMERICAN PROVERB
The older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune.
ENGLISH PROVERB
The oldest trees often bear the sweetest fruit.
GERMAN PROVERB
The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.
SWEDISH PROVERB
Some people have even viewed the mature years as a liberation from the problems associated with youth. In Fear of Fifty (1995), Erica Jong wrote:
At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose,
stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house.
She won’t be imprisoned anymore.
And speaking of good-humored observations, the British actress Gertrude Lawrence described the stages of a woman’s life in a spectacular geographical metaphor:
From 16 to 22, like Africa—part virgin, part explored;
23 to 35, like Asia—hot and mysterious;
35 to 45, like the USA—high-toned and technical;
46 to 55, like Europe—quite devastated, but interesting in places.
Any reasonably complete discussion of age and aging must include descriptions about the youthful years, and you will find many of them in this chapter as well. Perhaps the most famous metaphor about youth comes from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra tries to convince Mark Antony that her love for him is the real thing, and nothing like the youthful and foolish infatuation she had for Julius Caesar. In making her case, she refers to:
My salad days, when I was green in judgment.
Salad days is now a universal metaphor for that period between childhood and adulthood when people are inexperienced—or green with youth—and not yet ripened into maturity. Today, thanks to Shakespeare, we still use the word green to describe a lack of experience.
As people move from the dawn of their lives and get closer to the twilight, thoughts about aging and death become natural and commonplace. And, as we’ve already seen with observations about life, love, and so many other aspects of the human condition, many of the most compelling thoughts about the ages and stages of life have been expressed metaphorically.
Old minds are like old horses;
you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
> A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep,
and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
STEWART ALSOP
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom,
and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world;
I am like a snowball—the further I am rolled, the more I gain.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
The timing of death, like the ending of a story,
gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON
Youth: The too-brief span wherein
the human chassis is factory fresh, undented, and free of corrosion.
RICK BAYAN
Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge.
The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become—
but your views become more extensive.
INGRID BERGMAN
As you get older, you find that often the wheat,
disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
Separating wheat from the chaff means to separate the valuable from the useless. In ancient times, winnowing was the process of exposing harvested wheat to the blowing air in order to separate the useless chaff from the valuable kernels. The metaphor became established after a passage in Luke 3:17 described Jesus as using a winnowing fork to gather the wheat (worthy followers) into his granary (heaven), and leaving the chaff (the unworthy) to the fires of hell.
Youth is like spring, an overpraised season
—delightful if it happens to be a favored one,
but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable,
as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.
SAMUEL BUTLER
As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
This is not from the contemporary mythologist of the same name but from an earlier Irish poet who went on to become an Irish nationalist. The passage comes from one of his most famous poems, “Old Woman,” written in 1913.
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
WILLA CATHER
Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough,
as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.
LORD CHESTERFIELD (Philip Dormer Stanhope)
Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.
CICERO
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk.
It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
JEAN COCTEAU
Cocteau also wrote, “You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.”
The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age,
payable with interest about thirty years after.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
In another metaphor, on one of life’s most painful realities, Colton wrote, “Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.”
Age is like love: it cannot be hid.
THOMAS DEKKER
Old age was growing inside me.
It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror.
I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it
making its way toward me so steadily
when nothing inside me was ready for it.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The loss of friends is a tax on age!
NINON DE LENCLOS
I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey.
GEORGE ELIOT
Eliot wrote this in an 1861 letter. She would live another fifteen years.
When you live with another person for fifty years,
all of your memories are invested in that person,
like a bank account of shared memories.
It’s not that you refer to them constantly.
In fact, for people who do not live in the past,
you almost never say, “Do you remember that night we…?”
But you don’t have to. That is the best of all.
You know that the other person does remember.
Thus, the past is part of the present as long as the other person lives.
It is better than any scrapbook,
because you are both living scrapbooks.
FEDERICO FELLINI
We don’t grow old in a vacuum, but in a web of relationships with others—and often with one very special person. On October 30, 1943, Fellini and Italian actress Giulietta Masina wed, beginning a romantic and creative partnership that lasted half a century. On October 31, 1993, at 73, Fellini died of a heart attack, one day after the couple’s fiftieth wedding anniversary (she died six months later).
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look;
at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
If wrinkles must be written on our brows,
let them not be written upon the heart.
The spirit should never grow old.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
General Douglas MacArthur wrote similarly: “Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul.”
An adult is an obsolete child.
THEODORE GEISEL (Dr. Seuss)
Simone de Beauvoir put it this way: “What is an adult? A child blown up by age.” And British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss expressed it even more vividly: “When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.”
The abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope,
will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.
EDWARD GIBBON
Childhood is a disease—a sickness that you grow out of.
WILLIAM GOLDING
There is always one moment in childhood
when the door opens and lets the future in.
GRAHAM GREENE
I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
THOMAS HOBBES, his last words
A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors:
he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost:
and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy
must get by him before he can come near their camp.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
The advice of the elders to young men is
very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.
Fun is like life insurance; the older you get, the more it costs.
ELBERT HUBBARD
I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape
the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.
W. R. INGE
We cannot live in the afternoon of life
according to the program of life’s morning.
CARL JUNG
This comes from Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933). Later in the chapter, he continued: “The afternoon of life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.”
Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness.
Both are funny, but only in retrospect.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
On the Phil Donahue Show in 1986, Carol Burnett said, “Adolescence is one big walking pimple.” Capturing the prickly aspect of the stage, Anaïs Nin wrote: “Adolescence is like cactus.” And Anna Quindlen recalled the stage this way: “I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.�
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Youth is a perpetual intoxication, a fever of the brain.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets,
reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty
and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
G. C. LICHTENBERG, on a contemporary
The struggle between reason and passion is a lifelong battle, with periodic victories for each side, and an uneasy truce holding most of the time. Kahlil Gibran, who reconciled so many contraries in his writing, believed they could be complementary, once writing, “Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Rest in reason, but move in passion.”
Is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence?
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
There is a reaper whose name is death.
And with his sickle keen,
He reaps bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow in between
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, in “The Reaper and the Flowers” (1839)
This is the first time in history when death was formally personified as a reaper (although Longfellow was probably inspired by Jeremiah 9:22: “The dead bodies of men shall fall…like sheaves after the reaper”). Today, death is commonly called the Grim Reaper and is usually rendered as a skeleton carrying a scythe. The analogy is that the lives of people are cut off in the same way a reaper harvests grain.
To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps.
You reach a snow-crowned summit,
and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away,
and before you other summits higher and whiter,
which you may have strength to climb, or may not.
Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.