‘Old men forget…’
Distinguished English academic Richard Hoggart, 87, writes most affectingly in the Saturday Guardian about the phenomenon of ageing.
I go for a short, late afternoon walk along pavements crowded with schoolchildren of various ages heading for home, most of them continuously laughing & joshing. I do not envy them. It was lovely to be young; only a curmudgeon would begrudge them that part of life. A slight regret & one kept well in check is all I register. I remember that time warmly & try to imagine how they see me now, a slow old man with a stick.
Some make way for me politely. Others look at me as at one from another planet, at which they can never conceive themselves ever arriving. A few look at me as though I am a bit of a nuisance, slowing things down. Hardly any will see me as a survivor because that would link them emotionally with one who was once their age but now occupies a point in space & time towards which they do not yet see themselves slowly moving.
Tolstoy spoke for many when he noted to his diary that ‘old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man’. It steals up like a burglar in stockinged feet, but with a cosh. Some of us take the pension but ignore the indicated age & suddenly realise, perhaps at 80, that we have become old, as my wife & I did.
Commenting on the pleasure that memories of children & grandchildren bring in age, he sounds a poignant note.
Among the memories (of grandchildren) that stay most firmly in our minds is that of the oldest turning to his mother, at about four, & asking: “Shall I be happy all the days?” Almost heartbreaking. It made her want to hold him tight forever.
Shortly before my mother withdrew into the shady place she now inhabits, she expressed Tolstoy’s surprise when contemplating the onset of age. Anger & frustration were her principal reactions to having been ambushed by years. Still entirely on the ball at that point, she talked of an interior self that had arrested at around age 30 but that was now trapped within a body that refused to do her bidding.
Within a few weeks of the conversation in which she expressed her exasperation, she experienced the first of a series of transient ischaemic attacks, or TIAs. These small strokes forced her further & further into that hinterland of consciousness that those of past the first oddly liberating stages of middle age begin to dread increasingly.
Always one to avoid the physical excesses of sport (whilst ready enough to exercise strenuously enough if some extrinsic gain was the goal), I’ve not become heir to crumbling cartilages, dodgy hip joints or an impacting spine. And although physically I do have to do a great deal more to achieve a good deal less, that interior 30-year-old is maintaining fairly convincing control of the mental & physical extremities.
The difference now, however, is that sense of the very real finity of it all. My 6 – 8-monthly cholesterol, cardiac & prostate check-ups have me awaiting the results with increasing tension. I’m due one very soon & the fact that the last, whilst negative, did show irregularities will oppress me during the week following.
I forget who it was who, on being asked if he feared the onset of old age, answered that it was greatly preferable to the alternative. With two little children, two grown-up offspring & a partner younger than myself, my investment in life is substantial. I see old age, physical infirmities notwithstanding, as a further rite of passage no less rich & challenging than what has gone before & what prevails now. If at 87 I can reflect with some of the acuteness of perception & write with the passion that clearly still drive Richard Hoggart then I’ll lean on my cherrywood walking stick & cup my ear with all due forbearance.
11:34:05 PM 
|
