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William Butler Yeats
When You are Old
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.
-W.B. Yeats
Based on a sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard (first appearing in
Le Second Livre Des Sonnets Pour Hélène in 1578), Yeats wrote this poem in 1891, hoping—I think—to warn the object of his desire that when she looked back on her life she would regret not having loved the one person who loved her truly. A simple poem, structurally and thematically, but with a thread of mean sewn into its iambic pentameter.
Growing old, however, doesn't have to be a time for regrets. Age also brings with it the opportunity to truly appreciate the fullness of life. (Although I admit that this view is, from what I can tell, the minority view. An unscientific and random sampling of friends and family this week returned very few upbeat assessments of aging. One sister responded with a litany of the parts of her body that hurt each morning; a friend told me he missed his younger body and its ability to mend quickly; failing eye sight and hair loss made the list more than once; another friend, more upbeat than most, reminded me that the challenges incumbent in growing old called for self kindness and gentleness. Betty, my usual fount of wisdom, told me she couldn't think of anything to say about getting older—her way of dealing with early onset dementia, I guess.
But I'm not going so gently, or at least so predictably, into that good night—at least I'm not going to give my maker the satisfaction of listening to me complain about being given the time to grow old: after all, think of the alternative. I have to agree that my body isn't what it used to be, that aches and pains are more frequent visitors, that I have achieved a certain transparency in society (where my presence and opinions are barely registered), and that my psyche has certainly suffered its share of time's slings and arrows.
I've traded the ability to leap from great heights with the agility to think for myself and the courage to make my own choices. My hair is thinning, sure, but I have likewise shed layers of vanity and insecurity that never served me well. My eyesight has gone gradually from bad to worse, yet I see so many things more clearly than ever; my gait is slower, but it allows me time to more deeply appreciate the journey; my endurance has suffered, but my bouts of concentration are bountifully fed by knowledge and experience that can only be earned; and while my youthful glow has dimmed and visage aged, my understanding of lasting beauty and true love has been honed to a razor's edge.
A wonderful piece by Roger Angell in The New Yorker, entitled "This Old Man," is a candid exploration of growing old. Although a celebration of over nine decades of living, he also touches upon a common theme of the older generations: death.
A few notes about age is my aim here, but a little more about loss is inevitable. “Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.
Angell reminds us of an ever-present aspect of aging—the inevitability of death. A profound sense of mortality is no doubt something that each of us develops as we grow older. And it is, for me, at once the most troubling and fascinating aspect of living through youth and middle age. William Saroyan once observed that "everyone has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case." I don't count myself among those eligible for exemption, so this morning I am tethered to the present: no wandering through memories of lost opportunity or grand successes or even comforting recollections.
For me, growing older has given me the chance to atone for years of taking life for granted.
Grab your coffee and pull up a chair. Tell me, what's good about growing older?