"As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, "they grow more foolish and more wise"--wise in counsel, but foolish in conduct. "There is no fool like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is equally true that there is no fool like the young fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to middle age.
As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting to collate many wise sayings of many wise men on youth and age.[8]
[Footnote 8: Here followed several pages of quotations from the ancients and moderns.--C. B.]
Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any.
They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent, the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of pleasures is gone and another takes its place.
Emerson published his essay on "Old Age" while he was yet in the middle sixties, and I recall that in the "Emerson-Carlyle Correspondence" both men began to complain of being old before they were sixty. Scott was old before his time, and Macaulay too. Scott died at sixty-one, Macaulay at fifty-nine, Tennyson at eighty-three, Carlyle at eighty-six, Emerson at seventy-nine, Amiel at sixty.
I have heard it said that it is characteristic of old age to reverse its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them; it revises them. If its years have been well spent, it has reached a higher position from which to overlook life. It commands a wider view, and the relation of the parts to the whole is more clearly seen....
"Old age superbly rising"--Whitman.
Age without decrepitude, or remorse, or fear, or hardness of heart!
FACING THE MYSTERY
I wish there were something to light up the grave for me, but there is not. It is the primal, unending darkness. The faith of all the saints and martyrs does not help me. I must see the light beyond with my own eyes. Whitman"s indomitable faith I admire, but cannot share. My torch will not kindle at his great flame. From our youth up our a.s.sociations with the dead and with the grave are oppressive. Our natural animal instincts get the better of us. Death seems the great catastrophe.
The silver cord is loosened, and the golden bowl is broken. The physical aspects of death are unlovely and repellent. And the spiritual aspects--only the elect can see them. Our physical senses are so dominant, the visible world is so overpowering, that all else becomes as dreams and shadows.
I know that I am a part of the great cosmic system of things, and that all the material and all the forces that make up my being are as indestructible as the great Cosmos itself--all that is physical must remain in some form. But consciousness, the real Me, is not physical, but an effect of the physical. It is really no more a thing than "a child"s curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the night," and as the one is evanescent, why not the other?
Nature is so opulent, so indifferent to that we hold most precious, such a spendthrift, evokes such wonders from such simple materials!
Why should she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff of myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays down. Her cycles of change, of life and death, go on forever. She does not lay up stores; she is, and has, all stores, whether she keep or whether she waste. It is all the same to her. There is no outside, no beyond, to her processes and possessions. There is no future for her, only an ever-lasting present. What is the very bloom and fragrance of humanity to the Infinite? In the yesterday of geologic time, humanity was not. In the to-morrow of geologic time, it will not be. The very mountains might be made of souls, and all the stars of heaven kindled with souls, such is the wealth of Nature in what we deem so precious, and so indifferent is she to our standards of valuation.
This I know, too: that the grave is not dark or cold to the dead, but only to the living. The light of the eye, the warmth of the body, still exist undiminished in the universe, but in other relations, under other forms. Shall the flower complain because it fades and falls? It has to fall before the fruit can appear. But what is the fruit of the flower of human life? Surely not the grave, as the loose thinking of some seem to imply. The only fruit I can see is in fairer flowers, or a higher type of mind and life that follows in this world, and to which our lives may contribute. The flower of life has improved through the ages--the geologic ages; from the flower of the brute, it has become the flower of the man. You and I perish, but something goes out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of mankind. To what end? Who knows? We cannot cross-question the Infinite. Something in the universe has eventuated in man, and something has profited by his ameliorations. We must regard him as a legitimate product, and we must look upon death as a legitimate part of the great cycle--an evil only from our temporary and personal point of view, but a good from the point of view of the whole.
THE END