Measure of My Days (10 page)

T
he old are unsure
of a future, their past has grown stale so they are dependent on the sentience of the moment. It behoves us to be sentient.

Or—the old live by recalling the past, and are fascinated by the query of what future is possible: Their present is empty.

Or—there is nothing of interest to be said about the old, except that they are absorbed by age.

Each could be true. One takes one’s choice.

I
don’t like to write this down
, yet it is much in the minds of the old. We wonder how much older we have to become, and what degree of decay we may have to endure. We keep whispering to ourselves, “Is this age yet? How far must I go?”. For age can be dreaded more than death. “How many years of vacuity? To what degree of deterioration must I advance?” Some want death now, as release from old age, some say they will accept death willingly, but in a few years. I feel the solemnity of death, and the possibility of some form of continuity. Death feels a friend because it will release us from the deterioration of which we cannot see the end. It is waiting for death that wears us down, and the distaste for what we may become.

These thoughts are with us always, and in our hearts we know ignominy as well as dignity. We are people to whom something important is about to happen. But before then, these endless years before the end, can we summon enough merit to warrant a place for ourselves? We go
into the future not knowing the answer to our question.

B
ut we also find
that as we age we are more alive than seems likely, convenient, or even bearable. Too often our problem is the fervour of life within us. My dear fellow octogenarians, how are we to carry so much life, and what are we to do with it?

Let no one say it is “unlived life” with any of the simpler psychological certitudes. No one lives all the life of which he was capable. The unlived life in each of us must be the future of humanity. When truly old, too frail to use the vigour that pulses in us, and weary, sometimes even scornful of what can seem the pointless activity of mankind, we may sink down to some deeper level and find a new supply of life that amazes us.

All is uncharted and uncertain, we seem to lead the way into the unknown. It can feel as though all our lives we have been caught in absurdly
small personalities and circumstances and beliefs. Our accustomed shell cracks here, cracks there, and that tiresomely rigid person we supposed to be ourselves stretches, expands, and with all inhibitions gone we realize that age is not failure, nor disgrace; though mortifying we did not invent it. Age forces us to deal with idleness, emptiness, not being needed, not able to do, helplessness just ahead perhaps. All this is true, but one has had one’s life, one could be full to the brim. Yet it is the end of our procession through time, and our steps are uncertain.

Here we come to a new place of which I knew nothing. We come to where age is boring, one’s interest in it by-passed; further on, go further on, one finds that one has arrived at a larger place still, the place of release. There one says, “Age can seem a debacle, a rout of all one most needs, but that is not the whole truth. What of the part of us, the nameless, boundless part who experienced the rout, the witness who saw so much go, who remains undaunted and knows with clear conviction that there is more to us than age?
Part of that which is outside age has been created by age, so there is gain as well as loss. If we have suffered defeat we are somewhere, somehow beyond the battle”.

N
ow that I am sure
this freedom is the right garnering of age I am so busy being old that I dread interruptions. This sense of vigour and spaciousness may cease, and I must enjoy it while it is here. It makes me feel, “I serve life, certain that it is the human soul that discerns the spirit, and that we are creators”. But victims too. Life happens to us. Plan and try as we will, think, believe, it is still that inscrutable mood of the time that casts the die. We suffer as we change, that life may change in us. We also destroy, and the pain that for me is inherent in life is that we do not know when we create and when we destroy. That is our incurable blindness, but perhaps we are less dangerous if we know we do not see.

A
long life
makes me feel nearer truth, yet it won’t go into words, so how can I convey it? I can’t, and I want to. I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say—“Of what?” I can only answer, “We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery”. I want to say—“If at the end of your life you have only yourself, it is much. Look, you will find”.

I would like to be as outspoken as old people feel, but honesty gives pain. Few enjoy honesty for it arouses feeling, and to avoid the pain of feeling many prefer to live behind steel doors. It is not being able to say conflicting things with one breath that is the sad division between human beings. As some dislike the paradoxical we forego the fun of admitting what we know, and so miss the entertainment of being mutually implicated in truth.

One cannot be honest even at the end of one’s life, for no one is wholly alone. We are bound to those we love, or to those who love us, and to
those who need us to be brave, or content, or even happy enough to allow them not to worry about us. So we must refrain from giving pain, as our last gift to our fellows. For love of humanity consume as much of your travail as you can. Not all, never that terrible muteness that drains away human warmth. But when we are almost free of life we must retain guile that those still caught in life may not suffer more. The old must often try to be silent, if it is within their power, since silence may be like space, the intensely alive something that contains all. The clear echo of what we refrained from saying, everything, from the first pause of understanding, to the quiet of comprehension.

A
fter weeks of not writing
in my note book I took it up again, and some change had taken place. A sense of naturalness has come, or of freedom. Is a sense of the naturalness of being old tranquillity? Then the old can be tranquil, but it is an
achievement. If at the end we choose to represent tranquillity, as without us it might be missing, let it be clearly seen that tranquillity is not a grace waiting for us to take on as our right, but something we have to win with effort. It may not be our doing. It may be what facing age does to us. Then here lies our victory.

M
an is truly astonishing.
One would imagine his basic belief would be that struggle is natural and inevitable. I have supposed that the rock on which we all stood was that life was almost more than we could manage. But man’s history has much of the surprising in it, and it is now clear to me that from the beginning some human beings saw that the best way of taking life was lightly. Undeterred by what happened to him and to others, man has had a genius for ease. To be so unaffected by reality is inspiring.

I could understand his slowly but surely seeing that his own behaviour was the one thing it was
within his power to control, somewhat, but he tossed this aside to be caught by those handicapped from birth with a conscience. He had no difficulty in avoiding that monolith that I assumed lay on the path of each, the granite fact that though life thwarted him at every turn it did ennoble his character. Only a few gloomy people saw this. The hordes of the ages with wits sharpened by experience rushed to get what was desirable, leaving to others what was difficult, even inventing the idea of duty to slow them up, while he reached ease quickly since to enjoy life was his true inheritance.

Early, very early on, there were those who claimed ease as their own, and who knew what to do with it. I have proof of this, and I got it at the zoo.

I was watching a young female monkey swinging from the top bar of her cage. She was pregnant and interested me. She turned, caught my appraising eye, and swinging gracefully down sat in the straw on the floor of the cage. Then with languid elegance she drew the straw waist
high, as though it had been a carriage rug, casting on me so withering a glance that I withdrew with silent apologies. I remembered such glances cast on me from the occupants of great cars, if I stood on the curbstone waiting for them to pass, possibly in the rain. Yes, and I had felt in my own eye that sidelong look of unconcern when it was I who happened to be in a car.

Belief in ease began a long way back, and was part of life from the beginning. The skill of being effortless is part of life. As I regard it with the astonishment it deserves I no longer ask myself how it ever entered the human brain that you ought to have what you want, for I accept that it did, and that this is one of man’s many triumphs.

I
continue to be spellbound
by ease for I recall a visit to a music hall some fifty years ago. A stout, knowing man, wearing his topper at an angle, strolled onto the stage lazily swinging a
stick. He nodded intimately to distant points in the audience, and sang a song with sophisticated good nature that won him affectionate applause. Then he sang the same song silently; at moments moving his lips, giving a half twirl to his stick, lifting a finger as accent, living the rhythm with exquisite accuracy, and masterly indifference. When the song was finished his pleasure broke into a grin, and the audience roared its appreciation. They stamped feet, beat hands, their noisy admiration burst into a frenzy over the man who dared to be so unconcerned.

I too felt immeasurably relaxed.

C
onversation must be near the top
of human pleasures. Babies, even a few months old, have discovered this, and beguile themselves with what sounds like reflective conversation. They modulate sounds thoughtfully and subtly, in fact they enthrall themselves with the comfort of the human voice, as satisfying when alone as with a companion. If my youngest grandchild, at eight
months, pauses as though he had offered all his observations for the time being, I say something like, “But there must have been more to it than that”, and he then continues as though he had indeed recalled another aspect of the subject.

The sound of speech and pausing for a friend to contribute sound is one of the earliest needs. Sleep would come first, then food, protest perhaps third, then the pleasure in showing happiness and affection, and speech as the fifth solid satisfaction.

Silence receives too little appreciation, silence being a higher, rarer thing than sound. Silence implies inner riches, and a savouring of impressions. Babies value this too. They lie silent, and one can suppose them asleep, but look closer, and with eyes wide open they are sparkling like jewels in the dark. Silence is beyond many of us, and hardly taken into account as one of life’s favours. It can be sacred. Its implications are unstatable. It has a superiority that makes the interruption of the spoken word crude, rendering small what was infinite.

My youngest grandchild uses silence as well as he does sound. He is consummate in making soft, confiding noises that bind the heart of the hearer to him. But for long periods he prefers to keep his own counsel. Then he looks forth on the world unblinking, unhurried, and with a dignity that should be the rite of Kings.

At times he gazes at me without interest; above self-doubt he yawns, a wide, slow, complete and uncovered yawn. He removes his gaze from me so that I wonder if I was seen, if I was present. With grave deliberation he discovers a hole in the arm of his chair so small that no one else could have had the calm to take it in, and he gives it his undivided attention. He gives all of himself to that hole which just fits the tip of his minute first finger, and I know that all hope of further conversation with him is over. I also know that I have been in the presence of perfect naturalness, and I feel chastened and uplifted.

O
ur earth began with fire
, achieved water, and grew its infinite variety of vegetation. Animals evolved in a fantasia of form. Man struggled to consciousness, possessed imagination, endured self-awareness, and experienced the spirit within him. Can we do less than give fealty to such ascension?

FLORIDA PIER SCOTT-MAXWELL was born in Orange Park, Florida, on September 24, 1883. She had lessons at home until she was ten, briefly attended public school in Pittsburgh, then went back to private lessons, and finally gave it all up to go on the stage at sixteen. At twenty she abandoned that career and began another as a writer of short stories. In 1910 she married John Maxwell Scott-Maxwell and went to live in his native Scotland. Until 1935 she worked for women’s suffrage, wrote plays, and tended her flowers and children. Among her books are
Towards Relationships (
1939
), Women and Sometimes Men (
1957
),
and the plays
The Flash-point (
1914
), They Knew How to Die (
1931
),
and
Many Women (
1933
).
In 1933 Mrs. Scott-Maxwell began training for still another career as an analytical psychologist, studying under C. G. Jung. Since then she has practiced in psychological clinics in Scotland and England.