Authors: Lynne Segal
But rather than hitting back with anger, bitterness, and condemnation, Segal recommends protesting against ageism, in the model of such pioneers of Age Studies as Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Kathleen Woodward, Anne Wyatt-Brown, Barbara Frey Waxman, Sylvia Hennenberg, and Cynthia Rich, the estranged younger sister of poet Adrienne Rich (who knew?). While the popular image of political commitment among the old is a move to the right, many people ‘sustain their radical outlook to the very end’, continuing to campaign for peace, women’s liberation, socialism, and progressive change, and finding that politics still gives ‘meaning to their lives’. Despite
disappointment in the slowness of change, Grace Paley, Rosalind Baxandall, and Adrienne Rich, among many others, speak for the enduring satisfactions of continued activism. In his late seventies, Trevor Huddleston affirmed his ongoing dedication to anti-Apartheid and anti-racism: ‘I’ve become more revolutionary every year I’ve lived.’ For Segal, continuing to affirm the moral and political beliefs of our lifetimes keeps us attached to the world, along with our attachments to old friends, grandchildren, and new relationships. Old age is a time, Segal suggest, to acknowledge ‘the value of our lifelong mutual dependence’, as well as to defend our independence.
Above all, Segal values art and takes comfort in the flaming, exuberant creativity of Paula Rego, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Frank Auerbach, and David Hockney. She directs our attention to the work of writers and poets who have told the stories of age, including May Sarton, ‘America’s poet laureate of ageing’, who explained, ‘We have to make myths out of our lives in order to sustain them and I think this partly how one handles the monster.’ For Sarton, age was ‘magnificent’, but the point is not cheerfulness and consolation, but a fearless confrontation with the fearful ageing self, in writers as varied as Martin Amis and Penelope Lively, Roland Barthes and Doris Lessing. Segal scrutinizes at the relationship between grief and memoir, in which the book becomes a ‘form of public mourning’, an act of writing and performance which is itself a ‘guide to survival’, at the same time that it hints at the perverse glamour of bereavement and tragedy, ‘with its vividness and intensity compared to normal life’.
As Angela Carter observed, ‘Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.’ Finally, Segal’s meditations on grief,
loneliness, and loss are balanced by her understanding that attitude and humour are the strongest weapons in the armaments of ageing. Laughter, rather than another documentary on Alzheimer’s or a nice night out to see Michael Haneke’s film
Amour
, is among the truest pleasures and consolations of ageing. Segal wisely includes comic writers and performers in her pantheon of the artists of age – Virginia Ironside and her granny lit; Jo Brand’s brilliant TV series
Getting On
, set in an NHS geriatric ward, where one newly discharged old lady tells the doctor she is off for a well-earned holiday to Zurich; and the searing black comedy of Philip Roth.
It’s about time for a book like
Out of Time
, compassionate, seasoned, honest, and wise, which asks questions about age but aims to enlighten, rather than frighten us. Read on!
1
How Old Am I?
How old am I? Don’t ask; don’t tell. The question frightens me. It is maddening, all the more so for those like me, feminists on the left, approaching our sixth or seventh decade, who like to feel we have spent much of our time trying to combat prejudices on all sides. Yet fears of revealing our age when the years start to race by, speeding up as they mount, are hard to smother. Why write about ageing, when this troubling topic is so daunting, so complicated? My very hesitation, of course, tells me just how much needs to change before we can start to face up to the fearful disparagement of old age, including our own prejudices. I have to keep at bay so much anxiety around the subject, all that I project onto putative readers, my own abiding ambivalence.
It is when we are young that we are most obviously busy with the project of trying to construct a self we hope the world will appreciate, monitoring and re-arranging the impressions we make upon others. Yet as we age, most of us are still trying to hold on to some sense of who and what we are, however hard this may become for those who start to feel increasingly invisible. Everywhere I look nowadays I see older people busily engaged with the world and eager, just as I am, to relate to others, while also struggling to shore up favoured ways of
seeing ourselves. However, the world in general is rarely sympathetic to these attempts, as though the time had come, or were long overdue, for the elderly to withdraw altogether from worrying about how they appear to others. In my view, such a time never comes, which means finding much better ways of affirming old age than those currently available.
The need to think again, to think more imaginatively, about ageing should be obvious once we confront the rapid increase in life expectancy around the globe. Despite deep disparities locally and globally, ever more people are living into old age, often very old age. In Britain, ten million people are currently over sixty-five years old, around a sixth of the population, with that number likely to double over the next few decades.
1
The figures in the USA are equally arresting, where around forty million people are currently over sixty-five, some 13 per cent of the total population, with that number also predicted to double by 2030, accounting for nearly twenty per cent of the population.
2
Yet this greying of society has not only been largely either disregarded or deplored, it has also amplified rather than diminished social antipathy towards the elderly. Tellingly, in his parting statement to the British House of Lords as Archbishop of Canterbury at the close of 2012, Rowan Williams suggested that negative stereotypes of the ageing population are fostering attitudes of contempt and leaving them vulnerable to verbal and physical abuse.
3
There is thus aversion towards the very topic of ageing, although this is just one of the issues I will be struggling to change in tackling the varied and often paradoxical issues of old age.
Ageing encompasses so much, and yet most people’s thoughts about it embrace so little. Against the dominant fixation, for instance, this book is not primarily about ageing bodies, with
their rising demands, frequent embarrassments, and endless diversities – except that of course our bodies are there, in every move we make, or sometimes fail to complete. It will have little to say, either, about the corrosions of dementia, although it does look at the surprisingly interesting thoughts of some of those who have cared for, or continue to tend, loved ones affected by cognitive deterioration. It is telling nowadays how often those who address the topic of ageing alight on dementia – often, paradoxically, in criticism of others who simply equate ageing with decline, while doing just this themselves. For the faint-hearted, I need to point out that although the incidence of dementia will indeed accelerate in the age group now headed towards their nineties, even amongst the very oldest it will not predominate – though this information hardly eliminates our fear of such indisputable decline.
4
Conversely, this book is not, or not in quite the usual way, an exploration of those many narratives of resilience, which suggest that with care of the self, diligent monitoring, and attention to spiritual concerns we can postpone ageing itself, at least until those final moments of very old age. On this view, we can stay healthy, fit and ‘young’ – or youngish – performing our yoga, practising Pilates, eating our greens, avoiding hazards and spurning envy and resentment. It is true, we may indeed remain healthy, but we will not stay young. ‘You are only as old as you feel’, though routinely offered as a jolly form of reassurance, carries its own disavowal of old age.
Ageing faces, ageing bodies, as we should know, are endlessly diverse. Many of them are beautifully expressive, once we choose to look – those eyes rarely lose their lustre, when engrossed. However, in this book I plan to skim lightly over both the many depredations of the flesh as well as its potential
renewals, to look more closely at the psychology and politics of ageing. I am primarily concerned with the possibilities for and impediments to staying alive to life itself, whatever our age. This takes me first of all to the temporal paradoxes of ageing, and to the enduring ways of remaining open and attached to the world.
As we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age. ‘All ages and no age’ is an expression once used by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to describe the wayward temporality of psychic life, writing of his sense of the multiple ages he could detect in those patients once arriving to lie on the couch at his clinic in Hampstead in London.
5
Thus the older we are the more we encounter the world through complex layerings of identity, attempting to negotiate the shifting present while grappling with the disconcerting images of the old thrust so intrusively upon us. ‘Live in the layers, / not on the litter’, the North American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote in one of his beautiful poems penned in his seventies.
6
Many people are likely to mourn the passionate pleasures and perils of their younger life, fearing that never again can they recapture what they have lost. Yet, one way or another, for better and for worse, there are devious means by which we always live with those passions of the past in the strange mutations of mental life in the present, whatever our age. We do not have to be Marcel Proust to recapture traces of them without even trying, though it will surely be harder to find just the right words, or perhaps any language at all, to express our own everyday time-travelling.
Thus, on the one hand it can seem as though the self never ages; on the other we are forced to register our bodies and minds in constant transformation, especially by the impact we make upon others. As Virginia Woolf, always so concerned with issues of time, memory and sexual difference, wrote in her diary in 1931, just before reaching fifty: ‘I sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already, and sometimes that I am still the youngest person on the omnibus.’
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This is exactly how I feel.
‘I don’t feel old,’ elderly informants repeatedly told the oral historian Paul Thompson. Their voices echo the words he’d read in his forays into published autobiography and archived interviews.
8
Similarly, in the oral histories collected by the writer, Ronald Blythe, an eighty-four-year-old ex-schoolmaster reflects: ‘I tend to look upon other old men as
old
men – and not include myself … My boyhood stays imperishable and is such a great part of me now. I feel it very strongly – more than ever before.’
9
‘How can a seventeen-year-old, like me, suddenly be eighty-one?’ the exactingly scientific developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert asks in the opening sentences of his book on the surprising nature of old age, wryly entitled
You’re Looking Very Well
.
10
Once again, this keen attachment to youth tells us a great deal about the stigma attending old age: ‘you’re looking old’ would never be said, except to insult. On the one hand there can be a sense of continuous fluidity, as we travel through time; on the other, it is hard to ignore those distinct positions we find ourselves in as we age, whatever the temptation. I have been finding, however, that it becomes easier to face up to my own anxieties about ageing after surveying the radical ambiguities in the speech or writing of others thinking about the topic, especially when they do so neither to lament nor to celebrate old
age, but simply to affirm it as a significant part of life. This is the trigger for the pages that follow, as I assemble different witnesses to help guide me through the thoughts that once kept me awake at night, pondering all the things that have mattered to me and wondering what difference ageing makes to my continuing ties to them.
Beauvoir’s Blues
‘I don’t feel old’ may for differing reasons be one of the chief messages we hear from the old, often familiar to us in the words of ageing relatives, friends, or perhaps an insistent voice arising from within. Yet sometimes, of course, now at the very close of my sixties writing this, I do feel old. But then my manner of displaying confidence, strength and independence has from the beginning often been accompanied by an awareness of also feeling somewhat weak, fragile and dependent – characteristics always attributed to the elderly and, not coincidentally, seen as prototypically ‘feminine’. Despite a rather paradoxical official eagerness nowadays to present an encouraging view of ‘successful’ ageing, I know that there are always competing voices, seemingly coming from within and without, conflicting with any sense of satisfaction that I might have in later life. For however we may feel ‘on the inside’, this has little impact on the abiding fears of ageing that usually begin assaulting us from mid-life, seemingly from the outside.
Turning to my first guide into the territory of old age, no one depicted the contradictions of ageing more sharply than that intrepid feminist avatar, Simone de Beauvoir. Entering middle age, she felt she could not recover from the shock of realizing
she was no longer young: ‘How is it that time, which has no form nor substance, can crush me with so huge a weight that I can no longer breathe?’
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Beauvoir was, of course, the preeminent inspiration for so many of my very particular ‘postwar’ generation in our youth, rousing us to confront and resist the situation of women’s symbolic and social marginalization in, and as,
The Second Sex
. Fifteen years after publishing that rallying call, however, Beauvoir was unable to resist the searing sorrow she felt confronting her own ageing when concluding her third autobiographical book recording her life and times,
Force of Circumstance
, first published in 1963.