Authors: Lynne Segal
Meanwhile her son, Gregory, himself entering old age at sixty-two, more closely resembles his creator, Barnes, at least in his fears of mortality and thoughts about suicide. However, when he broods over suicide and different ways of dying, it is in a ‘quiet, almost companionable’ way (142). What I find particularly interesting about the fictionalized version of Barnes’ early mid-life reflections on very old age is their clear contrast with that of almost all the other male writers I have looked at in this book. He shows little dismay over women’s ageing bodies, sagging flesh, or other forms of physical decay, making neither
sexism, nor misogyny, nor even ageism, particularly evident in his own musings on old age. In this book, for instance, Gregory sees his mother as ‘an alert, tidy, sympathetic old lady who, if she hadn’t necessarily attained wisdom, had at least discarded all stupidity’ (185). He reflects that her apparent eccentricities and random memories are attributable to the absence of any shared points of reference. ‘The very old’, he realizes, ‘needed interpreters just as the young did. When the old lost their companions, their friends, they also lost their interpreters: they lost love, but they also lost the full powers of speech’ (156).
Finally, and rather wonderfully, Barnes’ own compassion for old people leads him to fantasize not for Amis’ suicide booths on street corners, but the opposite. In his imaginings of the future, the disdain shown towards the expanding numbers of elderly evident from the close of the twentieth century has led to old people campaigning for new civil rights which, after a spate of militant public suicides, has resulted in most of their demands being met, making ‘old people not just acceptable, but fashionable’ (144). The demands included the following fine sentiments: ‘Old people are to be loved more’; ‘There shall be special series of awards to recognize wisdom and the achievements of old people’; ‘Creation of an Old People’s day, to be celebrated once a year’; ‘Positive discrimination in jobs and housing in favour of old people’; ‘Free fun-drugs for the over eighties’. I can only hope that Barnes today, now in his late sixties, agrees with these suggestions dreamed up in his late thirties, for they are surely in need of revisiting.
Old people are to be loved more; yes, and old people often need the opportunity to be able to love other people more, need someone, or something, to take care of, even if only by stroking them, being able to show their affection, or simply concern for,
another, knowing that their feelings are appreciated. ‘No-one exists alone’, the poet Auden wrote in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War: ‘We must love one another or die’. But Auden wanted not just to be pitch perfect, but to be accurate, as time goes by. He therefore amended his words sixteen years later to read, ‘We must love one another and die.’
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In a similar vein, I have now come to think that dwelling upon mortality can make us more responsive to our bonds with others. Both in literature and in standard empirical studies there is some evidence for this. It was while facing death that the renowned French radical writer, André Gorz, wrote his remarkable love letter to his terminally ill wife, Dorine, whom he chose not to outlive:
You’re eighty-two years old. You’ve shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you’re still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We’ve lived together now for fifty-eight years and I love you more than ever. I once more feel a gnawing emptiness in the hollow of my chest that is only filled when your body is pressed next to mine.
At night I sometimes see the figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It’s you the hearse is taking away … Neither of us wants to outlive the other.
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To the extent that we can manage it, awareness of mortality can enhance our sense of our bonds to others and our embrace of the moment. The problem with laboratory studies is their artificiality, hence the difficulties of generalizing from them, and their dependence, often barely registered, on the interpretations investigators choose to make of them. Nevertheless, in some recent psychological research it has been reported that
subjects emphasized the significance of relationships and were more likely to be helpful to others after being asked questions about death, or when they were in other ways made more aware of mortality. The psychologists concluded that awareness rather than disavowal of death strengthens social bonds to others, at least inside one’s own group.
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This seems plausible to me, although it is significantly at odds with the general cultural beat encouraging us always to remain goal oriented, with eyes focused on the future. In my view, we may well be extremely anxious about the future, and yet still busy learning from the past in ways that keep us curious about the present, and its endless dilemmas, whether personal or social. However, let me now turn to other forms of resistance to the fears and challenges of ageing and mortality, fears so evident in the usually quite unthinking disparagement of old age, often palpable even in attempts to combat ageism.
5
Flags of Resistance
‘Old age is not interesting until one gets there,’ May Sarton wrote.
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Well, most of us will get there, indeed, linger there for quite some time before we die. But can we make it interesting, at least for ourselves, or perhaps even for certain others across the generations? In this chapter I look at further ways of resisting the fear of old age, beginning with a straightforward refusal to acknowledge one’s own ageing. However, there are other ways to recognize and value the mixed experiences of old age, in which beauty, pain, resilience and resistance intermingle, while time itself appears more fluid.
That ageing is never straightforward has been a refrain throughout this book. Given our enormous diversity, it is not so hard to challenge most stereotypes of old people, whatever form they take. There are, for instance, always a few formidable figures, including among the very old, who not only stay determinedly in touch with world affairs, but even manage to keep commenting usefully upon them. It is not so difficult, either, to intervene in the battles between the optimists and pessimists addressing ageing and old age. One side, like May Sarton, emphasizes the continued health and vigour possible in old age, stressing it as a period when the experiences of a
lifetime offer spaces of openness for meditation and spiritual renewal.
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The other sees only the losses, regret and sadness attending old age, as Philip Roth and Martin Amis epitomized. Neither side sufficiently encompasses the conflicts and potential, or the ambivalence and paradoxes, of ageing and old age.
Meanwhile, the world races ahead anyway, indifferent to our life or death. That sense of being left behind, losing out, can begin at whatever age we turn around, regretting the loss of the pleasures of yesterday. Indeed, Paul McCartney was only twenty-three when he wrote and the Beatles recorded ‘Yesterday’, when troubles seemed so far away, which became one of the most popular songs ever made, and with more cover versions than any other.
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Nostalgia is always with us. Indeed, as the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas suggests, it is the passing of time itself that is ‘intrinsically traumatic’: ‘the loss of youth, the loss of loved ones, the loss of “futures” ’ – some regretfully register these transformations well before old age.
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However, though sentiments of loss, decline and an inability to keep in touch with the world can certainly occur at almost any stage in adulthood, there is no doubt that such feelings must increase with age, although by then old people sometimes find better ways of dealing with them.
Defying Chronological Age
‘You haven’t changed at all’ are words I love to hear when meeting people I have not seen for a while. Guiltily, I cherish the thought that I don’t look my age, and like to believe friends and acquaintances when they flatter. So do all of my friends, I notice, and I’ve learned to offer these reassuring words myself.
It is a losing game, I know, rather than any flag of resistance to the dread of ageing. This type of personal bolstering is also the mainstay of the current promotion of healthy lifestyles, exercise regimes, beauty treatments, or more invasive surgical interventions, that encourage us to believe that if we strive hard, pay enough, remain sufficiently vigilant, we can grow old free from the standard signs of ageing. Here too, class differences in how we age are deeply etched. Biologists have revealed that, owing to the effects of stress and poverty, such differences are clearly evident even at the cellular level, not just in the most visible signs of ageing.
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We are urged everywhere to control those telltale signs by the adman’s ‘body maintenance’, similar to the care of a sleek car, which can be kept functioning at the optimal level so long as it is adequately serviced: ‘bodies require servicing, regular care and attention to preserve maximum efficiency’, as Mike Featherstone summed up the message.
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Personal worth itself becomes tied up with our ability to match up to approved models of fitness and slimness, whatever our age.
Researching the history of shifting attitudes to ageing in popular culture, the Scottish sociologist Andrew Blaikie similarly encapsulates the current zeitgeist as one in which ‘older citizens are encouraged not just to dress “young” and look youthful, but to exercise, have sex, diet, take holidays, and socialize in ways indistinguishable from those of their children’s generation’.
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The commercial implications are blatant, as captured by that caustic observer Hanif Kureishi in his novella
The Body
:
It was rare for my wife and her friends not to talk about botox and detox, about food and their body shape, size and relative fitness, and the sort of exercise they were or were not taking. I knew women, and not only actresses, who had squads of personal trainers, dieticians, nutritionists, yoga teachers, masseurs and beauticians labouring over their bodies daily, as if the mind’s longing and anxiety could be cured via the body.
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In this particular surrealist narrative, where the protagonist Adam is granted his yearning to remain forever young, the fulfilment becomes itself a curse, just as it always has been in its better-known literary precursors, Goethe’s
Faust
or Wilde’s
Dorian Gray
.
Nevertheless, today it is not any diabolical pact that might offer us eternal youth, but rather paying too much heed to the way scientific research is packaged in the popular press. It is hard to avoid such reckless promises, as they arrive with our morning papers, or with every click of the mouse. ‘An “elixir of life” could soon be reality, scientists claim’, according to Fiona Macrae, the science reporter for the second largest-selling newspaper in the UK, the
Daily Mail
. Here she tells her readers that cells treated with what she labels the ‘forever young’ drug – called rapamycin – lived longer than normal cells. This drug had been used successfully on children to reverse the effects of a genetic condition called Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, which causes its sufferers to grow old and frail in childhood, before dying of ‘old age’ at around twelve. It is a breakthrough that could ‘hold hope for the general population’, the newspaper celebrates.
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However, since I have also read that the drug is used primarily for suppressing the immune system in organ transplants, it seems researchers have a long way to go before such claims can be taken seriously. Just a few weeks earlier, Macrae had spied out and reported on a different ‘forever young’ drug, ‘Teperdexrian’, which has been used to
turn back time in old mice. Here, she quoted Professor Linda Partridge, a geneticist from University College London, who told the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2011 that ‘science is moving so quickly that it will soon be possible to prevent many of the ills of old age’.
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Let us hope she is right, but preventing disease and staying forever young are not the same thing.
It is the dedicated refusal to admit any necessary impediments in people’s lives as they grow older that remains at the heart of many narratives of ageing well. It is one thing for me to point out that we can always see continuities across a lifetime, suggesting also that as we age we retain a certain access, consciously or not, to all the selves we have been. It is quite another to imagine that we can remain ageless. Yet this is now the future many like to suggest is imminent. In a recent book exploring life free from any constraints imposed by ageing, Catherine Mayer celebrates what she calls ‘amortality’. This is her word for those she interviews and writes about who, according to her, are already managing to live ‘agelessly’. Simply by repudiating old age, Mayer’s amortals continue to live exactly as they have always lived until they die. They reject any form of dependency or restrictions on their lifestyle by whatever drugs or surgical interventions may prove necessary: ‘the defining characteristic of amortals is that they live the same way, at the same pitch, doing and consuming much the same things, from late teens right up until death’.
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Mayer interviews and reports upon scores of candidates for agelessness in her book, mostly rich, powerful and successful white men, predominantly from the USA. These include Bill Clinton, Hugh Heffner, Woody Allen, Mick Jagger, Simon Cowell, Bob Geldof, and just a few – very few – women, mostly businesswomen, exemplified by Lynne Franks. We are
told that Mayer herself, at fifty-eight, lives agelessly, as did her parents and grandparents – although she made the choice not to have children in her quest to stay always the same as she has been. It helps a lot, she admits, to be affluent, and hence able to afford the latest anti-ageing products on offer, such as Viagra, supposedly enabling men to live in their prime till they die. Her amortals are almost all workaholics, their only lack, if one sees it as such, as I certainly would, being any form of peace and quiet: in the words of one of her interviewees, ‘I keep maniacally active because if there’s any down time I sit there feeling guilty I’m not doing anything’ (11). Here personal growth and achievement, the refusal to decline, must remain a lifetime agenda. ‘Research suggests a link between retirement and physical and mental deterioration’, she warns us (177).