'People Thought You a Laconic Old Fool'

One of the better reasons we read is to understand what the future holds by consulting the past. The arrogance of presentism tells us we’re smarter and more enlightened than our predecessors, though to think we know more than Montaigne or Italo Svevo is to be sinfully stupid. Of late and for obvious reasons I’ve taken an interest in a subject that had never much concerned me – getting old, incipient decrepitude, the “golden years,” disease, deafness, dementia, more meds, cataracts, a pension, senility, unbridled nostalgia, crankiness, frayed memory, “ageism” and this damned cane. That sentence is an hommage to one of those eminent forebears, Robert Burton, who writes in The Anatomy of Melancholy: 

“How many decrepit, hoary, harsh, writhen, bursten-bellied, crooked, toothless, bald, blear-eyed, impotent, rotten, old men shall you see flickering still in every place? One gets him a young wife, another a courtesan, and when he can scarce lift his leg over a sill, and hath one foot already in Charon’s boat, when he hath the trembling in his joints, the gout in his feet, a perpetual rheum in his head, ‘a continuate cough,’ his sight fails him, thick of hearing, his breath stinks, all his moisture is dried up and gone, may not spit from him, a very child again, that cannot dress himself, or cut his own meat, yet he will be dreaming of, and honing after wenches, what can be more unseemly?”

 

Not much, I’d say. I’ve been collecting useful, well-written observations in poetry and prose about old age, avoiding some of the obvious sources like Yeats and Beckett. Jokes are good, so is science, though I’m staying away from anything that reeks of “gerontology” (no charts, no statistics, please). And no “inspiration,” damn it. Just this week I found a good thought by V.S. Pritchett on Max Beerbohm -- “The major pleasure of old age lies in the ruthless one of remembering” – which seems appropriate because Oscar Wilde famously said of Beerbohm: “The gods bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age.”

 

So, I’m keeping a notebook on the subject, no plan appended, knowing what I want to transcribe only when I see it. Humor is a plus. Typically for the late, admirably bookish D.J. Enright, he contributes a good quote within his good quote:

 

“There is so much explaining to do. For a forthcoming Oxford Book of Friendship I picked up a revealing and touching passage from Julian Barnes’s Staring at the Sun, where a character reflects that when they have lost their friends and contemporaries the very old need interpreters: ‘Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn’t give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.’”

 

[Apropos of nothing, Robert Burton was born on this date, February 8, in 1577.]