Aging feels like playing the role of a generic Old Guy on the stage. It’s a performance, not a chronological state. I can slough it off any time I wish. Such is the power of delusion. I retire today. On Thursday I went to the police department on campus to get my retiree’s ID card so I can continue using the library. Students held doors open for me. An Indian graduate student saw the Old Guy, loaned him his pen and offered him his place in line. Age and the cane, I suspect, made the clerk who processed him even more solicitous than necessary. All the others in line were students. She took his photo and laminated it to the new ID card. I was surprised to see the Old Guy’s hair had turned gray.
In a 1964 letter to her sister Phyllis Powell Cook,
Dawn Powell writes:
“I am really fascinated by the aging process, even
if the victim is me. Exciting things happen to me but it all seems far away and
as if it were somebody else . . . Somebody told me humans age like trees. I had
said one seems to be about 40 for 8 or 10 yrs. and then almost overnight teeth
and hair and all age and you are 50 for about 10 yrs., then with a big clank
like a rusty chain you’re 60 and so on. Anyway, they tell me trees do this too.
The ring of the age cycle on the trunk shows up the same way — suddenly.”
Of course, to read the rings you have to cut down
the tree. In her novel The Locusts Have No
King (1948), Powell writes: “I used to think old age was a kind of feather
bed you gradually sank down into, but it’s not. It’s a goddam stone wall you
butt your head into till it cracks.”
[The passage from her letter is found in Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913-1965
(ed. Tim Page, Henry Holt, 1999.]
2 comments:
Charles de Gaulle said that old age is a shipwreck. An example:
I just got a shirt colorfully emblazoned with the Hanna Barbera adventure characters I loved when I was a kid - Jonny Quest, Birdman, the Mighty Mightor, the Impossibles, Space Ghost etc. I'm going to wear it Monday to greet my class back from Christmas vacation, and I know that not one of my fourth graders will recognize a single character. (Indeed, I'll probably have to take up valuable time explaining just who the Herculoids were.)
Likely not exactly what de Gaulle had in mind, but he had his island and I have mine.
Yet Murray Cahill is forty years old when The Locusts begin. Few of us now would count old age as beginning in one's early forties, and I don't know how many would have then. Still, he had something of a point--age seems to be more the stone wall than the feather bed.
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