'Child, Man and Old Crone'

“Old age does not exist. At least, we do not suffer continuously from being old; like the trees, we have, each year, an attack of old age. We lose our leaves, our good humour, our zest for life; then they come back again.” 

That sounds about right – getting old as an exercise in ever-renewing autumn (until it’s not renewed). As my seventy-third birthday approaches, I don’t feel my age, whatever that may mean, all the time. Pain, yes. The occasional mid-afternoon sag in energy. More thought-life devoted to the past. I suspect some people wait all their lives for the “golden years” so they have an excuse to behave badly and get away with it. My contemporaries constitute the Complaining Generation, whining about something or other, all of it tedious and socially sanctioned by their fellows.

 

The passage at the top is taken from Jules Renard’s journal, dated October 10, 1905, when he was forty-one. I think of Renard having a peasant’s common sense. He’s no dreamer, no utopian. Had he been born a few years later in Russia, Stalin would have had him rubbed out as a kulak. Usually, when Renard complains, it is properly muted by wit. He’s a nineteenth-century French ironist who never tells a joke.  

 

The American novelist and poet Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was one of those indefatigable writing machines whose productivity was probably pathological. She produced some 170 books, mostly mysteries, including sixty-one in the Fleming Stone Detective series. She also edited at least nine poetry anthologies, including A Satire Anthology (1920). Among its themes is old age. “Lines by an Old Fogy” was written by the always-prolific Anonymous:

 

“I’m thankful that the sun and moon

Are both hung up so high,

That no presumptuous hand can stretch

And pull them from the sky.

If they were not, I have no doubt

But some reforming ass

Would recommend to take them down

And light the world with gas.”

 

Call it the conservative impulse (leave things be) or mere crankiness. It’s all in the delivery. “Too Late!” by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow is preceded by the French proverb “Ah! si la jeunesse savait,—si la vieillesse pouvait!” (basically, “If youth only knew, if old age could”). From the second of six stanzas:

 

While we send for the napkins, the soup gets cold;

While the bonnet is trimming, the face grows old;

When we’ve matched our buttons, the pattern is sold,

And everything comes too late—too late!”

 

Renard echoes his theme in the journal entry from October 10, 1907: “Every day I am by turns child, man and old crone.” We are forever multiple and ourselves.

 

[The Renard quotes come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]