'When I Feel Spiritually Bruised'

At our age it’s easy to ignore the braggadocio of youth. Back then we were still preparing ourselves for life, trying out philosophies and codes of behavior, testing our worth and what we can get away with. We were like actors playing roles. We needed to feel in charge because we suspected, rightly, that we were not. In Act V, Scene 1 of The Tempest, Ferdinand and Miranda are playing chess. She says: 

“O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in it!”

 

Prospero, her father, with infinite gentleness replies to Miranda’s naiveté: “‘Tis new to thee.’” Those four monosyllables never fail to move me. No need to correct and set straight the young. Life will do that for them, we hope. Here’s what the actor Alec Guinness says in one of his published journals, A Positively Final Appearance (1999):

 

“For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised – listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays. This morning, in spite of the promise of a bright cloudless day, I woke curmudgeonly and disapproving of the world and most of its inhabitants. Montaigne pulled me up sharply: ‘What we call wisdom is the moroseness of our humours and our distaste of things as they are now. . . . Age sets more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces.’ I don’t care about the facial blemishes but the wriggly, acid convolutions of the brain must be smoothed away somehow. Two or three days in a Benedictine monastery might do the trick.”

 

We don’t expect actors even to be literate let alone reliant on Montaigne. Guinness takes the Montaigne passage from his essay “Of Repentance” (1585-88), composed roughly a quarter-century before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. Here is the context in Donald Frame’s translation:

 

“[I]t seems to me that in old age our souls are subject to more troublesome ailments and imperfections than in our youth. I used to say so when I was young; then they taunted me with my beardless chin. I still say so now that my gray hair gives me authority to speak. We call ‘wisdom’ the difficulty of our humors, our distaste for present things. But in truth we do not so much abandon our vices as change them, and, in my opinion, for the worse. Besides a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humors, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches when we have lost the use of them, I find there more envy, injustice, and malice. Old age puts more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces; and we never, or rarely, see a soul that in growing old does not come to smell sour and musty. Man grows and dwindles in his entirety.”

 

We come to rely on our age – any age, youth or the “golden years” – to rationalize our defect of character du jour, usually some variation on self-centeredness. Montaigne is patient with us and himself. He understands that old age is, in his words, “a powerful malady, and it creeps up on us naturally and imperceptibly.” Guinness, who played Henry Holland in The Lavender Hill Mob, Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers and everyone in Kind Hearts and Coronets, died in 2000 at age eighty-six.