'So Much for the Philosophy of Old Age'

On New Year’s Eve many years ago in Albany, N.Y., a friend and I attended a concert by a traditional Irish band in a church basement. It was part of a city-sponsored holiday festival. Most of the music was instrumental, performed on fiddle, tin whistle, flute, uilleann pipes and button accordion, and it inspired most of the dancers in the crowded room. We stayed for hours. As midnight approached, the music stopped and one of the musicians, a woman, stepped forward and recited several poems by William Butler Yeats. I’ve always favored the later Yeats, beginning with Responsibilities (1918), and including his masterpiece “Among School Children.” I remember she recited “When You Are Old”: 

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

“How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

 

“And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

 

I remember being at first disappointed. Yeats wrote the poem in 1891, supposedly after Maud Gonne rejected his marriage proposal. He published it the following year in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics. Since first reading Yeats as a kid, I had judged the poem sentimental. Hearing it aloud helped change my mind. Yeats mingles disappointment, hurt and a subtle anger. He wrote it the year he turned twenty-six and Gonne was twenty-five. I heard it read aloud while in my thirties and being "old and grey and full of sleep" seemed like a distant abstraction. Certain works evolve as we age. Critical judgments are not made of granite. Here is George Santayana writing to a friend on this date, November 15, in 1945:

 

“Senex ad senem de senectute scribo: yet we are much older than Cicero ever was and also much more recent, so that we have a double chance of being wiser, having more experience of life, individual and collective. And the charm I find in old age—for I was never happier than I am Now—comes of having learned to live in the moment, and thereby in eternity; and this means recovering a perpetual youth, since nothing can be fresher than each day as it dawns and changes.”

 

Santayana paraphrases a tag from Cicero’s De Amicitia: “An old man, I write to an old man about old age.” The philosopher is eighty-two. He continues:

 

“When we have no expectations, the actual is a continual free gift, but much more placidly accepted than it could be when we were children; for then the stage was full of trap doors and unimaginable transformations that kept us always alarmed, eager, and on the point of tears; whereas now we have wept our tears out, we know what can pop up of those trap doors, and what kind of shows those transformations can present; and we remember many of them with affection, and watch the new ones that still come with interest and good will, but without false claims for our own future.”

 

Next sentence: “So much for the philosophy of old age.”