'We Talked of Old Age'

Boswell and Johnson dined on April 9, 1778, at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Other guests included the Bishop of St. Asaph and Edward Gibbon. Topics of conversation ranged from Oliver Goldsmith (Johnson: “his intention to blurt out whatever was in his mind”) to rural living (“No wise man will go to live in the country”). And then, Boswell reports: 

“We talked of old age. Johnson (now in his seventieth year) said, ‘It is a man’s own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.’ The Bishop asked, if an old man does not lose faster than he gets. JOHNSON. ‘I think not, my Lord, if he exerts himself.’”

 

Someone not identified by Boswell observes that “he thought it was happy for an old man that insensibility comes upon him.' JOHNSON. (with a noble elevation and disdain) ‘No, Sir, I should never be happy by being less rational.’ BISHOP OF ST. ASAPH. ‘Your wish then, Sir, is [original in Solon’s Greek, as reported by Plutarch: ‘I grow in learning as I grow in years”]. JOHNSON. ‘Yes, my Lord.’”

 

Call it wishful thinking but Johnson and Plutarch have something here. Reading, writing, pondering, learning, unto themselves, will not promote longevity though they will make life more interesting -- and worth living. People are forever looking for magic cures, even for mortality. The internet is infected with ads promoting this sad silliness. At the other end of the life span, when my sons were young, there was a vogue for playing Mozart to boost infant intelligence. Thelonious Monk seems to have done no harm.

 

Take R.S. Gwynn’s poem “Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry.” It’s an ingenious composite of lines lifted from twenty-eight poems, rhymed and metrically consistent. Here is the conclusion: 

 

“Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Downward to darkness on extended wings,

Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

 

The first quoted line comes from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” followed by, respectively, Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” Tennyson’s "Break, Break, Break," Shakespeare’s Richard II, and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

 

[Gwynn’s poem is collected in No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000 (Story Line Press, 2001).]