Ageing for Beginners: An Unrepresentative Guide

Transcending or cutting across the ageing process itself is the distinction between people who constantly change and people who remain just the same, which is particularly apparent in people who move to new countries or new parts of the same country, and either do change their accents (sometimes overnight) or do not. I knew a very conservative tutor at Cambridge, U.K. with a very upper class accent who one supposed was born in a manor house with a silver spoon in his mouth. In fact he was born on a working-class council house estate in Bristol with an accent he 'changed on the train' on first arrival in Cambridge. But then he was gay at a time it was illegal to be, so he was used to concealment.

Then there is the giving up of youthful bad habits, such as alcohol and cigarettes, or there is the failure to change and reconstruct oneself, which ages people before their time. This inability to change with the times is the failure to develop a rich and supple inner core on whose integrity mythical maturity blooms, balancing (at least at first) the relentless progress of physical decay. Such people are either feckless weathercocks, changing with the latest puff of wind or tortured geniuses who, as was said of Peter Sellers, are 'more seriously fucked up than a chameleon crossing a kilt.' There is a book by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion whose title has always interested me more than its contents: Learning from Experience - one either does or doesn't or does so in some respects and not in others or thinks one has when one hasn't or doesn't think one has when one has.

Other people's views of you come into this, though the same thing is happening to them, for they all see you differently, and to differing extents, at different times. You get to know someone and then forget them in favour of just living with them as a kind of wallpaper bursting into flames from time to time, a process which is either good or it isn't. I put it to you that, for people growing old like me (70 - those in their eighties call me a spring chicken of course), old age is sometimes thrust upon you by the young (or younger), who need there to be someone between them and the grave. One finds oneself coerced into serving all the purposes that old people are supposed to, like exerting authority or standing in their way or knowing everything - a stance the old (or older) involuntarily find themselves complying with, because that's how you're treated. The old did it too, but they forget, and the young will find it happening to them. (...)

Their ugliness and decay is unpardonable, because, if we're lucky, it will one day be ours.

There is little recognition that in relative terms the frail and elderly are all Olympians, perpetually performing feats of effort, agility and endurance that real athletes only manage fleetingly. The accurate lifting of a spoon of porridge to a gaping mouth. The eventual recall of a face or a phone number or what one was saying. An awe-inspiring ascent to the top of a staircase, without a flag to plant on its pinnacle. An arm will eventually become heavier to lift than a dumbbell. Avoiding a fall will become a perpetual tight rope walk along the flexing cable between supposedly undemolishable twin towers.

It is wrong, though, to think the elderly incapable of the greatest evils, simply because they are physically weak. Beware the little old lady with the bomb in her knitting bag. She's heading for her place in an Agatha Christie novel. It was malice, not senility, that prompted that old timer to plough his Lincoln Continental through the crowd in the shopping mall. Elderly tyrants and dictators want to take the world with them as they go, and push the ladder over with the young still climbing it. Merely consider the age distribution of Brexit voters, in whom stupidity and psychopathy became weird bed fellows. What is it some comedian said? ' I can't believe it took a referendum for Britain's youth to find out that old people hate them.'

Yet the young cannot fathom the wisdom of age. As a late adolescent I distinctly remember looking at middle-aged politicians far younger than I am now in suits on television and thinking 'why on earth does anyone let those ugly old gas bags actually rule us, looking like that?' Why should the ugly be powerful? Now I am older than nearly all politicians except the resurgent gerontocracy of the current United States, I often register a shock of recognition when I find out that some old trout is actually younger than me, - and probably looks it! I suffer equal shock in discovering that a good friend is eighteen years younger than I am.

In some respects there is not much difference between some people over 40, though hugely so in others. My mother thought her default setting was 26 right through to the age of 96, and I believed her. I love helping young people when they let me, but I keenly feel how limited their curiosity about me is. Younger academics sometimes automatically assume their work is hipper than mine, but I can often date their intellectual formations back to the early 80s and see them reinventing the wheel. Yet the elderly have no idea to what extent they patronise the young. How could the young be genuinely curious about the old? (...)

I have discovered that there is a kind of international club of people of a certain age who, whatever the differences in country, background, profession and experience, give each other a break in recognition of the fact that they've been through the wringer and come out at the other end and might as well show each other kindness and a smile. It is like a playground experience when the barriers drop in recognition of another joyful child. It also has to do with the grateful recognition that you are not unique after the incredible pressure of having had to differentiate yourself in the work force has ended. There is no longer any point in having to prove yourself.

Though in another sense that never stops. It even intensifies. Let no one think that the quest for status stops after retirement. Class distinctions, Simone de Beauvoir argued, ‘govern the manner in which old age takes hold of a man;’ ‘any statement that claims to deal with old age as a whole must be challenged, for it tends to hide this chasm.’ How well did you do? What is it that stops you from being useless now? What cars, houses, holidays differentiate you from those trapped on state pensions or with nothing at all? I have been to parties of people largely older than myself where someone is bragging about running a vineyard or an avocado farm or is on the board of this or that or is commissioned for their expertise on this and that. What's so great about running a boutique vineyard? At the same party an old Greek man advertised that his ambition in life, which he was clearly able to fulfil, was to sail his yacht back to the seabord town of his childhood and dock it in front of the hovel he grew up in. 'Look how well I've done', was to be the point of his life. I can imagine that the old people's homes of Florida's super-rich have untold means of discriminating gradations of wealth. There really are right wing cruises where you sing karaoke to the music of the Beach Boys (who were young when they were!) substituting 'Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran' for 'Bar-bar-bar, bar-barbara ann'! I love the idea of such things and want to go on one, just to see, but would be found out, and thrown overboard. (...)

I think perspectives on age change inexorably through life, though in different ways. I also want to write about that strange phenomenon of everything feeling the same for a long time and then experiencing a sudden, unaccountable shift, wherein every thing familiar feels strange. Is it just a feeling or does it represent a lurch towards the end game on the conveyer belt of ageing?

In the buffet car of Eurostar on the way to Paris at the end of April this year there was a white woman in her 60s in fashionable clothes, a smartly dressed young black man and the rest of us. It was these who emerged from the blur into a sharply focused memory. I guess I was eyeing the woman, who though well ‘past her prime,’ must have been very pretty once (I would never wish to use these terms, but read on to find out who she was) and quite stylish - nothing special, mind – but, yes, stylish. I assumed she was French, but she wasn't. Oh no. In an abrasively upper class English voice (I can say this because I’m English) she asked the young black man, also English, where he had got his shoes. They were black and laceless with white rubber surrounds. I found them, later, in a Parisian departmental store and presciently took a photograph of them to illustrate this story, which sadly I can no longer find. Though no Idris Elba, he was tall and thin, with a well-barbered skull and the topiary of a goatee beard contoured to match the lines of his face. He enthusiastically named the London suburb where he bought them and she proceeded to applaud his whole outfit, which I therefore became aware of. He was all in black except for the white rubber around his shoes, but on closer inspection his trousers were a dark green plaid in good wool and his light jacket had tailored pockets, which went with his black t-shirt. She loudly praised them all in front of others, especially the laceless shoes, which made me feel awful, for what about the elastic laces in my dark blue Campers??? Her praise served to insult everyone else in the carriage, and was a vehicle for broadcasting a great deal of status information about herself. Whether we wanted to or not we learned she was a rich and successful fashion curator with a flat in Paris and a son in a successful band, whom her young interlocutor 'probably knew', because it was 'making it' in band world. He didn't know it, but he took out a notebook and made a note of it. He was completely seduced by her initial praise of him as a fashion star and since he was in banking or something, he was, she said, 'to come and see me when you've made a lot of money.' What for? It was beyond her ken that anyone around her could hold different values or conceptions of success. She was a narcissist using this young man to out herself as a star to the whole carriage. Why couldn't he see she was using him? What stopped me walking out with a scornful laugh was that I wanted to hear enough to be able to tell this story. It was a high price to pay. As I left they got set to talk all the way to Paris. He was her accessory during the journey. He stopped her feeling so old.

by Richard Read, Arcade/Stanford Humanities Center |  Read more:

Image: A Way of Flying, Francisco Goya

[ed. Ageism - the last frontier of systemic, persistent discrimination. Why? As this essay notes, probably because most people don't like to think about getting old (including the old themselves). But likely an element of competition for limited resources as well - jobs, housing, healthcare, etc.]