September 29, 2023
Okay, I will have my cranky outburst right now, at the beginning, and then return to the wise, benign Olympian detachment that I am of course known for. I am increasingly impatient with the dismissal of Joe Biden as “too old.” What is this based on? Half of it is based on Republican lies, an orchestrated campaign to characterize Biden as "sleepy Joe," a campaign that has no qualms about outright deception. Photos of Biden with a vacant look on his face, taken at a moment when he is not posing for the cameras, maybe listening to someone or just thinking, are circulated as “evidence” that he is clearly half senile, out of it. Moments when he is speaking when Biden pauses a moment to get control of his speech impediment are likewise taken as “evidence” that Biden is suffering from dementia. Never mind the fact that Trump, who is only three years younger than Biden’s 80, is increasingly incoherent and unhinged. Yes, there are photos that clearly show: Biden has aged. But one of the many advantages of old age is perspective. If you have been around long enough, you know that all presidents visibly age. That’s what the presidency does to people. I remember an article showing before and after photos of every president in my lifetime, showing how the intense workload and pressures of the office aged them over four or eight years—including even Ronald Reagan.
But here are the plain facts: Biden has a remarkable record of accomplishment in three years, is so far as we know in excellent health, and is vital enough to have just completed a grueling tour of Asian countries. But most Americans have no idea of what Biden has accomplished, and don’t think he has accomplished much of anything. That is partly because many Americans are appallingly uninformed, unaware of real news and conscious only of the artificially manufactured crises generated by the media and the constant theatrics of Republican loons, partly because a lot of the middle class, living from paycheck to paycheck, cares only about the fact that groceries cost more than they did in 2019.
Okay, end of diatribe: back to Olympian detachment befitting my advanced years, beginning with an admission that, admittedly, this is a bit of a touchy subject for the present author, who is only 8 years younger than Joe Biden. I concede, however, that it is legitimate to raise the issue of the competence of those who are old and have been in office for a long time, and it is true that we have been witnessing alarming displays of debility on both sides of the political fence. Mitch McConnell stops in the middle of a speech and simply stares into space for thirty seconds; Dianne Feinstein cannot remember that she was absent from meetings and even votes. We are reminded of Ronald Reagan’s dementia, so carefully kept out of sight in his second term. Shouldn’t we pass laws to keep superannuated oldsters from remaining in office?
I have dealt with the issue of age in a previous newsletter, but from a different angle. People have always gotten old, and yet old age is a uniquely modern problem because, until the 20th century, old age was the exception, not the rule. What is new is the aging of the entire population, not just in the United States but around the world. The average lifespan did not advance from about 50 until the 20th century, reaching the Biblical “threescore and ten” only by mid-century. So the occasional old person was the one lucky enough to be still standing on the battlefield, the one who miraculously dodged all the bullets. Nestor in the Homeric epics is one such elder. He is 70 in the Iliad, therefore at least 80 in the Odyssey. Homer makes gentle fun of his old man’s garrulousness, but Nestor is still hale and hearty, a survivor, like Odysseus himself, whom we know will reach a ripe old age, in contrast to Achilles, doomed to die young.
Still, Nestors are rare: a whole population of elderly people is unprecedented in world history, creating something of a problem for my usual method of looking back into the history of mythology and literature for hints about how to understand and cope with a contemporary situation. Books are beginning to appear on the subject, such as Blasted by Antiquity: Old Age and the Consolations of Literature, by David Ellis, which sounds interesting but which I regrettably have not yet read, as it only was published in May. Ellis’s bio speaks of him as a professor emeritus, so, like me, he has a personal stake in this argument. The phrase “blasted by antiquity” comes from one of the famous old men in literature, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and, true to the phenomenon of newsletter synchronicity, the Expanding Eyes podcast happens to be working its way through two of the three plays in which Falstaff appears, Henry IV, parts I and II. (The third is a comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor). The underlying question, whether in literature or social life, is: can old age be spoken of affirmatively, or are the “80 is the new 50” articles merely appealing to a rather pathetic denialism? Is old age a qualified blessing or a slowly unfolding curse?
Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s innovations, a fictional comic character in a sequence of plays about real history. He is constantly moaning with self-pity about being old, and is, apparently about 60, which was old at the time: Shakespeare himself died at 52. But, far from being merely comic relief inserted so that the less mature members of the audience will not get restless having to watch too much serious historical action, Falstaff is part of a complex pattern of youth and age that structures the entire tetralogy that begins with Richard II, runs through the two Henry IV plays, and ends in Henry V. The entire tetralogy can be seen as a vision of history as playing out an ironic generational cycle, a cycle of youth and age comparable to that depicted in Blake’s Prophecies, a pattern often called the “Orc cycle” after its description in Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry. In Blake’s mythological system, a youthful, fiery-haired revolutionary figure named Orc rises in rebellion against an old, white-haired reactionary named Urizen, but the revolution fails. Either Orc’s energy flags, and he is offered as a dying-god sacrifice to the powers of time and death, or, worse, he ages into and becomes the new Urizen. The Orc cycle is Blake’s vision of history, or of what history would be without the power of Los, the creative imagination working inwardly to redeem it. It is analogous to the pessimistic cyclical visions of history in Vico and Spengler’s Decline of the West.
Shakespeare’s tetralogy begins with the deposing and death of Richard II, who loses his throne and his life because he is too youthfully immature to govern responsibly, refusing to listen to the advice of his wise old relative, the dying John of Gaunt. Richard lives in a narcissistic bubble, whereas the man who topples him from the throne, Harry Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV, plays by the politics of Machiavellian realism. This cynical philosophy seems to age him, for he is sick and dying by 2 Henry IV, paranoically anxious about whether his son, Prince Hal, will in turn depose him as he deposed Richard. The characters in the tetralogy line up according to whether they are vitally youthful but naïve and ungrounded or old and cynically manipulative. Another of Shakespeare’s great creations, Harry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, is filled with energy and imaginative idealism but is, like Richard, ungrounded. He is the type who, in a hilarious scene, meets to plot revolution and civil war but forgets to bring the map. Hotspur was an actual historical figure, but Shakespeare made him the youthful contemporary and rival of Prince Hal whereas in real life Hotspur was 23 years older. On the other side are the “realists.” Hotspur’s father, the Earl of Northumberland, is such a realist that he calls in sick to the battle of Shrewsbury, knowing it to be a lost cause, thereby betraying and dooming his own son. We see him in the opening of the next play, 2 Henry IV, with a crutch and nightcap, but the choral figure of Rumour who opens the play calls him “crafty-sick,” and, sure enough, when he thinks it is time to act, he makes a big theatrical show of throwing away nightcap and crutch—and yet abandons the rebel cause yet again in the interests of personal safety. Thus the revolution collapses because the youthful idealists have energy but no reality sense and the older generation no longer believes in anything but its own advantage, for which it is content to countenance any amount of betrayal.
Seen within this context, Falstaff at first seems to be a breath of fresh air. Although he is Sir John Falstaff, he wants nothing to do with the power games of the aristocracy, refusing to grant that there is any “honor” in war. He is a social parasite who games the system—but the system is corrupt. In 1Henry IV he is a humorous Trickster figure of enormous vitality even as he constantly bemoans becoming old. But as time goes on we begin to realize that Falstaff has his own version of the cynicism of the elder statesmen. When given the task of conscripting troops, he allows those who can afford it to pay him off and buy their way out of the draft, pocketing the money and recruiting in their stead a hopeless, hapless rabble of losers that he knows will be wiped out in the first battle, but he doesn’t care. They will fill a grave as well as any, he says. In the second Henry play, he ruthlessly allows the brothel owner, Mistress Quickly, to pawn her plate in order to pay his bills because she is infatuated with him. When Prince Hal becomes Henry V and rejects Falstaff, it basically kills him. He disappears from the story, and we learn in Henry V that he has died. Part of us wonders if it is from a broken heart and is sad; another part of us remembers his cold selfishness and is detached. The figure of hopefulness in the tetralogy is Prince Hal, who revitalizes England when he becomes Henry V. Hal attempts to unite in himself the opposites of youthful energy and mature reality-sense. As young, ne’er-do-well madcap prince, he hangs out with the common people and is beloved by them, unlike his aloof father. But as king he restores law and order and rewards the incorruptible judge, Justice Silence. However, as the audience would have known, Henry V would die fairly young, and England would be plunged into a protracted era of genocidal civil war that Shakespeare had already portrayed in an earlier tetralogy.
At the other end of his career, Shakespeare’s four final plays, the romances, attempt to find a way out of the ironic cycle of youth and age, idealism and ruthless power politics. Each of these plays spans an entire generation, in which people make terrible mistakes, both personal and political, suffer for them through time, and learn to change through the agency of some unseen providential agency. By the end, they are on the verge of old age, have lost a great deal, often through their own fault, but have acquired a hard-won wisdom and humanity. They are no longer young, but they are allowed a happy ending all the more moving for not being the wish-fulfilment happy ending of a fairy tale, or, for that matter, of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies. In the last of them, The Tempest, the redemptive agency is embodied in the central character, Prospero the magician. Prospero was Duke of Milan but neglected his duties, which allowed his ruthless brother Antonio to depose him and exile him to a desert island, where he survived by virtue of his magic. Now, a dozen years later, those who deposed him are shipwrecked on that island. Prospero uses his magic, which is largely a power of generating illusions, to put the other characters through a series of transformational ordeals. The bad people are punished and controlled; the guilty but redeemable people are rehabilitated; the innocent young people—his daughter Miranda and Prince Ferdinand—are put through ordeals that allow them to grow up and be ready for marriage.
By the end, Prospero has regenerated his society, but renounces his magic and says he is going home to retire, where every third thought will be of his grave. He too makes mistakes—his treatment of the native figure, Caliban, is unconscionable—but he has done much good. Dealing with human evil, however, has darkened his mind, and students never find him an attractive figure. On one level, Prospero is always understood as having autobiographical resemblances to Shakespeare himself. Like Prospero, Shakespeare had married off his daughters, and there is nothing like empty nest syndrome to make a parent feel old. Like Prospero, he would give up his magic and retire—and die not long thereafter. Prospero’s famous speech about the fading of all things in time is dark and depressing, inappropriate for the wedding party he is supposed to be throwing. We are on the verge of thinking that Shakespeare is a pessimist on the subject of age. In the speech about the Seven Ages of Man in As You Like It, the last age “Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.164-65).
Still, that speech is delivered by Jaques, self-described as a cynic, and there is another character in The Tempest, Jaques’ opposite in every way, who is, if not a greater figure than Prospero, certainly a more sympathetic and admirable one. Where Prospero is merely on the verge of old age, Gonzalo is genuinely old, and the bad characters make ruthless fun of his age and supposed senility. He gives a speech imagining an ideal commonwealth, and the villains treat it as if it were the flakiest kind of “Woodstock nation” nonsense. They, of course, are “realists”: their plan is to murder Prospero and whoever else they need to get out of the way of their plan to rule over the island. Mind you, this is a desert island, with fewer than a dozen people on it, and they are stranded. But they will rule it, because that’s what a man does. They have already demonstrated their manliness in the first scene, the tempest and shipwreck, where they are shrieking in hysterical panic. It is Gonzalo who remains calm and tries to calm others, treating their possibly imminent death with a, well, dry humor. On the island, the villains see the island as a desert; Gonzalo sees a touch of green in it. Gonzalo’s golden-age idealism is impossible, yet he lives by it, and by doing so influences other people in its direction. He is a small scale version of another mad old man, Don Quixote, who dreams the impossible dream.
What is the relationship of Shakespeare’s vision of a generational cycle of history to our own time? It is widely understood that the political crisis in the United States at present is generational. Who are the fascists, the would-be insurrectionists who want to overturn democracy to make their world safe for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and as much lucrative corruption as possible? It is us, the aged Boomers, ready to destroy everything rather than accept change and the evolution of society. Oh, Shakespeare understood this too, and has a play about it: King Lear. Lear is a tyrannical baby with an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump. He is 80 years old and cannot understand why the storm on the heath will not obey his orders. And what are his orders? To attack his enemies, about whom his sentiments are very close to what Trump has been spouting lately; “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” The plot of Roman New Comedy, which was the model for Shakespeare and the playwrights of his generation, was also that of a generational struggle. Young lovers are opposed by a blocking character who is frequently an old man, or senex, an authority figure, usually a father. The senex is thwarted and young love conquers all, yet the emphasis is on reconciliation, and the senex resigns himself to being overruled. But Lear is a tragedy. Cordelia, his good daughter, dies, and Lear himself dies of a broken heart. He has not only ruined his family but come near to destroying his whole society by his temper tantrums. Strikingly, Lear has a Classical parallel, the aged Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus, said to have been written by Sophocles at the age of 90. Oedipus is as bad tempered as Lear, and curses his sons as Lear cursed his daughters, leading to the fratricidal war of the Seven Against Thebes. Oh, the Furies love him, and bury him in their grove when he dies. But what are the Furies? Embodiments of nihilistic violence. Of course they love him.
So with us Boomers. All the younger generations can do is wait for us to die off. We members of the Counterculture were naïve about many things, and we did not recognize that we were actually a minority in our generation. There were yuppies waiting in the wings, and the era of Nixon and Reagan gave them their chance. That is why the TV drama Succession hit people so hard. The elite are largely geriatric; so, on a lower social class level, is the audience of Fox News. Even climate change is a geriatric issue. We are prevented from addressing it by the machinations of Big Oil, which means nasty old men like the Koch brothers. So much of the evil of the world has to be laid at the doorstep of old people. What happens when they all, when we all, finally fade away, hopefully leaving not a wrack behind? I do not, sorry to say, think that the meek will inherit the earth, not yet anyway. Not all evil comes from embittered old losers. Andrew Tate and Russell Brand are not old. Lauren Boebert is 36, going on 16, an eternally youthful juvenile delinquent. Still, these are people who have bought into a social paradigm that is passing away. Literature is littered with the wreckage of old people who are still living in the past, like Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, like the mothers in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.
When voters are frustrated by the prospect of a presidential election in which the contestants are clearly going to be two old men, Trump and Biden, it is understandable. But the fact that there are two issues involved, physical competence and moral integrity, tends to confuse the issue. As for physical competence, the idea that people in their 80’s are necessarily incapable is indeed ageism. It is usually argued anecdotally. No guy in his 80’s could still be competent because look at Uncle Fred: he’s a physical and mental wreck and he’s only 68. Every New York Times article about aging gracefully is accompanied by a discussion board in which some cranky respondents sneer at the idea because they are only 54 and can hardly walk across a room. Certainly, aging gracefully depends a very great deal on luck. One serious chronic illness can certainly shrink life’s horizon’s drastically, and—as people my age are well aware—you can be fine today and wake up with that illness tomorrow. We have not even begun to think this issue through. Declaring that there should be an automatic cut-off point beyond which people are excluded by age from jobs and positions of importance excludes the remarkable number of people who are not only capable at an advanced age, but may offer a wisdom and emotional maturity that younger people lack. You might as well argue that middle aged people should be excluded from positions of power and responsibility because they’re all having midlife crises and acting like lunatics. Some people start to fail as they age; others come into their own, and may even enter a phase of late wisdom and creativity that is ahead of its time and will only be understood by later generations.
That is especially true in the arts. It is sometimes said that mathematicians have done their best work by the time they are 30. I am not qualified to have an opinion on this. Nevertheless, some scientists remain active until late old age, such as Jane Goodall, the great primatologist, who is now 89. The greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky is still active at 94. But whatever is true in math and science, early obsolescence is certainly not true in the arts and humanities. True, there is Mozart; there are Keats and Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas; there is the “27 club” of rock musicians who all died by the age of 27. But there is also Beethoven, whose late work strives to reach beyond not only his earlier work but beyond the musical understanding of his time. There is Goethe, who worked on his masterpiece, Faust, for 60 years, from the time he was a young man until just before his death at 82. Faust is, among other things, about aging, about never ceasing to strive to grow, change, and develop. It is his restlessness that keeps Faust going until the age of 100, when he is saved from his deal with the devil precisely because he kept striving. It is a remarkably ambivalent story, for his restlessness may save Faust, but it proves lethal for those around him—for young Gretchen in Part 1, who suffers the consequences for Faust’s #MeToo conquest of her; for the benevolent old couple Philemon and Baucis in Part 2, who die after being displaced from their home because Faust’s capitalist land reclamation project demands it. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. The problem is when the eggs are other people. Faust and its complex moral dilemmas were an enormous influence on C.G. Jung, who himself kept growing and striving up to his death at 86. Yet on a stone at his estate in Bollingen, he carved the message “Philemon’s Shrine—Faust’s Repentance.” I have always admired the attitude that drove Joseph Campbell, who emerged from the Jungian camp, to embark upon an enormous project, an Atlas of World Mythology, projected to be in four volumes, in his old age—a second magnum opus, since he had already completed a tetralogy, The Masks of God, years before. He only lived to complete the first two volumes before his death at 83—but how wonderful to dare to take something like that on at the age of, well, Joe Biden. Another of my heroes, the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, published his first book in 1932. In 2000, at the age of 93, he published a 700-page work, From Dawn to Decadence, a cultural history of 500 years of Western civilization. He lived through one of those five centuries, dying at the age of 104!
In the visual arts, Picasso and Miró continued to be creative until late old age. In poetry, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens wrote some of their greatest poetry in their late years. In fiction, Alice Munro, who is now 92, published her last collection of short stories at the age of 81; Ursula LeGuin, a late bloomer who did not begin publishing until her early 30’s, published an important novel, Lavinia, at the age of 78, and continued to publish occasional work until her death at the age of 88; the last of May Sarton’s wonderful journals is titled At Eighty-Two. In popular music, Tony Bennett just died at the age of 96. Astonishingly, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016, he continued to record and perform until 2021, when he was 94. He loved to collaborate with younger artists. In 2022, one of his two albums with Lady Gaga won a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. The same vitality shows itself in folk and blues. Doc Watson and B.B. King kept performing until shortly before their deaths, both of them at 89. Pete Seeger kept going until 94. Two of my great folk-blues musical heroes, Jorma Kaukonen and Tom Rush, are going strong at 82. Tom Rush appears weekly on his Patreon site, Rockport Sundays, looking at least ten years younger than he is. He survived Covid before there was a vaccine. In the dramatic arts, the first captain of the Starship Enterprise, William Shatner, went into space for real at the age of 90; the second, Patrick Stewart, still has an active acting career, keeping pace with Gandalf, in other words with Ian McKellan.
Maybe intellect and art are a kind of anti-aging drug. Maybe what ages people prematurely is a lifetime of rat-race capitalism. Certainly, I would recommend trying to read serious fiction, poetry, and nonfiction as a better exercise to stave off dementia than working puzzles, which seems to be all the doctors have to recommend. Maybe those who are able to live a life immersed in intellect, culture, and contact with nature tend to be not only mentally stimulated but at the same time possessed of a serenity and detachment that takes life as it comes. As enrollment of traditional college age students dwindles, it is a shame that the decline is not offset by a revival of Continuing Education, the return of older people to school. There are problems with that that have not been solved, however, especially the problems of lack of mobility and fear of Covid or some other contagious illness.
But what about old people in public life? I find it ironic that people are complaining about elderly incompetence while being surrounded by counter-examples. Queen Elizabeth II was at least somewhat active until just before her recent death at 96, and Jimmy Carter is about to celebrate his 99th birthday. His hospice care was ended some time ago, and the family expected a quick final decline. Instead, he just got done visiting a peanut festival! I have read that he is still interested in news of his projects, such as Habitat for Humanity. Most of all I would point to Pope Francis, because his example points to the other source of ageism, the fact that so many of the world’s problems are being perpetuated by a reactionary older generation. So they are, but there are old people and old people. Francis has enemies in the Church, and they are exactly the aged reactionaries who want to return Catholicism to the Counter-Reformation, to roll back the modernization and liberalizing of the Catholic Church since Vatican II. Any ruling elite, whether religious or secular, can, like individuals, develop rigor mortis if it decides that its present condition is final, and that all future effort will be directed towards arresting further development. The same thing happened in the old Soviet bureaucracy, and is still happening in Iran, ruled by a clergy that is increasingly out of it and therefore increasingly fanatical.
The conflict between the Pope and the reactionaries is intragenerational. Francis is 86, the age that people moan piteously that Biden will be at the end of a second term, but he is fighting for continuing growth and change. Anyone who does that is young no matter how old they are. Francis has secular counterparts, those who are forever young because their attitude is young. The indefatigable Bernie Sanders is one of them. Another is Joe Biden, who has been a kind of octogenarian Prince Hal. Biden pretended to be a cautious centrist. We forget that just a few years ago his age was comforting, as Ronald Reagan’s age was comforting, because people wanted the reassurance of an avuncular figure who represented safe normality. The assumption was that he would be a comfortable placeholder, doing little but providing security so that people’s nerves could settle after four years of Trump. But once in office, he began governing as a bold progressive.
Not everyone can live up to the model of these extraordinary people. But revising our expectations of old people downward to some least common denominator is not “realistic”—rather, the reverse. Nonetheless, it is what our society does, and, in doing so, creates the kind of useless, embittered seniors who have nothing to do but sit around, poison themselves with Fox News (and maybe fentanyl) and vote for a man who will save them from Black people, from immigrants and refugees, from people of different sexual identity, who will take them back to when they were young and the world was understandable, which mostly means it was set up for the benefit of their kind. Clear back in 2002, Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt showed what happens when many people go through the initiation ritual of retirement: Jack Nicholson, an insurance man, retires and realizes that he has wasted his life. He is alienated from his daughter, and finds that his wife, while still alive, had an affair with a friend. This fits exactly the description surveys provide of the typical member of Trump’s MAGA crowd. If we want to break the cycle in which old people ossify into Blake’s frozen Urizen, a burden to their families and a danger to democracy, we are going to have to confront this new social problem, new because people in the past did not so often live to become a burden to themselves and others for 10 or 20 years. Robert Heinlein tried to address the problem in science fictional terms with his character Lazarus Long, who, in Time Enough for Love (1973) finds that his greatest challenge is how to avoid terminal ennui when living for centuries. The Martian settlers in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy live well into their third century thanks to anti-aging drugs. Robinson does not flinch from the topic of sex in old age. The good news is that his characters are still having it at the age of, say, 230.
Lazarus Long first appeared in an early novel called Methuselah’s Children. The name of Methuselah reminds us that all the early patriarchs had lifespans far beyond the later norm. Methuselah, the longest-lived person in the Bible, lasted 969 years; Adam expired at a mere 930. The question is whether such longevity is a blessing or a curse. At any rate, Lazarus Long is, like all Heinlein’s heroes, truly heroic and exceptional, and extraordinary people, gifted people, are able to avoid becoming useless “senior citizens.” However, a primary social task of the future is to provide the opportunity for continued growth and continued social importance to ordinary people.
Of course, that will involve changing the whole structure of our capitalist society, in which “planned obsolescence” refers not just to our phones but to people, who are disposable. Oh, but now I’m sounding like one of those young ones, those naïve, utopian radicals, who will understand when they get older that any interference with capitalist ruthlessness is out of the question. Not really, though. I am not pretending to be young. I just think that the world would be better with a few more Gonzalos.