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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 4, 2003
Turning fifty
"The most significant fraction of a century you will ever live to see was among the happier thoughts that greeted me Tuesday morning. I turned fifty that day: something that can happen to anyone. It's like getting a PhD, it requires patience. This is the first day of what remains of your life was the message on another jolly birthday card. May you live another fifty years ... or if not may you live at least another ten said a thoughtful friend in e-mail. God you're old a much younger acquaintance observed, in what I took for an attempt at dryness. Later, I was presented with a cake, inscribed, Go to L Warren" -- a play let us suppose on the Roman numeral for fifty. I have been sharing this birthday with the long-lived Emperor Hirohito of Japan who achieved his century two years ago; though only after being dead 12 years. I missed sharing it with Saddam Hussein by about 90 minutes; instead getting William Randolph Hearst Duke Ellington and Michelle Pfeiffer for my "date". On the upside: a couple of bottles of fine single malt scotch which could not have been obtained from any lesser anniversary. It was my luck to be born into a generation that made a cult of youth which was more obsessed with being and remaining young than any that could be remembered. It was the generation that grew up in the 'sixties of the last century the so-called baby boomers. Well for all we know other generations may also have celebrated the fact of their youth but it didn't come to our attention. "Crabbed age and youth cannot live together." Much is lost on the young. Still the claim is plausible. Preceding generations worked for a living or else went to war or alternatively got early and often pregnant. We were the first to "discover ourselves" as an alternative to such alternatives. It had something to do with our parents being by any historical standard filthy stinking rich. Hence the alternative culture and the alternative that is now needed to that alternative. We were a numerous generation many of us inclined to abort or otherwise obviate the generations after. Which means that we remain a numerous generation -- now passing into and through the male and female versions of menopause. (Yes kids it's now too late.) We chose our own lifestyles. And now if we choose to ignore the signs of the times and resist hints to move on a merciful nature will begin to move us. I found myself reading for the first time in years T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It was something first discovered in adolescence; I had forgotten to come back to it for a while. I was struck once again by the part in Little Gidding in which the dead master discloses "the gifts reserved for age". There were three gifts specifically: ... "First the cold friction of expiring sense without enchantment."... "Second the conscious impotence of rage at human folly." ... "And last the rending pain of re-enactment of all that you have done and been." Now that was the end of a good life in the normal scheme of things according to the same poet who was able to exclaim in a tone almost of triumph The whole earth is our hospital. It could be worse than that in other words. We might not have earned "the gifts reserved for age". We might go to our graves as mere medical cases. What have I learned over fifty years? I'm glad you asked I've been thinking about this question. I've been thinking about the dream of perpetual youth and the truth that this dream might still contain. It seems to me now that with the progress of years one does in some sense actually grow younger. At least it seems to me when I recall the faces and the lives of the most impressive old people I have known that there was something very young about them: something boyish or girlish in the nature of each one. It is true the years mount up on some people; but from others they seem to be falling away. "Old men ought to be explorers the poet said. To be reasonable, old men can only be explorers, pioneers, for we go into a wilderness with fewer and fewer guides. We began, long ago, surrounded by advice, including the lessons of all our elders. We generally didn't take it, one generally seldom does. But it was there, in its mass, providing a kind of regulation; together with the example of our peers, that school of fish, finding its common way forward. One by one the other fish peel away, the school becomes smaller, till finally everyone dies alone. To continue this strange analogy: by a certain age the surviving fish begin to talk to one another, must find something to say. The way becomes uncharted, or rather we discover there was never any chart. We become more inclined to ask than to answer. There is a kind of youthful candour which, I think, is only possible after one's youth is spent. By the age of fifty everyone has the face he deserves George Orwell was reported to have said, on his deathbed more than half a century ago (it's his centenary this year). By an age like that, everyone knows what he knows, more confidently than ever, and begins to appreciate how little use his knowledge will be. That is what makes it exciting: a new territory to explore, and with the eyes clearing of illusions that belonged only to a certain age. It is a prospect of freedom. And the gifts of which Eliot wrote will themselves be offered, and later pass away. They, too, belong only to a phase, and we begin to see through phases. Edmund Waller, an English poet of the 17th century, expressed this consummately: The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made: Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home. Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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