Getting old

I saw Leonard Cohen in concert last night. It was everything I'd hoped for. He was by turns humble, powerful and devastatingly good. He performed an incredible array of songs, including easily the best renditions of "Everybody Knows" and "Who By Fire" that I've ever heard. Songs he had sang in his tenor days were adjusted perfectly to a harsher, older bass. After over three hours of nearly straight performance, he bounded off the stage. Leonard Cohen is seventy five years old. 

"Here," I thought, as I yelled and applauded along with the entire auditorium. "Here is a command lesson in aging well."

By all rights, Cohen should not be doing this. Seventy five years is a perfectly reasonable time to retire, according to the conventional wisdom (though, to be fair, Cohen tried). Age, at least with the way most industrialized societies figure it, takes place accordingly a set schedule. You have a rebellious, marketable adolescence followed by a productive adulthood, a retirement and then, as you age, a push to a nursing home or assisted living facility. This idea of old age is intimately tied to notions of productive efficiency: after your prime years, you are shunted off to the side. The End.

Or is it?

A few months ago I was re-reading William Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down, a study of violence throughout the ages. Within, he related the story that the Aztec Empire, after victory over a particularly troublesome rival city-state, insisted that all the 75-year-old males be put to death. To our modern eyes, that may be a strange edict. To both the Aztecs and their rivals, however, it seemed perfectly rational, as Vollmann explains. Those men were revered elders, valued for their cunning, as well as their sheer tenacity (surviving that long was a considerable feat back then).

Of course, our habit of excluding the elderly from the larger culture is just that, ours, and a fairly recent development at that. Besides the Aztecs, there are plenty of other counterexamples, not least that of traditional Confuciansim, in which the elders (males especially) should expect deference from (and show wise guidance to) their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

These days, however, many societies see the prime cultural and political roles belonging to the middle-aged. The way we simply forget about the older members of our society, consigning them to nursing homes, is often (rightly) chided as horrific. We should not, it is declared, cruelly ignore this source of wisdom. Japan, taking a slightly different route, is building exoskeletons for its burgeoning elderly population.

I expect this impression to break in the coming years. The Baby Boomers are finally becoming the old and they will likely react to this development with the same defiant entitlement that's defined the rest of their journey, for better and ill. It's already begun, in fact; look at voting patterns in the last election and the largest split that emerges is that of young vs. old. Perhaps the children of the '60s will be too numerous, even in their dotage, to discount. Given how far our attitudes have shifted into ignoring the elderly, this may be a good thing. 

While cramming the old into nursing homes as soon as they become inconvenient is nasty, we shouldn't romanticize the way some societies have revered their elders. It can have its downside, allowing attitudes shaped long in the past a huge amount of sway, even after circumstances change. Be they Aztecs, tribal nomads or classical China, the societies that put their oldest in the high positions often had a deep suspicion of change, even when mightily needed.

This is natural, of course, but damn if it isn't painful. Growing up, I knew any number of older people who had been courageously ahead of their time on issues of economics and race. Many had even risked their lives, demonstrating great courage for causes highly unpopular at the time. On top of it all, they had fought the largest conflict in human history, and won.

But any woman wearing a two-piece bathing suit was a slut. Gay rights? An extremely alien and suspect concept. The aforementioned elders weren't bad people; in some cases they, on the whole, did many good things. But they were shaped enormously by stances chosen early in the game, long before most of us were born. 

There was a gulf that could simply not see, for example, that the modern struggle to see gay as equal to straight was analogous to their hard fight to have black and white stand together. Tell them that, and their reason shut off behind a blank gaze. Time is a hard damn thing to beat.

In all our plans of the future, we see only the young, the beautiful and brilliant. Even our apocalypses are sexy. Futurists do not talk about the old, because age is the point where yesterday weighs just a bit heavier than tomorrow, and god, if we don't love the fuck out of tomorrow in all the wrong ways.

But one day the crags will settle into our faces for good. One day we will be white-haired. One day we will grumble that the young lack the drive we showed, back in our prime. One day there will be studies declaring in bold letters that we simply don't get it: our radicalism is now normal, and their new ideas are, to us, folly. We may go gracefully, with a few parting words of advice. We may go kicking and screaming, wondering how everything changed so fast. But one day we'll be behind the times.

If we're lucky.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=59702003]

Dave

I have been following your blog for some time now, and I am duly impressed. I like your unapologetic style, and your willingness to take on difficult topics.

With regard to "Getting Old" I'm glad to see that we young people seem to be catching on to the idea that older people could have some value beyond keeping the nursing homes in business. My unprofessional analysis of the way our culture treats old folks is that it comes down to our fear of death. In a culture that subscribes to the idea that stuff = happiness, can there be anything worse than the idea that you can't take it with you?

Here's to the pendulum swinging a little the other way.

Stephen