Senescence, the Last Half of LifeHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Senescence, the Last Half of Life
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Geriatrics
Of course I am answering my question in a different sense than that
understood by most of my correspondents. In fact, in a way it was
an idle and perhaps foolish question, because to exactly relive a
present life is so impossible that it is hardly conceivable. But let
us oldsters realize that if we are sated, it is because our appetite
has flagged and not because viands are scantier or less toothsome.
Perhaps we all wish we had been born later so that we should be now
in our prime. Most of us would probably have sacrificed a few of
the earlier, if by so doing we could add a few more to the later,
years of our life. Perhaps the very restlessness of old people, their
retirement from activity, their propensity to a change of scene or
mode of life, or their not infrequent _Wanderlust_, is the result of a
blind instinct to exploit unused and submerged faculties and thus to
complement or vicariate for the loss of certain possibilities always
involved in realizing other careers. Certain it is that even those who
do not make a clean break with their past develop views, interests,
habits, modes of life, personal associations, or perhaps take pleasure
in becoming novices, apprentices, or amateurs, in new fields and find
thus a certain rejuvenation, the strong instinct for which has found
so many unworthy forms of expression that the term “second childhood”
as applied to age is commonly one of reproach and the affectations of
youth by the old are ridiculous. We all tend to live our lives over
again in our children and grandchildren and this impulse is another
expression of the deep instinct for renewal and living other lives
again. How shall we explain, too, the so common inclination of the old
to plant trees they will never see mature or build houses they can
hope to live in only a short time; or to get into and keep in such
sympathetic rapport with the young; to engage in works of charity;
or to grow tolerant of errors, of persons, and of opinions they once
bitterly opposed. What can all these phenomena mean save that the
barriers of egoism are falling down and that we tend to live more and
more not only for but in others by a kind of sympathetic identification
with them. Three of my correspondents had a period of reorienting
themselves to new interests as if to find themselves again, which is
suggestive of the period in youth when one vocation after another is
taken up and abandoned before a fit life purpose has been found.
Whether these tentatives in the old were a recrudescence of a series of
earlier circummutations, like those of a climbing vine seeking a fit
support, our data do not show.
_Did you experience an “Indian summer” of revived energy before the
winter of age began to set in?_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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