Thoughts on Growing Old

...A railway supervisor who retired five years early because of the "tyranny of the trade unions" put it this way: "Unless you are a bloody idiot, if you've lived for 80 years, you must know something...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Readers and admirers of Aken-field, a memorable evocation of English village life, will agree that Ronald Blythe is the poet of oral history—a form generally closer to journalism than to imaginative writing...

...So far the disability has answered, 'Don't be silly, it's me.'" Although some of these men and women have grown old in the villages where they were born and all their lives employed, these places have been transformed by plumbing, electricity, automobiles, television, and other artifacts of consumer society...

...Inevitably, financial circumstances vary widely, but even those who manage (a key word for the old) on pensions consider themselves fortunate because their present circumstances contrast favorably with memories of a grinding poverty...

...Some of the septuagenarians, octogenerians and nonagenarians Blythe interviews are finishing up their lives in institutions —private, public or, for one group, living out their days by themselves or in the company of equally ancient spouses...

...Old age rarely is a slate to be celebrated...

...As one ancient cogently epitomizes the condition, "When a new disability arrives 1 look about to see if death has come, and 1 call quietly, 'Death, is that you...

...For many of the old, the realization is hard to endure that the young are totally uninterested in their recollections and blithely skeptical of the value of the experience of a long life...

...The principle that the state has the duty to prohibit all its citizens from enjoying certain pleasures in deference to the weaknesses of some is the stuff of Ayatollahism...

...Vet it is equally clear lo almost all of Blythe's people that it is better to be old than dead...

...But for some reason you're not supposed to know what you know, or what the young know—not any more...

...One venerable couple has been married 73 years, after a courtship of eight years as prelude...

...They are terrified of senility and resentful of existence on the margin of the world's concerns...

...And while financial inanition has seriously damaged the British Health Service, the English pensioner is mercifully free of his American counterpart's worries about the diminishing role of Medicare in meeting his medical costs...

...That is why it is bitter to be old...

...magazines...

...No girl, of course, need apply...

...All the same, their joyful vocation is accompanied by a special apprehension: "Terror comes for the old religious when he drifts into areas where he can no longer hear, feel, see or taste Christ, when the ascensions and aspirations originally set in his heart, though still subjected to all the familiar and beautiful disciplines, fail to lift it...

...But you do...

...An American must uneasily conclude that for all the melancholy here displayed, it is far worse to age on our side of the Atlantic...

...Even in Blythe's villages, changed and defaced by modernity, more eyes are solicitously cast on the old—too often in ways the aged resent—than in urban and suburban America, where a general anonymity prevails...

...Are you there...

...Any teacher alert to classroom moods learns how rapidly his students' eyes glaze and ears close when he refers to events of his past...

...What does it feel like to be very old and yet still alive...

...A retired schoolmaster recalls that he escaped a career as a rural laborer only because his determined mother identified and reactivated a local charity that supplied ?0 a year for the education of a promising local boy...

...This book is about the old and their lives among the young in England...

...Still, this is not a sad book...

...For "Severe bodily or mental hospital treatment aside, nothing can remove la Cowley Father) from the community until he dies...

...Chaucer, occasionally quoted by Blythe, might have appreciated the tale of the soldier's widow, aged 85, who "One night . . . woke with a start and was convinced that it was her deathnight...

...Old age homes, public and private, seem more honorably and far more compassionately managed in Britain...

...It was late September and the village was all long shadows under the moon...

...But the old are nothing if not custodians of the past...

...Blythe, a critic of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, moves back and forth between literary perceptions of old age—from the Greeks, through Shakespeare, to W. H. Auden—and the concrete experiences of his cast of characters, an astonishing number of whom are themselves readers and reciters of poetry...

...She leapt from her bed and opened every door and window for Death...

...In both societies, though, the old are casualties of "progress" and its accompanying veneration of novelty...

...At six she closed them and put the kettle on...

...Of course, Blythe cannot refute the wisdom of young a well as old that it is belter to be 20 than 80...

...Blythe's respondents are daily, hourly, aware of declining powers and diminished mobility...

...Many of these men and women cope with their situation far too courageously, ingeniously and even humorously to allow any generalization about the melancholy of age...

...In this company, the luckiest appear to be the Cowley Fathers, a group of aged brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist at Oxford...

...However kindly the young may treat them, they are ineluctably superfluous because time is thought not only to have superseded what they know but to have rendered that knowledge valueless and, worse, boring...

...If it is ignored, so are they...