The flat had been repainted two months before but London dust sticks and the flat must be scrubbed. It was already so precious to me that its surface was almost my skin. A charwoman had been promised, and when next morning the bell of my flat pealed out I opened the door and there stood the most battered little figure I had ever seen. Only two yellow teeth, and hair almost burned away from a lifetime of curling tongs. I felt I could not invite her in, not into my dear, dear flat, but of course I did though feeling apologetic to the flat.
At the end of an hour’s scrubbing she did some act of discrimination, of taste, I have forgotten what, and I exclaimed with pleasure and praised her rightness. She stopped scrubbing, drew herself to the full height of her weary little body and said slowly and graciously, “Our family has always been—different”. I bowed my acknowledgement, she bowed her acceptance of my tribute, and the scrubbing went on.
That was many years ago, but only last year I passed a supermarket and saw coming out a slut of a woman. She was fat, unwashed, unkempt in hair and dress, with a large three-cornered tear in her overall. She looked large-hearted and vital, and as our eyes met something passed between us, we liked each other. She straightened up, placed one hand with fingers spread wide over the tear; then as we passed, we smiled seriously and bowed with equal dignity.
We know who we are even though we lack the precise name for it.
I never understood myself less. The humid summer makes me listless, age empties me, and this nervous exhaustion proves me truly spent. I feel profound lassitude, yet I am not ill. If someone comes and I talk I call up energy that I do not possess, and I may pay for it with an aching head lasting two or three days. I must talk less, I must become laconic. A smile, a nod, how unlikely, yet excessive talk must be based on vanity, an assumption that you are the fountainhead of interest. Age insists that I be dull as a further disability: No one else will mind, perhaps not even notice. Others might prefer me silent. I will try.
I may be gaining strength. I do not know. I do know that to assure someone I am better creates a hole that used to be filled by the energy used up in saying I am better.
Today I must be better for I suffer, and it gives me energy. I have lost some of my lassitude for I am angry, angry at sorrow, at the impossibility of expressing it. Life is so many-sided that nothing can be clearly put. One is left throbbing with it so no wonder one is angry, though not with anyone, just hot with protest. Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its right channel.
I accept the reasonableness of the event that pains me. I see its necessity, but my heart is a storm of loss. I am part of my family as they sail down the channel only a few miles away at this moment. I am happy with them, thrilled with them, I feel the excitement of the children, the pleasure of their father as he shows them the great ship. I feel the wind blowing, I feel everyone astir with the sense of the long voyage ahead. I have all this clear in my head, but at the same time I suffer at their going. I am bereft. And I am angry that nothing can be said, I can’t keen my woe, and I can’t tell my love, and I hate the outrage we do ourselves in that we have no forms to convey feeling. It is a lie to be cheerful, and so I am left with this passion with which I can do nothing.
If I liked the actual physical presence of people more I might not love their essence so much. The precious quality in them that appears and disappears, that ennobles the features, sweetens the eyes for a radiant instant, that makes a sensitive boy ignite with interest, or a man standing silently by the fire strengthen my heart. I am losing contact with their dearness. I can treasure them in my memory, feel the wound of difference, flush with affection, but the ship is taking them out of my life. They will change, I will fade in their minds, and I will no longer see them live their lives. The pain of love, the sheer pain of it.
I wonder why pain brings energy. Six years ago I had the fractured femur, and felt energy come to me, new energy, and knew I was stronger than I had been before the accident; it is again like that. The same happened with the major operation, and now with the pain of parting I am more alive, and I protest that no form of expression accompanies this energy. This love and pain and energy that are so strong while I am so weak, what do I do with them? I could bear them better if I could play an organ and let everything in me roll and rumble out in a great volume of sound. No, that would not help, I need to be the organ and compose out of my own being.
Now, have I found what I want? Is there an idea near at hand that will help? I feel it, but I cannot yet think it. It is the possibility that all intense experience is an increase of energy. It is the intensity of being that turns us into prisms, we split consciousness into qualities and we have to endure the passion of doing this. We cannot express it for we are the process. The problem is not what we do with it but enduring what it does to us.
Daily, hourly we must keep the crystal clear that the colours may assume their order. I pray to fulfil my task, don’t elude me now for my soul’s sake. I must live so that clarity produces the order of diversity. Nothing less than bearing it all will do, for it is the creation of a change of consciousness. Nothing less, and no words are needed. It is the mystery that is done to us; as though love and pain and emergence are all intensified energy by which one is fired, ordered and perhaps annealed. The purpose of life may be to clarify our essence, and everything else is the rich, dull, hard, absorbing chaos that allows the central transmutation. It is unstatable, divine and enough.
I feel people moving like patterns I cannot decipher, and I ask all those who like me seem to do nothing:” Does the passion in our hearts somehow serve?”.
Again a day that is so empty that I cry inside, a heavy weeping that will not stop. I cannot read, the papers depress me, reviews are written from points of view so outside my experience that I wonder if I ever understood anything. The grey sky seems very grey, but I finally soothe myself by small duties, putting away freshly ironed linen, watering plants. Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and if it does not create it maintains decency. I make my possessions appear at their best as they are my only companions. Some days it is the only improvement I can bring about. I remember a beautiful girl of seventeen with destructive parents; unable to improve her position in any way she burst out with the surprising phrase, “I could neaten the stars”. With less need I neaten my flat.
Old people can seldom say “we”; not those who live alone, and even those who live with their families are alone in their experience of age, so the habit of thinking in terms of “we” goes, and they become “I”. It takes increasing courage to be “I” as one’s frailty increases. There is so little strength left that one wants shelter, one seeks the small and natural, but where to find it?
A garden, a cat, a wood fire, the country, to walk in woods and fields, even to look at them, but these would take strength I have not got, or a man whom also I have not got. So, here in a flat, I must make the round of the day pleasant, getting up, going to bed, meals, letters with my breakfast tray: can I make it total to a quiet heart? I have to be a miracle of quiet to make the flame in my heart burn low, and on some good days I am a miracle of quiet. But I cannot conceive how age and tranquillity came to be synonymous.
For days I have been unwilling to record my distress caused by the degree of organization we must expect in the future. I am on my third book which tells of a society so planned that the individual as we conceive him would disappear. Such a world is imperative it seems, already far advanced, and nothing can stop it. Industry finds it necessary, the increase in population makes it obligatory, and communism and capitalism are meaningless terms for societies becoming more and more alike.
The basic concept of oneness has undergone a great change. It no longer lends us greatness. It now reduces us for it is the practical problem of providing for the many. But this may change the very core of our being. Is it that the concept of oneness used to be carried by our image of God, and now the sense of an all-creating, all-cont
aining power has gone? If we are bereft of all sense of a spiritual force arousing our awe, granting us value, instilling us with fear of ourselves and our fate, do we now seek some other greatness in which to lose ourselves? Do we will to be contained, and protected from life’s polarity?
Has the conception of oneness been projected onto the outside world? If it is no longer centred in God giving us each a source where we are greater than ourselves, are we empty, almost meaningless? Where we used to pray to be servants of one God, we now ask to be organized into a whole, and we have already begun to worship, and to fear, that whole. Then is it we who force the able minds to answer our needs? Can one surmise what will follow? We know that the unconscious compensates the conscious, so if we create a world of contained units, conforming, agreeing, adapting that all parts may fit the whole, what will then arise in the unconscious of each? If automatically we conform, violence could arise as counterpole.
Tranquil? The old tranquil? I am leaden with foreboding. Not for myself. For human-kind, which isn’t in my care.
These books have lamed me. Can one not trust to the richly gifted men and women to keep life varied and creative? It would seem so, yet within one or two generations standards may have undergone a complete change, and conforming would have become morality. Or a static society could arouse the individual to passionate protest, and criticism, and a very flowering of needed individuality might take place. Yet if we are entering an age of numbers, to differ could become a social sin, endangering the good of all, and such a system might last for ages. Could the very irrationality of life not be trusted to defeat this chimera of the intellect? That it fascinates good and less good minds is certain, that it has wounded me for weeks shows that I am too old to expose myself to speculation. I feel aged by it all, aged.
There is self-pity and rancour in the old, in me. It is partly the demand of the child for safety supplied by someone else. I am failing, modernity is frightening, the old can barely keep a steady stance, so may our cries be forgiven us.
Yesterday I finished my fourth book on the inevitability of a planned world. No mention was made of the high calibre of the people who would be required to create world order, and nothing less was expected. Nor was the temptation to tyranny dealt with. Today I recalled the difficulty always experienced in making people do what it is thought they ought to do, even with the most severe methods tried, and my hopes rose a little.
I thought of great plans failing everywhere, of mighty America ineffectually trying to impose her will, of the plight of England, and I now felt more able to face the frightening fertility of man’s mind. His abstract ideas, extreme, inhuman, and from which we are only saved by the incalculable turns of life itself. What a boon disparity is—difference of opinion has never been sufficiently appreciated. It is the unexpected, the unknowable, the divine irrationality of life that saves us.
But I also remember a fellow passenger who had made twenty-five trips between Australia and Europe. After four weeks at sea she asked me if I was enjoying the trip. I said that I did not really like shipboard life, but the sea was a mighty experience. She nodded in agreement, saying, “I’ve spent weeks on it, and I’ve seen it again and again from the air. It’s a great sight. You know all the ideas men have, how they’re always talking about something like the world being round, and so on. Well, I give it to them. From the air the earth looks round. They may know what they’re talking about more often than we think”.
We old people are not in modern life. Our impressions of it are at second or third hand. It is something we cannot know. We do know its effect on us, and the impact is so great that it can alienate us from our past, making it seem unlikely and irrelevant. We live in a limbo of our own. Our world narrows, its steady narrowing is a constant pain. Friends die, others move away, some become too frail to receive us, and I become too frail to travel to them. Talk exhausts us, the expense of the telephone reduces us to a breathless rush of words, so that letters are our chief channel of friendship. Letters can be scarce so we tend to live in a world of our own making, citizens of Age, but otherwise stateless.
The old are unsure of a future, their past has grown stale so they are dependent on the sentience of the moment. It behoves us to be sentient.
Or—the old live by recalling the past, and are fascinated by the query of what future is possible: Their present is empty.
Or—there is nothing of interest to be said about the old, except that they are absorbed by age.
Each could be true. One takes one’s choice.
I don’t like to write this down, yet it is much in the minds of the old. We wonder how much older we have to become, and what degree of decay we may have to endure. We keep whispering to ourselves, “Is this age yet? How far must I go?”. For age can be dreaded more than death. “How many years of vacuity? To what degree of deterioration must I advance?” Some want death now, as release from old age, some say they will accept death willingly, but in a few years. I feel the solemnity of death, and the possibility of some form of continuity. Death feels a friend because it will release us from the deterioration of which we cannot see the end. It is waiting for death that wears us down, and the distaste for what we may become.
These thoughts are with us always, and in our hearts we know ignominy as well as dignity. We are people to whom something important is about to happen. But before then, these endless years before the end, can we summon enough merit to warrant a place for ourselves? We go into the future not knowing the answer to our question.
But we also find that as we age we are more alive than seems likely, convenient, or even bearable. Too often our problem is the fervour of life within us. My dear fellow octogenarians, how are we to carry so much life, and what are we to do with it?
Let no one say it is “unlived life” with any of the simpler psychological certitudes. No one lives all the life of which he was capable. The unlived life in each of us must be the future of humanity. When truly old, too frail to use the vigour that pulses in us, and weary, sometimes even scornful of what can seem the pointless activity of mankind, we may sink down to some deeper level and find a new supply of life that amazes us.
All is uncharted and uncertain, we seem to lead the way into the unknown. It can feel as though all our lives we have been caught in absurdly small personalities and circumstances and beliefs. Our accustomed shell cracks here, cracks there, and that tiresomely rigid person we supposed to be ourselves stretches, expands, and with all inhibitions gone we realize that age is not failure, nor disgrace; though mortifying we did not invent it. Age forces us to deal with idleness, emptiness, not being needed, not able to do, helplessness just ahead perhaps. All this is true, but one has had one’s life, one could be full to the brim. Yet it is the end of our procession through time, and our steps are uncertain.
Here we come to a new place of which I knew nothing. We come to where age is boring, one’s interest in it by-passed; further on, go further on, one finds that one has arrived at a larger place still, the place of release. There one says, “Age can seem a debacle, a rout of all one most needs, but that is not the whole truth. What of the part of us, the nameless, boundless part who experienced the rout, the witness who saw so much go, who remains undaunted and knows with clear conviction that there is more to us than age? Part of that which is outside age has been created by age, so there is gain as well as loss. If we have suffered defeat we are somewhere, somehow beyond the battle”.
Now that I am sure this freedom is the right garnering of age I am so busy being old that I dread interruptions. This sense of vigour and spaciousness may cease, and I must enjoy it while it is here. It makes me feel, “I serve life, certain that it is the human soul that discerns the spirit, and that we are creators”. But victims too. Life happens to us. Plan and try as we will, think, believe, it is still that inscrutable mood of the time that casts the die. We suffer as we change, that life may change in us. We also destroy, and the pain that for me is inherent in life is that we do
not know when we create and when we destroy. That is our incurable blindness, but perhaps we are less dangerous if we know we do not see.
A long life makes me feel nearer truth, yet it won’t go into words, so how can I convey it? I can’t, and I want to. I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say—“Of what?” I can only answer, “We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery”. I want to say—“If at the end of your life you have only yourself, it is much. Look, you will find”.
I would like to be as outspoken as old people feel, but honesty gives pain. Few enjoy honesty for it arouses feeling, and to avoid the pain of feeling many prefer to live behind steel doors. It is not being able to say conflicting things with one breath that is the sad division between human beings. As some dislike the paradoxical we forego the fun of admitting what we know, and so miss the entertainment of being mutually implicated in truth.
One cannot be honest even at the end of one’s life, for no one is wholly alone. We are bound to those we love, or to those who love us, and to those who need us to be brave, or content, or even happy enough to allow them not to worry about us. So we must refrain from giving pain, as our last gift to our fellows. For love of humanity consume as much of your travail as you can. Not all, never that terrible muteness that drains away human warmth. But when we are almost free of life we must retain guile that those still caught in life may not suffer more. The old must often try to be silent, if it is within their power, since silence may be like space, the intensely alive something that contains all. The clear echo of what we refrained from saying, everything, from the first pause of understanding, to the quiet of comprehension.
Measure of My Days Page 7
