Post #142: Getting Old

20 Sep. 2024

“Shame on you, sordid age, maker of ugliness!”

—Samyutta Nikaya 48:41

     Ageing happens at every stage of life; getting old only when you arrive within view of the end, that is, when the breakdown of the body that was once but an expectation for the future starts announcing itself in unavoidable fact. You age even as you grow; you are getting old what you begin to shrink and shrivel up like a rotting apple. It sounds disgusting because it is. Humor and acceptance may soften the horror, but they cannot redeem it.

     “You’re as old as you feel!” enthusiasts like to proclaim. A half-truth at best, bordering on a blatant lie that gets no better with repeated telling. It holds true only in the negative: you cannot be younger than you feel, meaning that if you feel old, then for all intents and purposes you are. But the reverse is merely wishful thinking, however prevalent it may be: you can feel twenty at seventy-five or ninety; it’s not uncommon; but it will not restore you to your youthful vigor anywhere other than in your dreams.

     Why beat around the bush or pretend: I hate getting old. When I was younger, I dreaded it less than my peers, in anticipation, figuring that wisdom and experience would make up for much. I thought it wouldn’t be so bad to turn into a grandfatherly figure, maybe because I was so fond of my own grandparents. Little did I know.

     I am disappointed to discover that the supposed relaxation of advancing age about which one hears so much does not seem to apply to me. The inescapable physical and mental decline is not a detail or something merely imagined, something that a mere adjustment of attitude can correct, but a bitter fact that is depressing to discover for a reason. “Senior moments” are not cute or harmless, in oneself at least; they are mortifying. They are symptoms of decay, plain and simple, and they are hideous. Advancing old age is a wretched state with nothing consoling about it whatsoever.*

     Granted, the decline is usually incremental, giving us a chance to adjust in relatively small steps; if it happened from one day to the next instead, Montaigne observes in his reflections on death (#136), we would surely find it unbearable. Not to put too fine a point on it, then, we get cooked like frogs in the pot of urban legend, one degree at a time. They, in fact, jump out; it is merely a myth, apparently, that they allow themselves to be boiled alive so long as it is done slowly enough. It is we who stay in place and rarely have the nerve to jump out on our own initiative, in our own good time.

     Why? Our moral and religious traditions discountenance it, for the most part, although it hasn’t always been so. The Stoics, for one, were wise to life and taught that in the exit-option lay our last and greatest residual freedom.** Whether in life or in facing death, Epictetus kept reminding his students, you have only two choices: you can accept your lot and walk freely, willingly, even gladly to where you must in any case go, or you can be driven through life and towards death with a stick, like a donkey, only without the benefit of his thick hide.*** (In practical terms, it may be a good idea to keep some money at hand for a final trip to Switzerland, should it become necessary. I’ve said how uncomfortable I am with the place (#88), but going somewhere that makes you wish you could stay longer would defeat the purpose of your visit.)

     Waking up several times a night to trudge to the bathroom is not fun; being unable to go back to sleep afterwards, worse. Having trouble getting it up, much worse still; incontinence, intolerable. (The point of this wretched list is not to catalogue my current afflictions, but to mourn the times when I still felt at a safe distance from them. So far I have been spared the worst, and I am grateful; what I am doing is not complaining, I hope, but staring with horror at the writing that has appeared unmistakably on the wall in recent years.)

     Losing your hair, your looks, your memory, your ability to read up close, your hearing, ultimately your very wits: what are these but deaths by increment? Let enough such bites be taken and the Reaper may not look, by the end, quite so grim anymore; when there is so much less of you, there is also less for him to tear from your clutching hands. Upon sober second thought, the delights of your younger years were never quite what they appear in hindsight; Dukkha was there all along as the concomitant of whatever pleasures you might have licked like honey off the razor’s edge, as a favorite Buddhist image has it. Alas, on the downward slide, there are no more limits at all, until you stop your losses, so to speak, by pulling the plug, the lever, or the trigger. By then what seemed so terrible before may beckon you with an inviting smile, not perhaps at the exit gates themselves, which are likely to be terrible (#140), but from whatever mysterious parts lie beyond.†

     Do I really need to run down the list? Let me not even bother with the exotic possibilities, or the rampant smallpox and syphilis of the past. Cancers, heart attacks, and strokes are quite sufficient to fill the heart with dread, to say nothing of dementia and vegetative states. It puts even the unmitigated horror of car accidents and battle deaths in perspective. Not that the latter are anything to wish for, but smash-ups and bullets can at least be fast—no small consolation in view of what it means to be slowly ravaged by more sadistic kinds of killers. Then again, neither crashes nor bullets can be relied on, alas, to make a clean break of it (any more than falls): soldiers in wars do not only pray for survival; they add a subordinate clause about making it quick if their first wish cannot be granted. They’ve seen and heard the alternatives—the protracted wails of the dying on the Somme, for example, haunting the night and the memory with a sound “like moist fingers screeching across an enormous pane of glass.” The best die young, it has sometimes been said, in view of the field of honor, so-called; how sad if it were indeed so. But having to watch yourself and loved ones waste away with the years promises heartbreak of another kind.

     But wait, you may cry, enough already of all this horror! Where is the good cheer, the joyfully walked Path, the equanimity with life’s trials and tribulations that you have been parading before us in so many of your texts? Is it not a little late, after more than 140 of them, to play the prophet of doom and destruction? Ah, well put, dear critic, only not so fast! Have I, even once, depicted the Path as a bed of roses, rather than path of thorns to be walked with great care? Few depictions of the onrush of ageing and death could match the brutality of what the Buddha is said to have told a king with whom he was friendly, Pasendi of Kosala, a man impressed with his own importance, busy with the affairs of state, and “intoxicated” (by his own admission) with the powers and pleasures of his high office (or so the sutta in question reports, Samyutta Nikaya 3:25).

     “Beware, great king,” the Buddha cautioned the crowned head, “for you should know this: there is a great mountain as high as the clouds coming from the east, crushing all living beings in its way. And there is one coming from the west, and from the north, and from the south: from all directions, ageing and death are rolling in on you, great king, on you and everyone else, and there is no hope of victory in battle or chance of success against them, whether by subterfuge or by force!”

     To be sure, the Teaching is not meant merely to terrify us with bleak prospects; it is supposed to offer us a way out—the only way out, allegedly, though it may have its equivalents (by other descriptions but substantially the same, or so one might think) in other traditions. Fair enough, and heartening, perhaps, if it were not also true that the escape we are offered demands nearly the opposite of what we do by instinct: namely that we give up our clutching and clinging, and relinquish freely what we hold so dear and protect with such unrelenting determination, though it causes us such misery. Not that we are to throw our lives away gratuitously, of course; but we must cease, the Teaching sternly insists, to hold on “for dear life” the way we habitually do, and learn instead to let go lightly (#19), recognizing that there is nobody home, as it were, in the dwelling we mistake for our own. No self, no problem. To understand this properly is, supposedly, to break free of our chains. Some might even say that it is quite simple; but easy it is not. Nor is it this life only that is at stake, the Buddhists say, but an endless repetition of ever the same. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

     Ideally the surrender of our bodily attachments that the Dhamma requires (not for dogmatic reasons but because such is the nature of things) would follow readily upon insight into the three characteristics of all things: Anicca, Dukkha, Anatta—or impermanence, dissatisfaction, and no-self. Where wisdom does not blossom spontaneously and the consequent letting go is not so forthcoming, perhaps there is another way: maybe the surrender can be forced on us, not by deliberate violence exactly, but by cruelly compelling circumstances and natural conditions. If such a forced surrender could prove liberating, then I guess there might, after all, be a silver lining to getting old. If, what seems more likely, the message should keep eluding me and I remain unable to see past the misery to the liberation, I suppose the Buddhists would promise me as many lifetimes as I need to finally learn my lessons properly. My skepticism as to such future lives would be brushed off. I would concede that the prospect of having to do it all again, and again, and again, does not delight me, and at least in this last respect the orthodox Buddhists would presumably commend my right view.

*If the decisive thing for our happiness (or our contentment at least) turns out to be not so much how good life is, but rather how much (or better: how little) we ask of it (a suggestion I find quite plausible, see #115), then the secret to “successful” ageing might be one’s mental agility in a merciless race to the bottom. If one can stay a step ahead in nimbly ratcheting down one’s expectations, apace with life’s deteriorating terms of engagement, then one may still pocket some modest winnings; otherwise not. A disposition towards discovering sour grapes where before all was sweetness probably helps. So does focusing on the small over the momentous. Example: a lady of my acquaintance, very well-situated in life materially, who proclaimed her delight with turning sixty because she now gets to use the Tube for free! Alas, I expect to be a laggard in that game for scraps off the formerly rich tables, as I have been slow in others diversions of a similar nature. Indeed the sobering light thus cast on the matter, though I see no way to evade it, depresses me even more. I see a ray of light, perhaps, in the possibility of a quasi-Socratic turn: “How many things I don’t need (anymore)! How many things I don’t care about (anymore)!” (#29, #98) Until, perhaps, in the end there really is nothing left but a little life in a little shell, a last breath, and out—that does sound like a potentially liberating scenario to me. Having cares is necessary in this world, as I see it (#33); but it’s a heavy burden too. No more need, no more deprivation, no more misery. I’m not fully persuaded, not in my heart; but it’s possible.

**I feel obliged to warn the reader that the Buddhist orthodoxy will not hear of voluntary exits, any more than other religious traditions, except where certain very narrowly circumscribed conditions are met. These required circumstances concern not the degree of suffering to be expected or the likely quality of what life remains, but how far a practitioner has progressed on the Path. For the Buddhists by the books, escaping our miseries by our own hand is said to be self-defeating because a life that is ended deliberately in such a non-accepting manner, based on an aversion to pain and indignity, will have to be resumed somewhere else on even less favorable terms. My own perspective is complex and relevant only insofar as I would not have it misunderstood, please, as a ringing endorsement of suicide. I lean Stoic on the issue, but with the reminder that good Stoics to their duty in this life and are free to depart only when their responsibilities have been fully discharged to the best of their ability.

***A deep soul, Epictetus was, recognized by his contemporaries as the greatest sage of his times, someone for whom the Stoical teaching was not a lofty abstraction, but a confirmed unburdening from the miseries of slavery and being crippled at his master’s hands. His lot improved, very considerably, even before he became a famed teacher of philosophy, when he was attached to a notable household in Rome; but certainly he knew something of the great suffering he invoked, as the price of disregarding wisdom. Stoical talk can sound like mere bluster; it was not in Epictetus’s case. (On the central theme of welcoming events in whichever way they happen (“this is the way to peace”), see Enchiridion 8 (also 31.1 and Discourses IV.1.131). The image of the donkey is from Discourses IV.4.37. For a further discussion of amor fati (not a term Epictetus used, because he taught in Greek, but still true to the Stoical outlook), see my next text.)

†In his reflections on what he considered the nullity and misery of life (see #32 for details), Schopenhauer likened our existence to a debt involuntarily contracted at birth, to whose repayment we are committed all our days. In an extension of this image, perhaps death might end up being to life what bankruptcy is to unmanageable liabilities. In common parlance we speak of bankruptcy as if it were a disaster, and so it appears; but speaking more strictly, that is not quite right. Judiciously designed bankruptcy proceedings are meant not to prolong anyone’s agonies but to offer a way out of an unmanageable situation, to cut the debtor free from a millstone that might otherwise drag him down or bury him forever. The same may be true of death: forbidding as it looks, it may prove the final resolution of an intolerable situation. What, if anything, comes after (if the word is legitimate in this context) remains anyone’s guess, or article of faith.