In my old age, I am rereading the
Letters of Henry Adams, who, at the moment as I read, is my age in
1901, sixty-three. His observations of old age are mordant and unsentimental,
“At sixty one is running one’s last ounces [of reserves]” and “You need not
waste sympathy on us people of sixty. We are not worth it.” (v. 261-2) While he
often claimed to be living posthumously anyway and predicted his own demise
with blithe frequency, he lived another seventeen years and quite fully. Which
is not to discount his sense of loss and world-weariness, which fueled in many
ways the fullness of his later life, but rather, perhaps, to recognize that
much of life at our age
is
loss—parents, siblings, old friends, acquaintances, colleagues, our
generation’s celebrity heroes, and others, even perfect strangers, many of whom
were nicer people than oneself. All the sadder. And, if there are gains, they
are gains gathered in an age of loss, making them all the more precious.
“There is a little mild light about it [old age],” Henry
could admit, “a sort of Indian summer, which has a certain kind of repose and
tone, if not much color.” (v. 261) I see it illuminating my own retirement, the
not working, the travel, the loving, the caring and thinking, the reading and
writing: “it occupies me to write; which is something—at sixtythree.” (v. 202)
