Old White Guys, One Still Living

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)