THE COUNTRY OF OLD AGE

Carl Jung

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs.”

“We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond capacity at times, but something to be carried high. If it is a long defeat it is also a victory, meaningful for the initiates of time, if not for those who have come less far.”

Florida Scott-Maxwell

The Measure of My Days

“In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery . . . That until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one’s entire being.”

Ellen Glasgow

The Woman Within

AN INTENSE EAGERNESS TO LIVE

“I get up before anyone else in my household, not because sleep has deserted me in my advancing years, but because an intense eagerness to live draws me from my bed.”

Maurice Goudeket

The Delights of Growing Old

“Awareness is the compensation that age gives us in exchange for mere action . . . While everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.”

Bernard Berenson

Sunset and Twilight

“I wish I knew what people mean when they say they find ‘emptiness’ in this wonderful adventure of living, which seems to me to pile up its glories like an horizon-wide sunset as the light declines. I’m afraid I’m an incorrigible life-lover and life-wonderer and adventurer.”

Edith Wharton, Age 74

From The Letters of Edith Wharton

R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, ed.

TO MAKE A CONTRIBUTION

“When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die. I think it is a necessity to be doing something which you feel is helpful in order to grow old gracefully and contentedly.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Letter to Mr. Horne, February 19, 1960

“The mere fact that you keep doing is self-

creating . . . One needs to try to continue doing those things you find interesting, satisfying,

self-fulfilling.”

Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn

“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, and to intellectual or creative work . . . One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of friendship, indignation, compassion.”

Simone De Beauvoir

Coming of Age

THE ART OF LOVING

(with the help of a little chemistry)

“Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in life, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Author’s Note, Old Love

“From Grandparents children learn to understand something about the reality of the world not only before they were born but also before their parents were born . . . Experience of the past gives them means of imaging the future.”

Margaret Mead

Family

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

Ezra Pound

Canto LXXXI

FREE TO CHOOSE ONE’S LIFE

“ . . . one learns to walk alone, and that is one of the opportunities in age, a last chance to learn to be truly independent and free to choose one’s life and interests and friends, enjoying them but not leaning on anyone. A state we dreamed of in adolescence but never quite found.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

From a 1983 speech

“If one is not to please oneself in old age, when is one to please oneself?”

Vita Sackville-West

All Passion Spent

INTO ANOTHER INTENSITY

“We must be still and still moving into

another intensity . . . ”T.S. Eliot

“East Coker,” The Four Quarters

“ . . .it can’t be categorically stated that death ends anything. . . . The old man meets the young people and lives on.”

William Carlos Williams

I Wanted a Poem

“What has happened has happened. The water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.”

Bertolt Brecht

“Everything Changes”

“GOOD NIGHT, WILLIE LEE, I’LL SEE YOU IN THE MORNING”

A poem by Alice Walker

Looking down into my father’s

dead face

for the last time

my mother said without

tears, without smiles

without regrets

but with civility

“Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you

in the morning.”

And it was then I knew that the healing

of all our wounds

is forgiveness

that permits a promise

of our return

at the end.