De Senectute
CATO MAJOR, a man of fifty. SCIPIO LÆLIUS } Students at Harvard College.
Cato: Welcome, Scipio; your father and I were friends before you were born. And a hearty welcome to you, too, Lælius; all your family I esteem my kinsmen. Is this the holiday season, or how comes it that you have at this time shuffled off the coil of academic life?
Scipio: We have a few free days now according to the liberal usage of our college, and we have come, relying upon your kinship with Lælius, and your friendship for my father, to ask you some questions.
Cato: I had thought that seniors of Harvard College were more disposed to answer questions than to ask them; but I am truly glad that you have come, and as best I can, I will endeavor to satisfy your curiosity.
Lœlius: We have been disputing, sir, in the interim between academic studies, as to the value of life; whether, taking it all in all, life should be regarded as a good thing or not. We are agreed that, so far as Youth is concerned, life is well worth the living, but we are doubtful whether, if Old Age be put into the same balance with Youth, the whole will outweigh the good of never having lived.
Scipio: You see that we have really come to ask you about Old Age, for as to Youth, that we know of ourselves.
Cato: About Old Age! Naturally that has been the subject of my meditations, and I will gladly impart my conclusions, such as they are.
Scipio: Thank you very much. I regret to say that we are obliged to take the next train back to town, so our time is all too short.
Cato: We have half an hour. I will waste no time in prologue. And I shall begin by asking Scipio’s pardon, for I shall flatly contradict his assumption that the young have a knowledge of Youth.
Scipio: Of course we beg you to let neither our youth nor our opinions hamper the free expression of your views.
Lœlius: We are all attention, sir.
I
Cato: In the first place, my young friends, Age has one great pleasure which Youth (in spite of its own rash assumption of knowledge) does not have, and that is a true appreciation and enjoyment of Youth.
You who are young know nothing of Youth. You merely live it. You run, you jump, you wrestle, you row, you play football, you use your muscles, without any consciousness of the wonderful machinery set in motion. You do not perceive the beauty of Youth, the light in its eye, the coming and going of color in its cheek, the ease and grace of its movements. Nor do you appreciate the emotions of Youth. You are contented or discontented, merry or sad, hopeful or downcast; but whatever that feeling is, you are wholly absorbed in it, you are not able to consider it objectively, nor to realize how marvelous and interesting are the flood and ebb of youthful passion.
In fact, the young despise Youth; they are impatient to hurry on and join the ranks of that more respectable and respected body, their immediate seniors. The toddling urchin wishes that he were old enough to be the interesting schoolboy across the way, who starts unwillingly to school; the school-boy, as he whistles on his tedious path, wishes that he were a freshman, so splendid in his knowledge, his independence, his possessions, so familiar with strange oaths, so gloriously fragrant of tobacco. The freshman would be a sophomore. You seniors wish to be out in the great world, elbowing your way among your fellow men, busy with what seem to you the realities of life. Youth feels that it is always standing outside the door of a most delectable future.
Appreciation of Youth is part of the domain of art. There is no virtuoso like the old man who has learned to see the manifold beauties of Youth, the charm of motion, the grace of carriage, the glory of innocence, the fascination of passion. The world of art created by the hand of man has nothing that can challenge comparison with the masterpieces of Youth. No man, in his own boyhood, ever had as much pleasure from running across the lawn, as he gets from seeing his sons run on lliat very spot; no laughter of his own was ever half so sweet to his ears as (he laughter of his little girl. No man in his youth ever understood the significance of the saying, ’Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ You may smile condescendingly, young men, but in truth the appreciation of Youth is a privilege and possession of Old Age.
Lælius: I did but smile in sympathy.
Scipio: If I understand you aright, Cato, Youth is a drama, in which the actors are all absorbed in their parts, while Age is the audience.
Cato: You conceive my meaning. The play is worthy for the gods to watch, — it out-Shakespeares Shakespeare.
II
Cato: The second great acquisition that cgmes to Old Age is the mellowing and ripening of life.
As I look back across the years I can see that I and my friends were all what are called individualists. We were all absorbed in self, just as you young men are. We went through our romantic period in which self, with a feather in its cap and a red waistcoat, strutted over the stage. It monopolized the theatre; everybody else — parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, schoolmates — were supernumeraries, whose business was to look on while the hero recited his lines. With attention concentrated all on self, the youl h is shy of all other yout hs, of everybody whose insolent egotism may wish to push its way upon his stage and interrupt his monologue. The I of Youth insists upon its exclusive right to emotion, upon its right to knowledge of the world at first-hand, upon its right to repeat the follies of its father, of its father’s father, of all its ancestors. Youth, bewildered by the excitement of self-consciousness, can hardly see beyond the boundaries of self.
Youth is raw and suspicious. It looks askance at its neighbors, is indifferent to their lot, and delights in solitude, because solitude is favorable to egotism. The young are ashamed of their humanity. Boys regard the mass of boys as if they were of a different species; they fight shy of any general society among themselves; they form cliques. The smallest clique is the most honorable. And sacredly enshrined in the very centre of the inner ring stands the Palladium of self. You, Scipio, do not associate with Gains or Balbus, though they are the best scholars in your class; nor do you, Lælius, frequent any but the Claudii. From the vantage-ground, as you think, of exclusiveness, you look down upon your fellows herded in larger groups. You turn up your aristocratic noses at the vulgarity of joy in commonalty spread. Your judgments are narrow, your prejudices broad; you are distrustful and conservative; you arc wayward and crotchety; you are all for precedent, or all for license. You rejoice in foolish divisions, your country, your native province, your college, your club, your way of doing things; you despise all others, and all their ways. A boy represents the babyhood of the race; in him is incarnate the spirit of contempt for Barbarians.
Age is a reaction from the restive individualism of Youth. It recognizes the human inability to stand alone; it perceives that the individual is a bit broken from the human mass, that our ragged edges still maintain the pattern of the break,and are ready to fit into the general mass again. The Old Man no longer dwells on the differences between one human creature and his fellows; he reflects upon their common qualities. He finds no solace in isolation; he rejoices in community. Youth is supremely conscious of its own sensitiveness, its own palate, its own comfort, it is full of individual appetite and greed; but Age is conscious of humanity, of a universal sensitiveness, of palates untouched by delicacies, of bodies uncared for, of souls uncomforted, and its queasy stomach cannot bear to be helped tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, while fellow members of the indivisible body human sicken from want.
Age perceives a thousand bonds where Youth sees discord. Age sets store by the common good of life, it conceives of our common humanity as the mere right to share, and of pleasure as sharing; it considers humanity partly as an enlargement of self, partly as a refuge from self; it lightly passes over the differences of speech, of accent, of clothes, of ways and customs, which to boys like you, taken with the outward aspect of the world, seem to erect such insuperable barriers between them and their fellows. To Old Age the sutures of humanity, that to the youthful eye gape so wide, are all grown together, the several parts are merged into one whole.
Of all pleasures, none is so satisfying as the full enjoyment of our common humanity. It loosens the swaddling clothes that wrap us round; it alone gives us freedom. No doubt this is partly due to the nearer approach of death; the chill of night causes the pilgrim to draw nearer his fellows and warm himself at the kindly warmth of human fellowship. But be the cause what it may, the enjoyment of humanity is a taste that grows with man’s growth; it is a part of the ripening of life, and comes quickest to those who ripen in the sun of happiness.
There is another element in this process of mellowing with age. Old Age is intensely aware of the delicacy of this human instrument, on which fate can play all stops of joy and pain; it feels an infinite concern before the vast sum of human sentience; it sees in humanity the harvest of all the tillage of the past; it ponders over the long stretch of toil, cruelty, suffering, bewilderment, and terror, of unnumbered generations, back through recorded time, back through the ages that paleontologists dimly discern, back through the first stirrings of organic life. All along the path life flickers up but to be quenched by death. In contemplation of this funeral march the Old Man nuzzles to the breast of humanity, and longs for more and more intimate human communion. To him humanity is not a mere collection of individual units, but a mighty organism, animated by a common consciousness, proceeding onward to some far-off end, with whose destiny his own is inseparably joined.
III
Lælius: What do you say to the physical weakness of Old Age? Surely the lack of physical vigor is a disadvantage.
Cato: It is true, Lælius, that Old Age fences in a man’s activities. We old men are no longer free to roam and amuse, or bore, ourselves with random interests. Our bounds are set. But with the diminishing of space comes what may well be a more than corresponding intensity of interest. The need of boundlessness is one of the illusions of youth; it is a consequence of youth’s instability, of its unwillingness to hold its attention fixed. The tether of Old Age obliges us to fix our attention; and no matter on what our attention is fixed, we can find there concentrated the essential truths of the universe. The adjectives great and small are not God’s words; they mark our inability to throw aside our egoism even for a moment.
The Japanese general who has slain his tens of thousands on the plains of Manchuria, squats on his hams and contemplates the infinite beauties in the iris, as the sunshine flatters it, or the breeze bellies out the wrinkled petals of its corolla. Its purple deepens, its white emulates the radiance of morning, its velvet texture outdoes the royal couch of fairyland, its pistil displays all the marvel of maternity, its laborious root performs its appointed task with the faithfulness of ministering angels. The armies of Russia and Japan could not tell as much concerning the history of the universe as does this solitary iris. A garden that will hold a lilac bush, a patch of mignonette, a dozen hollyhocks, or a few peonies, is enough to occupy a Diocletian. A square yard of vetch will reveal the most profound secrets of our destiny; the fermentation of a cup of wine discloses enough to make a man famous for centuries; the disease of a silkworm will determine the well-being of a kingdom; the denizens in a drop of blood cause half the sufferings of humanity. The achievements of modern science merely confirm the intuitions of Old Age. Littleness is as full of interest as bigness.
Youth has a longing for Sinai heights, for the virgin tops of the Himalayas, and the company of deep-breathing mountaineers; this is because he cannot see the wonder in common things. Blindly impatient with what he has, blindly discontented with what is about him, he postulates the beautiful, the real, the true, in the unattainable. But Old Age delights in what is near at hand, it sees that nothing is cut off from the poetry of the universe, that the littlest things throb with the same spirit that animates our hearts, that the word common is a mere subterfuge of ignorance.
Lælius : If I conceive your meaning aright, Cato, Old Age is, through greater understanding, nearer the truth than Youth.
Cato: Yes, Age understands that such revelation as may be vouchsafed to man concerning the working of the will of the Gods needs not be sought on Mount Sinai, but in whatever spot man is. Earth, the waters, the air, and all the starry space, are waiting to communicate the secrets of the Gods to the understanding of man. Many secrets they will reveal; and many, perhaps, they will never disclose.
IV
Scipio: Excuse me, Cato, but are you not, in substance, claiming the advantages of religion, and is not religion as open to Youth as to Old Age ?
Cato: By no means, Scipio; Old Age is more religious than Youth. I do not speak of the emotional crises that come upon young men and young women in early youth; those crises seem too closely related to physical growth and development to be religious in the same sense in which Old Age is religious. That the emotional crises of Youth may bear as truthful witness to the realities of the universe as the temperate religion of Old Age, I do not deny. The God that Youth sees by the light of its emotional fires may be the real God, but that image of God is transitory, it appears in fire and too often disappears in smoke. The image of God that appears to Old Age is a more abiding image; it reveals itself to experience and to reason instead of to the sudden and brief conviction of vision. Old Age finds God more in its own image, calm, infinitely patient, not revealed merely by the vibrant intensity of passion, but in the familiar and the commonplace. To Old Age the common things of life declare the glory of God.
Common things affect different minds differently; yet to most minds certain familiar phenomena stand out conspicuous as matter for reflection. Most extraordinary of all common things is human love. Throughout the universe of the stellar sky and the universe of the infinitely little, so far as we can see, there is perpetual movement, change, readjustment; everywhere are velocities, potencies, forces pushing other forces, forces holding other forces in check, energies in furious career, energies in dead-lock, but always, everywhere, energy in travail. And, apart from our animal life, the whole machinery whirls along without a throb of emotion, without a touch of affection. Why should not men have been mechanical, swept into being and borne onward, by the same energies, in the same iron-bound way? Even if consciousness, unfolding out of the potential chaos that preceded man, was able to wheedle an existence from Necessity, why was it expedient to add love? Would not mechanical means serve the determined ends of human life, and impel us to this action and to that, without the need of human affection? Human affection is surely a very curious and interesting device.
And if the world must be peopled, and the brute law of propagation be adopted in a universe of chemistry and physics, why was it necessary to cover it with visions of ’love and of honor that cannot die,’and to render the common man for the moment worthy of an infinite destiny?
Then there is also the perplexity of beauty. Why to creatures whose every footstep is determined by the propulsions of the past, should a flower, a tuft of grass, a passing cloud, a bare tree that lifts the tracery of its branches against a sunset sky, cause such delight? Descended from an ancestry that needed no lure of beautiful sight or of pleasant sound to induce it to live its appointed life, why should mankind become so capriciously sensitive?
Or consider human happiness. Here, for example, I live, in this little cottage that seems to have alighted, like a bird, on the slope of this gentle hill. Red and white peonies grow before the door, enriching the air with their fragrance. They charm both me and the bees. In yonder bush beside the door a chippingsparrow sits upon her nest; and in the swinging branch of the elm tree overhead two orioles rear their brood, and as they flash by, their golden colors delight the human beings that watch them. Look over that stone wall, and mark how its flat line gives an incomparable effect to the landscape. See our New England fields dotted with New England elms; and far beyond see those white-sailed schooners scud before the boisterous wind. The farmer’s boy, who fetches milk and eggs, left me that nosegay of wild flowers. Look! Look! See how the whiteness of that cloud glorifies the blue of the sky. Is it not strange that all these things, that go about their own business, should, by the way, perform a work of supererogation and give us so much unnecessary pleasure?
The young do not see or do not heed these common things; they are busy with their own emotions. Youth is a time of tyrannical demands upon the universe. It expects a perpetual banquet of happiness, and at the first, disillusion charges the universe with falsehood and ingratitude. It no sooner discovers that all creation is not hurrying to gratify its impulses, than it cries out that all creation is a hideous thing. It arraigns the universe; it draws up an indictment of countless crimes. The long past becomes one bloody tragedy. Dragons of the prime rend one another, creature preys upon creature, all things live at the expense of others, and death is the one reality. All the records of the earth tell a tale of bloody, bestial cruelty. The globe is growing cold; man shall perish utterly, all his high hopes, all his good deeds, all his prayers, all his love, shall become as if they had never been. And Youth, because the universe for a moment seems to neglect it , in a Promethean ecstasy defies the powers that be.
But Old Age, rendered wiser by the mellowing years, concerns itself less with the records of paleontology and the uttermost parts of the universe, than with matters at closer range and more within its comprehension. It fixes its eye less on death than on life. It considers the phenomena of love, of beauty, of happiness, and the factors that have wrought them, and its thoughts trace back the long, long sequence of causes that lie behind each contributing factor; they follow them back through recorded time, back through the ages of primitive man, through the dim times of the first stirrings of organic life, through vast geological. periods, back to chaos and old night. They follow each contributory factor out through the universe, to the uttermost reaches of space, beyond the boundaries of perception; and everywhere they find those contributory causes steadily proceeding on their several ways through the vast stretches of space and time, and combining with other factors from other dark recesses of the unknown, in order, at last, to produce love, beauty, happiness, for such as you and me. Consider, you young men, who pass these miracles by as lightly as you breathe, this marvelous privilege of life, the infinite toil and patience that has made it what it is, and then, if you dare, call the power that animates the universe cruel.
v
Scipio: I perceive, Cato, that you believe in a God, a God in sympathy with man, and I grant — Lælius, too, will grant — that such a belief, if a characteristic of Old Age, does indeed give Old Age one great advantage over Youth.
Cato: No, I cannot claim that a belief in God is a necessary accompaniment of Old Age, but I think that Old Age is far more likely than Youth to dwell upon the considerations that fit in with such a belief.
To Youth all the energy of the universe is inexplicable, the things we behold are the products of blind forces; but to Old Age the essential element in the universe is the potential character of its infinitely little constituent parts. Out of the dust came the human eye, up from the happy combination of the nervous system came the human mind, and with the passage of time has come the new organic whole, humanity. Do not these phenomena hint at a divine element in the potential energies of the universe? What is all this motion and turmoil, all the ceaseless turnings and tossings of creation, but restless discontent and an endeavor to produce a higher order? Our human love, beauty, and happiness are loss to be explained by what has gone before than by what is to come. You cannot explain the first streaks of dawn by the darkness of the night. All the processes of change — gases, vapors, germs, human souls — are the perturbations of aspiration. This vibrant universe is struggling in the throes of birth. As out of the dust has come the human soul, so out of the universe shall come a divine soul. God is to be the last fruits of creation. Out of chaos He is evolving.
You would laugh at me, Scipio, if it were not for your good manners. Wait and learn. Belief in deity is, in a measure, the privilege of us old men. Age has lost the physical powers of Youth, and no one will dispute that the loss is great, but that loss predisposes men to the acceptance of religious beliefs. Physical powers, of themselves, imply an excessive belief in the physical universe; muscles and nerves, in contact with unyielding things, exaggerate the importance of the physical world. Throughout the period of physical vigor the material world is a matter of prime consequence; but to an old man the physical world loses its tyrannical authority. The world of thought and the world of affection rise up and surpass in interest the physical world. In these worlds the presence of God is more clearly discernible than in the material world; but if He is in them, He will surely come into the material world.
Even now, here and there, his glory is visible. A mother, at least, cannot believe that, the throbs of her heart over her sick child are of no greater significance than the dropping of water or the formation of a crystal. The presence of deity has reached her heart; in course of time, it will also reach the water and the crystal. If matter of itself has produced the passion of human love, it surely may be said, without presumption, to be charged with potential divinity.
Old Age cares less and less for the physical world; it lives more and more in the worlds of thought and of affection. It does not envy Youth, that lives so bound and confined by things physical. But you have been very patient. Make my compliments to your families, and perhaps in part to Harvard College, on your good manners, and remember when you, too, shall be old, to have the same gentle patience with Youth that you now have with Old Age.
Scipio: Thank you, Cato. If we are not convinced, we desire to be.
Lælius: Yes, indeed, we now doubt that those whom the Gods love die young.
Cato: You must hurry or you will miss your train. Good-bye.