The Revelation of the Middle Years

DEAR PETER : —
Yesterday at luncheon, when you flourished your napkin and declared vigorously that you could n’t see why anybody should care about living after forty, as, of course, ‘one never had any new experiences after that age; it was just the same old things over and over,’— did you notice that none of your elders attempted to answer you seriously? Your mother was slightly shocked, your father grinned a little grimly, and I was so busy trying to remember whether I was nineteen or twenty-two when I made precisely that remark, also at luncheon, to a slightly shocked and slightly amused family, that I, too, let your declamation pass unchallenged.
Thinking it over to-day, remembering how terribly in earnest I was in my own young belief that everything of interest must, happen before one was forty, probably even before one was thirty, and that the rest of life was a useless by-product, I began to wonder if it was possible to tell you anything about the real connotations of middle age. Can I say it so it will reach you? Can I ‘get it across’ ? Perhaps not, but I can try!
Why try? you may ask disdainfully. You don’t care a row of pins! A fellow of your age knows pretty well what he thinks about things, and it’s as clear as mud that middle age is—well, just simply dull. Its eyes are on the sidewalk, and its nose to the grindstone. What is there in that to inspire a chap or make him look forward to it with expectation, not to say enthusiasm? Old age now — one knows a few pretty decent old fellows who seem to have got something out of the game and show up as fairly contented, but middle age —Oh bosh! Did n’t. that man Osler say there was nothing in it? That shows!
Well, Peter-boy, here’s the point; you will learn for yourself in time what there is in middle age. Yet if you could understand it a little now, you would look forward to the forties and fifties with keen expectation. This, in itself, would cheat the thieving years of the one great thing they do often take away.
Did you ever notice in what consists the exact difference between a young face and a face somewhat older? The distinction was brought home to me with a shock in my girlhood. Visiting in a strange city, I was told by an acquaintance that I had a double there. ‘Yes, she looks exactly like you. Older, of course, but awfully similar. She lives somewhere out on the Shelburne car-line. Haven’t you ever seen her? Do look out for her! It’s so amusing to see replicas of one’s self. Don’t you know the woman I mean?’ This last sentence was addressed to my hostess who demurred. ‘Ye-es, I’ve seen her, but I don’t think there is such a startling likeness. Still, there is a little something — ’
After that, of course, the girl that I was watched eagerly for her double, hoping possibly (the young do have these vanities!) to be a little flattered and a little inspired by the sight of her. She might suggest new possibilities, constitute a fresh ideal.
Once that winter I encountered her on the Shelburne car-line, recognized her at once and — disapproved of her at sight! Yes, she was very like. The eyes, the chin, the shape of the face, were all as familiar as the lookingglass. What was it that was different and depressing? The girl sat in her corner while the car leisurely jogged down town, studying the face of the woman across the aisle. How did one know she was anywhere from seven to twelve years one’s senior since, at that, she was still young? What betrayed it? Her skin was smooth, her color fresh. Yet something, certainly, was very different. Slowly it dawned upon the girl. The elder face showed no eagerness; it was no longer avid of life as was the face that met her own in the mirror. It was clone with expectation.
‘That,’ said the girl to herself, ‘is the real difference between us. That is what makes one grow old. But has it got to come? If there’s nothing more to expect on earth, surely there’s all of heaven left to hope for! Now, if one could get that into one’s face—’
I am not defending this naïve young assumption that our eternal hopes are worth while as first aids to beauty. I’m only telling you that youth is expectation, and how I found it out.

Youth is expectation. In the more happily born and reared, it is expectation of experience; in earthy, less fortunate temperaments, it is expectation of pleasure. With their inevitable disappointments, we need not deal here.

You, Peter, think yourself clearsighted in that you hope not to live beyond forty. Experience alone is so real and so dear to you that you can conceive of no value in life without it, and by experience you rightly mean such vicissitudes, such events, as throw light into dark places, enrich your inner life, increase your perceptions. You are of those who desire, above all things, to know.

An experience has two parts, the objective happening and the subjective reaction upon it. The wonder and delight of the latter gives value to the former. A real perception is a kind of act of creation. You seem to be coöperating with God when you perceive what He means. Your instinct that this is the priceless thing is surely right; as surely wrong is your naïve belief that thirty or forty years will drain you of the possibility of such reactions. Yet that belief is based, I make no doubt, upon the silence of your elders as to the actual content of life between thirtyfive and fifty.

We hear much talk lately about the ‘conspiracy of silence’ in regard to sex. One might with equal truth proclaim such a conspiracy in regard to soul. And it would be quite as just to say a ‘conspiracy of disbelief’ exists among the young! I asked some of the wisest folk I know about the possibility of telling our juniors what chiefly endears middle-age to us who possess it, and they shook their heads. ‘Yes, you can try. We all ought to try. But they won’t believe it. One has to learn these things for one’s self.’

What is growing older, anyhow? When you and your contemporaries think of it crudely, physically, it seems to you the wearing out of the body, baldness, wrinkles, obesity, a hardening of the arteries, a general stiffening of the members and the faculties, making responsiveness to life difficult or impossible.

Viewing it on a less material plane, you see in it a wearing-down of ideals, a crushing-out of the dreams, a loss of the glory.

As I see it, growing older is the process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life. Living is simply getting acquainted with the world we live in. The real purpose of a body is that it shall be used up, worn out — and then thrown away — in feeding the spirit. Whatever happens to you in the outer world translates itself, finally, into such sustenance. That is what it is for, just as the purpose of food is not to look pretty on china plates, but to be transformed into blood and muscle. It is in the natural order of things that the body should be thus used and exhausted; the unnatural and horrible thing is that the body should be worn out and yet the spirit remain unnourished.

People chatter endlessly nowadays about ‘teaching’ the young this or that. The problem is not so simple. For, while you all accept unquestioningly the scientific facts and theories that are offered you, and build upon them, you also take ethical and philosophical statements with a certain reserve, waiting for the sanctions of your own experience. I am far from being a defender of logic, but this is surely illogical.

As a matter of fact, ethics is far more stable than physical science. The latter has recently had occasion to revise its whole theory of matter, while the theory of conduct remains unchanged. The Origin of Species is already out of date, and monumental undertakings like the Synthetic Philosophy are disregarded, but the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule remain intact and unassailable. They are being rediscovered daily, with much pomp, by those brilliant social investigators who were not brought up to accept them as basal.

How do we get our obiter dicta about life, you ask? My dear Peter, it is very simple; they are as much laboratory products as the rules about reagent bottles. Experience is the laboratory of the spirit — that very experience which you are already finding so precious that you assert that the years can have no value without it.

You can accept the statements of thoroughly qualified elders about what life is and teaches as absolutely as you accept the statements of your chemistry professor about the reagent bottles. But first you must make sure that they have passed their examinations and taken their degrees summa cum laude in the schools of experience.

You will not have much trouble in assorting people with reference to their ability as spiritual advisers. The thing sifts itself down finally to the pragmatic test, efficiency for the end desired. Will it work?

Thirty-odd years ago your grandmother employed a German laundress, a shrewd, devout, hard-working widow. By the toil of her hands at the current wages of a dollar and a quarter a day, she acquired a comfortable home with an orchard, garden-patch, and grass for the cow, and brought up four children to walk through life with self-respect and industry. As a child I used to hang about the steaming tubs to hear her talk of the eternal verities, — her favorite theme, — for I knew blindly, as children do, that here was the real thing. I can see now the exultation shining in her face as she told us about ‘my Charley who went to Chicago,’ and found himself up against that particularly unholy portion of this wicked world. ‘But my Charley, he is a good boy. He goes straight. An’ he writes me an’ says “ T’ank God we got a mudder who taught us for why we live an’ for why we work.” ’

Her eyes were as those of one who says, ‘Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace,’ for she had succeeded in passing her revelation on. Her children had seasoned their loaves with her leaven — and this is parental success. She is living to-day, near ninety, an honored inmate in the home of ‘my Mary who married the minister,’ with grandchildren worthy of their blood.

When you find folk whose account of ’for why we live and for why we work’ gets results that can be passed on in this way, it is perfectly safe to trust their dicta. Scrub-women or seers, they are masters of the only art that matters.

Few of us are so successful as this woman in transmitting knowledge. Daily there goes down to the grave unspoken wisdom enough to run the world a thousand years. Your fault, Peter, for how can we speak if you will not hear?

Think of the long procession of dull people that you pass daily on the street, noticing them only as the drab background for the young faces which, to you, shine out like stars. They seem unimportant folk, and you find them as stupid as babies do grown-ups — yet these are they who know the secrets of the Seven Stars and Plato’s Year! They have solved the long problem of work; they have irrigated deserts, washed down hills, tunneled mountains, sailed strange seas, controlled vast engines. They have also fronted death fearlessly and been convinced of immortality. They have looked at Love aghast and found in themselves infinite springs of tenderness to quench the flames of lust and greed. They have created new bodies and new souls. Lying in king’s houses or fouled in the mire, starved, gorged, scorched, frozen, lifted up to heaven, cast down to hell — from all this have they learned nothing?

Peter, the great process which is being completed behind these countless quiet faces is the same process which had begun in you when you told me shyly at fifteen that ‘ it was so interesting to sit still and watch your judgment being formed.’

This was your way of saying that a sense of the many-sidedness of things was already born in you, and that you were beginning to weigh those contradictory aspects and find pleasure in the process.

Later on, as your education grew more interesting to you, you confided to me the gradual growth of a cosmic theory that had begun to outline itself in your brain. In this, everything you learned seemed miraculously to find a place, as if it were a great picture-puzzle whose fragments were doled out to you one by one. You observed how physics and astronomy and chemistry and ancient history, and even mathematics, fitted into one another’s corners. You got fleeting glimpses of other men’s cosmic theories, not alone in books, where they are least convincing, but in real life. Your professor of physics accidentally betrayed a deepburied hope that ether might be the very substance of the Eternal, inclusive of all things. You heard and remembered an ardent mathematician saying that his science was ‘the shortest cut to infinity — and God.’ The little assistant in geology, of whom you thought patronizingly, flashed out one day and gave you a glimpse of all creation groaning and travailing through endless prehistoric ages to find and bring forth Man — on whom is laid henceforward the everlasting obligation to show himself no less than spirit and worthy the age-long struggle of his making.

And so, by this and by that, the picture grew. It was as if the vast tapestry of the cosmos swung in great folds before you. Dimly you discerned a pattern that was above your seeing. Flashes of wonderful color, fragments of great design, tantalized your vision. They excited and uplifted you, reinforcing all that you would soonest believe as to the Star-Builder. Never completed, still unfolding, in the immensities of a space that your mind could conceive neither as finite nor infinite, the universe held you expectant. All knowledge and speculation were absorbed into this great dim pattern, that was still more than they. For no matter how daring and how comprehensive our cosmic theory, we fall short of the audacities and subtleties of God.

Into that far-hung cosmic pattern you also tried to fit your individual life and your mother’s faith. You did not, perhaps, try very hard; for at the same time you found most sermons dull and most dogmas unintelligible. The forms in which Christianity was offered you did not suit the shape of your mind. So, you did not very definitely connect your religious instruction with these other things it was thrilling you greatly to learn. Healthy, contented, clean, and only normally selfish, you have not as yet very greatly needed a religion that, will stand the strain of life. But I cannot give you any satisfactory account of the connotations of middle age without talking about such a religion.

Don’t lose patience with me at this point, Peter, because my sentences are getting long and my enthusiasm is mounting high. It’s not so easy as you might think to put the deepest things one knows into plain words — for it breaks a law of being that almost all men keep.

Let us go back to your desire to know; it does not mean that you wish to be either a philosopher or a scientist. Either is admittedly unsatisfactory from the point of view of that cosmic outline you are so keen about. Scientists must confine themselves to facts and, tentatively, to such theories as may best explain facts; philosophers have usually felt that they must be logical.

Because you are still at school to books, your respect for facts and logic is, deservedly, immense. But outside of fact and beyond logic there lies a domain of knowledge as irrefragable as the contributions of either to our consciousness, and more necessary to normal existence. There have always been things that the commonest man knew. When this knowledge is turned toward everyday matters we call it common sense, and it is the fixative that holds the charcoal sketch of civilization on the map; when it is turned toward the things of the spirit, it constitutes that natural religion which is the basis of all our supra-material life.

The common man has never based his life, his dogmas, his institutions upon anything told him by scientist or philosopher. He has based them upon these things he knew, these intuitions, these gifts of insight. There his heart is fixed.

These gifts of insight have had small philosophical recognition. However, you may now classify them under ‘data of immediacy’ if you like. In this guise they have recently acquired good standing. Bergson is officially best known as a philosopher by the romantic and exciting outline he suggests of a universe spinning its own future and its own God out of the perpetually changing stream of time-stuff, under the compulsion laid on it of a vital urgency. But one suspects that the real reason why Creative Evolution (which I recommend you to read and use as a basis for your speculations in a field which it does not enter) sold like a popular novel and was dipped into and tasted by thousands of readers usually indifferent to philosophy, had no connection with this exposition of duration. Its popularity is due, rather, to its rehabilitation of intuition, showing it as equally authoritative with intellect. Bergson demonstrated the undeniable fact that our ‘godlike intellect’ is, after all, wrought out by the reactions of matter upon our perception, is built up, cell by cell, from our contact with the material world. It is, therefore, a wonderful instrument, indeed, but one which can be used to advantage only upon such stuff as it is wrought from. You may safely use logic upon matter, since matter shaped your thinkingmachine. Upon spirit, it follows that you must use intuition, since only so is spirit apprehended.

At the back of his brain, the plain man has known this all along. Bergson, cogent and brilliant, has shown the philosophers that the plain man was in the right.

The common man is not born aware of all the things that he knows he knows. He stumbles upon them as he lives along. Typical experience runs in this fashion.

A youth is told that he has an immortal soul; that God made the world and cares actively for it; that a superhuman exemplar came to rescue man. He accepts this teaching tentatively. He is conscious of something that seems to be a soul and hopes it was not made to die. The universe seems to demand a Creator who is an indwelling spirit — but to believe that God is indeed a Father seems to savor of conceit. He recognizes the value of the Christ-example.

He goes ahead, trying to be a fairly decent sort, sometimes having spiritual illuminations of his own and sometimes not, sometimes approximating Christian standards and sometimes not, hoping that God, if there is a God, will see that he is trying not to impede the Universal Will.

Life does not let him alone. Sooner or later the big experiences come. Perhaps one loved by him dies. Beside that still figure he suddenly perceives that death is not what he thought it. The peace in that quiet face is so absolutely the peace of clay which a spirit has ceased to inform, that it is a revelation. He is not here, he is risen! cries the heart with such authority that the youth believes — because he cannot do otherwise. He no longer hopes that the soul lives, — he knows with a certainty that, once felt, is never shaken. Every human being who has undoubting faith in immortality came to it thus. There is no other road to that assurance.

So it goes through the years. Each successive experience is equally a revelation; each, perhaps, equally a reversal of what he expects; each undoubtedly discloses how the soul is enmeshed with the body, eternity knit into the web of time.

It is impossible to over-state the authority, the overwhelming validity of the great experiences of life. Death — love— birth — work — creative effort — pain, above all, pain! — each adds something definite, precious, enduring, to the soul’s stock of treasure. These are the things that shall not be taken away. They are the bricks we build into the House of Life; they are the foundation-stones of our Eternal City.

The quality, the character, of conviction that the great experiences bring is of such a nature as cannot be foreseen or imagined. As it is impossible to imagine a taste or an odor never sensed, so it is impossible to forecast these gifts of experience. They impinge upon consciousness, poignant and wonderful. They pass, and leave you with a conviction as much deeper than an intellectual assent as the emotions are older than the brain.

To tell you what each one of these experiences makes clear would be too long a task. But the whole structure of society is reared on them. Examine the Family, the State, the Church, and see this for yourself. Man has put the gifts of insight into institutions and put them into dogmas.

Each generation revamps the outer garment of these vital things a bit, to suit itself. There is bound to be some misfit apparent between the style of any age and the taste of its successor. Therefore to youth, which lacks entirely the basal experience, all dogma appears blind and most institutions appear faulty. Wherefore youth would discard old doctrines and make the world over rapidly, in utter ignorance of the stuff it is handling.

Forgive me, Peter, if I bore you by talking about dogmas for a few minutes. Since I learned what they are, they have interested me madly. Before that, I was as indifferent as yourself. A dogma is something cryptic, a big experience crammed into a few words. If you are willing to put. into its unraveling half the enthusiasm of an Assyriologist translating a difficult inscription, or of a naturalist putting together fossil remains, you will have your reward. You will find out that, whatever words the fathers used, they meant what we mean, but meant it more intensely. They were more passionately spiritual than we, those old dogmatists, and less given to expression. So they packed each word fuller of expression than it would hold.

Says a recent essayist, ’Unless the words “salvation by grace" had at one time stood for the most powerful conviction of the most holy minds, we should never have heard the phrase.’¹ It would be possible to give you the exact equivalent of that doctrine in our modern spiritual life, but I will spare you — to-day!

I must not protract my preaching, but I would like you to know that something like this happens with reference to spiritual development: if you accept the fundamental statements of our religion in your youth, you will find life a long, painful and beautiful process of verifying and enriching them. If you put aside those statements in your youth and yet have the strength to live uprightly and deal justly, according to the moral code which Christianity has forced upon the world even as the sun forces spring on the earth, — in short, if you are a Christian in all but the name, and face life with an open mind, you will find it a long, painful, but wonderful process of evolving a religion which tallies in essentials with that which you put aside.

You may be willing to accept the religion that you make yourself; you may look askance at the claims of revealed religion; yet they are one and the same revelation. The Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world is no farthing candle but an illumination as steadfast as the sun.

Call yourself Christian or freethinker,—your feet are within the Way while you accept life loyally and get out of it what it holds in trust for every man.

On this point Christ himself was explicit, and more liberal than his interpreters. ‘If a man do the will of my Father which is in heaven, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be true or false.’ In other words, salvation may begin at the ‘works’ end or at the ‘faith’ end — it may be proved as readily from one approach as from the other by those ‘men of good will’ to whom the angels sang.

Intuition and experience have built up institutions as well as doctrines. For a single instance: man felt the sacredness of procreation, the veritable ties of blood. From these perceptions resulted marriage and family. Only when you look at those institutions from the outside do you believe the babblers who declare that they will crumble.

Seeing marriage as it can be with the eyes of your youth, a union fair and firm and sweet, the tale of its historical evolution may revolt you. It will not, if you have the key. From savagery upward, through brutal ages, blind with lust, the race has still been groping to express that basal perception of an enduring alliance for a wonderful end. Perhaps it is still done clumsily at best, but the profound intent is there.

Needless to expound to you all doctrines or institutions as they show themselves to me. The thing to make clear to you is that, one by one, as you climb the ascent of the years, these illuminations arrive; one by one you will accept them and fit them into that cosmic picture you have already begun to build so enthusiastically out of the gifts of intellect. The completion of that picture demands the deepest insights of your spirit as well as the keenest energies of your intellect.

Take it from me, if you can, that, at long last, a time comes when we are suddenly conscious that we have ‘gone observing matters’ so extensively and to such purpose that we have a certain vital and dependable knowledge of the pattern of the tapestry so far as this earth and our human existences are concerned. This does not mean that it is clear to us — but that it is perceptibly less obscure. Out of the mass of detail emerge the great principles, the salient things, the things that make the pattern. We have watched the honest man across the street and the scoundrel next door so long that we have actually seen with these eyes righteousness rewarded and iniquity in torment. Where we have seen a son disappoint parents who had a right to expect much, we have also lived to see the grandchild who more than atones for his father’s failure. The world begins to make sense.

This does not mean that if you have been submerged in the life of the senses for forty or fifty years, you will be rewarded by heightened perceptions of things spiritual. One finds what one seeks. It is the rule of the game that you must do your part. But if you question men and women among those roughly classified as right-living and right-thinking, you will find them aware of a time when their insight into all life is quickened and enlarged. The bread they have been casting on the waters begins to return. Harvest arrives. They not only see further into other lives, but they recognize that what has happened to themselves in the outer world has been but food for their spirits. They begin to see, also, that the events which have gone to make their life do not in themselves matter greatly. ‘Cold and damp, are they not as rich experiences as warmth and dryness?’ asks the sage. ‘Richer!’ replies the spirit that has learned the final lesson of wresting profit from pain.

Then — then the dry bones of the thousand axioms and platitudes which foretold these events arise, take on flesh, and go marching across the plains of life like a conquering army! It is a wonderful sight!

To read a face as you pass it; to predict the outcome of a life; to rest confidently in the moral order of things because you cannot disbelieve what you have seen, — the period when these perceptions begin to arrive is perhaps the most stimulating and exciting of our whole lives. For to most of us it is undoubtedly a surprise that the things that we have always believed are really true! We rub our eyes and look about us.

So — this is that despised and dreaded middle age! Even more than youth, it is the land of revelation. It is the Shining Country if you have chosen the better part that makes it so. I cannot exaggerate the wonder and delight of seeing things ’work out’ as they inevitably do work out. This is the flowering of our slow years of struggle and of growth.

Don’t think me complacent if I tell you that the revelation of the middle years, ‘ knocking a window through to eternity ’ as it does, is a glory no less exultant than the glory of youth that you know so well. And to reach this point means that you immediately begin to look forward with confidence. There is restored to you that expectation which is youth’s very heart.

With this in mind, do you see the import of what you said yesterday about not living after forty? You were unconsciously exhibiting the blind loyalty, even to the death, of young things to the conditions of their growth. If experiences indeed ceased just as you became able to interpret them richly, you would be justified in demanding that life, too, should cease. What happens is not that, they cease, but that they pass more and more into the sphere of the life within.

Of those antiquated doctrines whose phraseology has become meaningless to us, the one I best understand is accounted the blindest of all — that of the Unpardonable Sin!

The common man is convinced from within of the foundations on which he builds him a world. All these data regarding God, the soul, the family, on which he builds, have been verified for him by the intuitions beyond price which accompany experience. In those intuitions he so clearly feels the touch of spirit on spirit that to deny them in action is to defile them, and works out for him as literal destruction. He ’goes to pieces’ before our very eyes.

Thus the Holy Ghost is surely the still, small voice that bides forever in experience. We shut ourselves off from it only by denying the validity of our deepest insights, and thereby automatically condemn ourselves to cessation of growth — which is death and damnation. The unpardonable sin, then, is not, as we childishly supposed, some irrational wrath of an offended deity but a logical necessity. You cannot fill the cup if you shut the faucet. The universe cannot compel you to grow if you will not grow. The thing is in your hands. But your refusal is irretrievable. Thus, for those who would know, it is ‘worth while to be good ’ because their payment comes in cosmic gold — in increased perceptions, in deeper insights.

In your own phrase, life is no ‘ tight wad,’ Peter, nor is experience a niggard. The years may give you nothing else, neither homes nor friends nor gold nor lovers, but they are lavish with the stuff from which wisdom is distilled. I gather from this that wisdom is the one thing nominated in the bond between Creator and created.

Now — the sermon is over. Have I made you understand anything of the attitude that lies behind wisdom and the meaning of middle age? How can one tell if one has ‘ put it across’ ? Perhaps my words convey to you — just nothing. The phrases and formulæ that seem luminous to me may be as far from fitting your mind as those of the old dogmatists and mystics.

Out of all possible aspects of middle age, this most vital one is that which your elders most desire you to understand. And with all my doubts, I feel one certainty. Those who would know shall be satisfied. I do not know your path, but I know your goal, — for each man goeth to his own place. Your cosmic tapestry, woven, thread by thread, from the facts of science, from the conclusions of philosophy, from the intuitions of the race verified by your own contacts with experience, will content you at the end.

Most fundamental in the pattern, most marvelous in color, most daring in design, will be such parts of it as are the gift of the plain man’s insight. He has led the way. The dogmatists and mystics, the saints and seers, the preachers and teachers, are all merely aiming to express those things which the plain man knows but never tells. Sacred, unshared, unspoken, they lie at the core of being; they are the central flame.