ESSAY
YOUTH, MIDDLE AGE AND THE HARSH OLD
AGE
It’s
very common to associate youth with happy days, and old age with
more difficult ones, or with the misfortune that surrounds our
existence.
It’s part of
the ancient tradition – literary, philosophical and also
popular. «I should describe old age as a kind of incurable
disease»; «An old man in his rudiments is a disgraceful object»,
said
Seneca almost two thousand years ago, expressing the
current opinion. Thence the advice of one of his (almost)
contemporaries: «Enjoy yourself while in the spring of life» (Ovid).
There are,
notwithstanding, other opinions, or more nuanced ones, about
the connection between happiness and age. How many young people
experience the plenitude that
Joseph Conrad remembers with nostalgia in
his Youth: «I remember my youth and the feeling that will
never come back any more – the feeling that I could last for
ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful
feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain
effort – to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the
heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that
with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires
– and expires, too soon, too soon – before life itself»?
Bernard Lovell,
for instance, expressed another opinion: «Youth is vivid rather
than happy, but memory always remembers the happy things».
Maturity and even old-age may be associated with happy
existences, says
Cicero in his essay about old age (De
Senectude): «Old age, when honourable, has an authority that
is worth more them all the pleasures of youth ».
Physical decrepitude may
indeed be very damaging and the cause of unhappiness, but in
Cicero's
view our happiness depends a lot on our values and our
wisdom, and the way we are able to conduct our life and control
our thoughts and feelings. To him, happiness is very much a product of our
philosophies of life. Old people situation may be far less
dramatic than that described by
Shakespeare in his
comedy “As You Like It”:
«That ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness
and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything»).
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See also:
Life best years quotes
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