SOMETHING ELSE … is the way old people experience things, and here I don’t wish to and mustn’t allow myself to indulge in fiction or illusion, but will stick to my knowledge of the fact that a person of younger or even youthful years has no idea of the way old people do experience things. For basically, there are no new experiences left for them; they have long since lived through all the appropriate, predetermined primary experiences, and their ‘new’ ones—which become rarer and rarer—are repetitions of those they have already had sometimes or often; new varnish on a painting apparently finished long ago, a new layer of paint or gloss, one layer over ten, over a hundred earlier layers. And yet they do mean something new, and although they are not primary, nevertheless they are real experiences. Because every time, among other things they become encounters with oneself and examinations of oneself. The man who sees the ocean for the first time or hears Figaro for the first time experiences something different and generally more intense than the man who does so for the tenth or fiftieth time. Because the latter has different, less active but more experienced and more sharply honed eyes and ears for the ocean or the music, and he not only feels the no longer new impression differently and more discerningly than the other, but with this repetition he is also reminded of the earlier occasions, and so as well as experiencing the already familiar ocean and music in a new way, he also encounters himself again, his younger self, and the many earlier stages of his life within the framework of that experience—regardless of whether he does so with a smile, a sneer, a superior sniff, emotion, embarrassment, joy or regret. In general, the older a person is, the more he is inclined to view his earlier exploits and experiences with emotion or embarrassment rather than with feelings of superiority, and that applies particularly to creative people like artists, who in the later stages of life, on being reunited with the power, intensity and richness of their peak years will very rarely get the feeling: “Oh, how weak and stupid I was in those days!” On the contrary, they are more liable to wish: “Oh, if only I had a bit of the energy I had then!”
We poets and intellectuals attach a great deal of importance to memory—it is our capital and we live on it, but when we are surprised by an intrusion from the underworld of the forgotten and the discarded, it is always the discovery, whether pleasant or not, of a powerful force which does not reside within the memories of ourselves that we have so carefully nurtured. Occasionally I have had the thought or the suspicion that it might be the desire to wander free and to conquer the world, the hunger for the new, the not yet seen, for travel and for the exotic, that is familiar to most people with a bit of imagination, especially when they are young, and also a longing to be forgotten, to drive away what has been, in so far as it oppresses us, and to cover the images we know with as many new images as possible. On the other hand, the tendency of old age to cling to fixed habits and repetitions, to go back again and again to the same areas, people and situations would then be a striving after memories, a never satisfied need to reassure oneself concerning what memory has preserved, together perhaps with a desire, a mild hope, that one might see this preserved treasure expand, perhaps one day to rediscover this or that experience, this or that encounter, this or that image or face which had been lost and forgotten, and thus to add to the store of memories. All old people, even if they are not aware of it, are in search of the past, the seemingly irretrievable which is not, however, irretrievable and not necessarily gone for ever, because under certain conditions—for instance, through literature—it can be restored and for ever torn away from the grasp of the past.
From the circular letter Engadiner
Erlebnisse (Engadine Experiences)
1953
Truth is a typical ideal of young people, whereas love is one for mature people and for those who take pains to prepare themselves for decline and death. For thinking people, the urgent quest for truth only ceases when they have realised that man is extraordinarily badly equipped for the recognition of objective truth, so that searching for it really can’t be the activity for us humans. But even those who never actually achieve such insights go through the same process of discovery in the course of their unconscious experiences. Possessing the truth, being right, knowing, being able to distinguish precisely between good and evil, and consequently judging, punishing, condemning, being able and allowed to wage war—this is for young people and it suits young people too. As one gets older and comes to a standstill in the face of these ideals, so the ability—which in any case is pretty feeble—that we humans have, to ‘awaken’ and to sense superhuman truths, simply fades away.
From a letter written in June 1931
to Fanny Schiler
Age and calcification are advancing; sometimes the blood doesn’t want to flow through the brain as it should. But when all is said and done, these evils also have their good side—one doesn’t take things in so clearly or so intensely any more, one misses a lot, one no longer even feels various blows and pinpricks, and a part of the person that was once called me is already there where soon the whole will be.
From Ein Brief nach
Deutschland (A Letter to
Germany) 1946
It’s one of the few good things about old age that one can’t be so completely touched by the present and reality any more, because there’s a slowly thickening veil coming between us.
From a letter written on 7th September
1951 to Ludwig Tügel
Nowadays when one is old, one lives on a different geological level with a different climate and in a completely different environment from that in which one grew up and which was once normal and natural. At times one is amazed that one is actually still here.
From a letter written in February
1950 to Jeanne Berta Semmig