BETWEEN THE OLD and the very old there is a strange relationship. At least this is how it is with me—when a younger friend or colleague surprises me with the fact that suddenly he is sixty or seventy, has heart problems and has had to give up smoking, or has been made an honorary doctor, honorary president or freeman of the city, or has been assailed by one of the many other symptoms of old age, I am quite shocked by the perception that someone whose youthful follies we have just been looking upon with mild indulgence has suddenly claimed his place among the grown-ups and the dignitaries and, with grey or white hair, has entered the realm of old age, complete with honorary titles and decorations. With the stubbornness of my advanced years I had subconsciously expected, and indeed relied upon the fact, that the younger man would remain young and would keep me for ever in touch with young people.
Once I have got over this first little shock, then of course I no longer consider the younger person’s moving-along process to be something audacious and even presumptuous, but instead begin to feel a degree of sympathy for the now old; that is to say, with the facts having shown themselves to be unalterable, my old man’s stubbornness immediately establishes a distance between myself and my younger friend. Because, I assume in the darkness of my senility, these symptoms that accompany the arrival of a greater age—birthdays and honours as well as aches and pains—still have the gloss of something new, the importance of a first experience, with the seventieth birthday boy feeling rather like the newly confirmed or the newly graduated; a new stage has been reached, a new room has been entered; the sense of resignation mingles pleasantly with the scent of ceremony—there will presumably be a celebratory feast with saddle of venison, burgundy and champagne, and the happy new arrival will still take it all fairly seriously, will listen not without emotion to the speech by the Minister of State or the Lord Mayor, will look back not without melancholy at the harmless high spirits of earlier celebrations and so, as I ascertain with some smugness, will therefore still be a youngster and a beginner by comparison with those of us who are really old. For those of us who are really old imagine that we have transcended all these vanities and, in cool proximity to death, now live a life of wisdom and dignified renunciation, and only rarely in our especially enlightened moments do we realise how slight is the difference between being very old and being old, and between our wisdom and the illusions and vanities which we short-sightedly attribute to those who are not yet standing at the same lofty heights as ourselves. And in these enlightened moments, we also recall how once as children or boys or teenagers we thought and laughed about the old and the very old, and we know that this laughter was far from being as innocent and silly as we might, even after many decades, have liked to think it was. Indeed we know that ultimately the only wisdom of age that has any substance consists in once more becoming a child.
It is with such thought games that I generally react when I hear news of sixtieth, seventieth or seventy-fifth birthdays within the circle of my somewhat younger friends. They are an attempt to resist with some humour the uneasy feelings that overcome us whenever we are notified of how swiftly time flies and how fragile life is. One of the contradictions of this life, whose tragic aspects are so often and so easily covered up by its comedy, is the fact that with one half of our souls we artists are delighted by and in love with nothing so much as the moment, the short-lived, the lightning changes of life’s directions, while in the other half of our souls we have and nourish the deep desire for permanence, for stasis, for eternity—the longing that goes on driving us to try and achieve the impossible: the spiritualisation and externalisation of the transient, the crystallisation of the fluid and changeable, the capture of the moment. It is what the wise man seeks to attain in his contemplative renunciation of all actions—the cancellation of time—that is what we artists strive for in our reversal of direction; we strain every sinew to keep things firm and fixed for ever.
From a letter written in November
1957 to Ernst Morgenthaler
On your entry into a new habitat, the forecourt to old age, an old man wishes you all the gifts that life at this stage has to offer—increased independence from the judgement of others, increased imperviousness to the passions, and an unworried reverence for the eternal.
A page from an album
written in the 1950s
We are curious about undiscovered bays in the South Seas, about the earth’s polar regions, about the nature of the winds, currents, lightning, avalanches—but we are infinitely more curious about death, the last and boldest adventure of our existence. Because we think we know that of all our insights and experiences, only those for which we willingly sacrifice our lives can be deserving and satisfying.
From Reiselust
(Wanderlust) 1910
When a person has grown old and has done his all, it is his task peacefully to make friends with death. He does not need other people. He knows them and has seen enough of them. What he needs is peace. It is not seemly to seek out such a person, to talk to him, to torment him with your chatter. At the gateway to his home the proper thing is to pass by, as if nobody lived there.
A notice that Hesse stuck to the
door of his house after he had
been awarded the Nobel Prize