I will very soon be 86. A young man once wrote – or rather sent an email – to me asking about the magazine Kyk-Over-Al, which I used to edit once upon a time. He pointed out, with brutal frankness, that I had failed to keep Kyk going and that the cultural torch I had tried to uphold was now flickering low. The young man reminded me, cruelly but correctly: “The fact is, Mr. McDonald, you are mellowing….. The fate of the Guyanese writer is the fate of all old soldiers: they don’t die, they just fade away. You are going gently into the good evening of your life. You have lost the fire in your belly. What has happened to the poet-warrior, Ian?” That message was sent years ago.
The young man was right. The creative fire dims with age, the abundant and easily renewable energy needed to get things done promptly and efficiently slows and slackens. And so now on the brink of the 87th year of this extraordinary adventure, I again take God to task for spoiling his fundamentally sound conception of the living man with the terrible defect of growing old. That is like a workman creating a masterpiece only to introduce a deliberate flaw into his masterly design to satisfy some perverse quirk in his personality.
Dorothy Parker, the American writer, was particularly bitter about this when she said: “People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No, what’s the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.” Perhaps that is going a bit far – life is so full of beauty and delight that the oldest man in the world still will crave half an hour more of his last sunset before the night comes down.
But one can see what Dorothy Parker meant. The spring and freshness and energy and ambition and creative fire of youth should be ours forever. Nothing can replace that – not experience, not wisdom, not even the maturity that comes with lost illusions.
A long time ago some lines by the poet Robert Lowell stuck in my mind:
Being old in the good times is worse
Than being young in the worst times.
That is true – nothing sweet or comforting in an old man’s world can make up for the inner fire that burns so passionately in youth. If only youth itself appreciated this richness that it possesses instead of taking it for granted. The cruel paradox is that youth’s sweetness is its own forbidden fruit. The feast is over before you know how good the menu was. Perhaps the fact that youth is wasted on the young is one more joke by a mocking God to test man’s fragile faith.
Ah, well, we must all put up with heaven’s humour. We can whistle a little song and whisper comforting clichés like: “You’re as old as you feel” or “Life begins at eighty-six.” Best of all we can read the Chinese poets, who, in this respect, give the most comfort. For instance, in this poem by Po Chu-I from the ninth century (I have substituted seventy for sixty in the poem to suit my own case):
On Being Old
Between thirty and seventy one is distracted by the five lusts,
If one lasts to eighty one may be prey to a hundred diseases.
But at seventy one is free from all ills:
I have put behind me Desire and Greed, I have done with Profit and Fame;
I am still short of illness and decay, and have not reached decrepit age.
Strength of limb I still possess to seek the rivers and the hills.
Still my heart has spirit enough to listen to flutes and strings.
At leisure I open new wine and taste several cups;
Drunk I recall old poems and chant a stray verse.
But in the end, we have to face reality, brace ourselves, and accept the fact of being old with as much humour and philosophy as one can muster. And if we cannot muster up humour or philosophy, at least we should heed, as the young man once hinted to me in his message, the advice Dylan Thomas gave his old father, passionate to the end:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Also, before we grow too old to remember what it was like to be young, let us quote to our young friends in their heedless, springtime days the last lines of the greatest lyric poem in the English language – Feste’s song in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:
What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter,
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure;
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Such lines are lovely. Yet, as I grow older the passage I more and more recall is from a speech in Next Time I’ll Sing to You, the great play by James Saunders:
“There lies behind everything, and you can believe this or not as you wish, a certain quality which we may call grief. It’s always there, just under the surface, just behind the façade, sometime very nearly exposed, so that you can dimly see the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental pond on a still day, the dark, gross, inhuman outline of a carp gliding slowly past; when you realize suddenly that the carp was always there below the surface, even while the water sparkled in the sunshine, and while you admired the lovely water lilies and patronized the quaint ducks and the supercilious swans, the carp was down there, unseen. It bides its time, this quality. And if you do catch a glimpse of it, you may pretend not to notice or you may turn suddenly away and romp with your children on the grass, laughing for no reason. The name of this quality is grief.”
