From the book "The force of character: and the lasting life". Copyright © 1999 by James Hillman. Published by Random House, Inc., New York, NY. website: www.atrandom.com
Part I: Lasting
Chapter 3 Old
. . . what terrifying teachers we are for that part of creation which loves its eternally childish state. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 11:14)
I want now to study the idea of "old" all on its own, independent of aging. 'Distinction between Aging and Old' should be printed in bold letters---as would have been the case in the old and ageless books of other centuries---for the difference is as important as the one between aging and death, discussed in the first preface. When we muddle these three terms, we miss the importance of each. For "old" is a category unto itself, not necessarily implying either the process of aging or the approach of death.
When we begin to inquire into old---old cut free from the downward drag of aging and the fearsome bogey of death---we find right off that what we value most about things called old is precisely their deathless and ageless character. Old masters' paintings, old manuscripts, old gardens, old walls do not bring to mind dying but everlastingness. Paleontology, archaeology, geology---studies of the old. We visit Old Towns, preserve old sites, collect old silver, glass, cars, instruments, toys. These old things and places seem more potent guarantors of a tomorrow than do the young bodies of marines and adolescent girls---who, for all their hope and bloom, seem more susceptible to fast fading and death than the bent old woman marching to her bus stop and the veterans wheeling around the hospital.
Old is a visible condition, independent of years. There are old children with old eyes, whose oldness displays their distinctive character, not that they are near to dying; old souls, who seem to be waiting for time to catch up so they can finally come into their own. Estranged in childhood, distressed in youth, they have been old from the beginning. In fact, "old" and "soul" cannot do without each other. There are old words so packed with connotations that they grow more significant instead of aging into obsolescence. (connotation: noun an idea or feeling that a word invokes person in addition to its literal or primary meaning) There are old texts, like those of Homer and Ovid, Heraclitus and Sophocles, that require new translations every generation: The translations age, but never the texts.
What about the old things you live with? Are they aging, dying? The old chair the cat prefers; the old fork your hand enjoys holding for your evening prunes. "I love this knife; I couldn't do without it." We say "love" more often about things---tools, shoes, hats---than about persons. Old is one of the deepest sources of pleasure humans know. Part of the misery of disasters like floods and fires is the irrecoverable loss of the old, just as one of the causes of suburban subdivision depression---and aging and death---is the similar loss of the old, exchanged for a brand-new house and yard. Old things afford a supporting vitality; without them, we find it harder to be alive. Moved from the old place to the new, deprived of their old things, old people more easily let go. What is old has slowed their aging and postponed their death. We need the old pleasure-giving things, which reciprocate our love with their handiness and undemanding compatibility.
"Old" is itself a very old word, supposedly deriving from an Indo-European root that means "to nourish." Tracing the word into Gothic, Old Norse, and Old English, we find that something "old" is fully nourished, grown up, matured. Today, when we inquire into someone's age, even if that someone is a small child, we ask, "How old is she?" and are told, "She is four years old." At whatever age we are we identify ourselves with a specific quantity of oldness, having and being,"old."
Old English manuscripts love 'eald' (old); it is one of the fifty most frequently appearing words in the medieval corpus of legal, medical, religious, and literary texts and occasional scribbles. And it mainly carries a positive meaning. Of forty-nine compound words that incorporate 'eald,' only eight are clearly negative, like "old devil." To include 'eald' in a compound generally brings benefits: trustworthiness, venerability, proverbiality, value.
A goodly portion of the English language descends from the eighth-century epic poem 'Beowulf,' which, some scholars contend, places oldness among such virtues as nobility, mercy, esteem, and power. With the daring adventure and revolutionary thought of the Renaissance, however, "old" begins its decline. Shakespeare used "old" as an instrument of insult and ridicule and he frequently disparaged the word by coupling it with unpleasant partners: "old and foul," "old and wicked," "old and miserable," "old and deformed." "Reading modern idioms using 'old,'" writes the medievalist scholar Ashley Crandell Amos, "is a lowering experience, and a drastic contrast to the old English patterns." Since "words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind," as Virginia Woolf put it, the old mind is lowered by the lowering of "old" to its present undesirable condition: old maid, old-fashioned, old guard, old boys, old witch, old fogey, old fart.
Some of this contempt comes from a superficial habit of mind that can grasp meanings only with the tool of contrasts. "Old" then suffers from cliched comparisons with "new," "fresh," "young," and "of the future"; its meaning, narrows to the stale, the worn, the dying, and the past. When "old" gains its definition only by pairing, it loses its value. In a culture that has identified with "new" ever since Columbus, "old" gets the short end of the comparative stick, and it becomes ever more difficult to imagine oldness as a phenomenon apart from the lazy simplicities of conventional wisdom. To escape from the negativity of "old," don't leap for the new, which reviles the old as its opposite. Don't fall for thinking in opposites. That mistake continues to curses the New World of the American continents with its basic syndrome: addiction to newness and futurism, which makes anything "old" retro, passe---"a bucket of ashes," as America's American poet, Carl Sandburg, wrote. To escape the spell that the new casts on the old, dive into the old every which way you can: old ideas, old meanings, old faces, old things.
Oldness is an adventure. Stepping from the bathtub, hurrying to the phone, or just going down the stairs presents as much risk as traveling camelback in the Gobi desert. Once we were down the stairs and out the door way ahead of our feet. Now who knows when the trick knee will give out or the foot miss the tread. Once we learned from the fox and the hawk; now the walrus, the tortoise, and the moose in a dark bog are our mentors. The adventure of slowness
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The appreciation of any phenomenon calls for a phenomenological method. To know your mother, study 'her,' don't compare her with your father, or her sister, or the mother of someone else. Our approach tries to penetrate the phenomenon itself. We walk around it from many sides (circumambulation), expand it by turning up its volume (amplification), distinguish among its everyday appearances (differentiation). We want more of its character to shine forth; epiphanies, revelations. To inquire into oldness by thinking also about youth and freshness and the future diverts the inquiry into a study of opposites, rather than bringing us closer to the nature of oldness---that quality we feel in old things and places, meeting old friends, going to old movies, watching a pair of old hands at work.
The world nourishes when we feel its oldness. The human soul cannot draw very much from the New World of discoveries or from futurism's Brave New World, which makes nothing that lasts and whose swiftly obsolescent generations are far shorter than those humans enjoy. Not those worlds, but this old, old world; the very word "world" was once spelled 'wereald,' 'weorold': this nourishing place, so full of 'eald.'
It is as if "old" were hidden inside "world" much as the Gnostics' Sophia and the Kabbalists' Shekhinah were the soul concealed within the created world. Sophia and Shekhinah are figures of ageless wisdom, the intelligence of soul abiding in all things. As the soul of the world is an old soul, we cannot understand soul without a sense of old, or old without a sense of soul. . . .
Even when chipped, blunted, and threadbare from overuse, old things have acquired character---from familiarity, from utility, and sometimes from the beauty of luster, patina (a green or brown film) or design. Or simply from being old, the being of oldness. Without this sense of old as a state of being beyond beauty and utility, we cannot come easily into older years. Instead of the lasting that oldness signifies, the richness of accumulations coupled with the shedding of inessentials, we moderns take old only as the result of destructive time, as a last stage linked to death rather than to lastingness.
Old brings out character, gives character, and often substitutes for character in our common feelings. "That old house" means a house with a strong character, and "my old dog" refers to her character traits that are evident and familiar. I do not call the house old simply because it was built in 1851, or the dog because of her sixteen years. Numbers are impartial, applicable without feeling, and therefore are so useful for the uninvolved stance, whereas the adjective "old" bears emotions, and so I say "old" for things deeply loved and just as deeply reviled. The best I can say of someone, and the worst, is that he is old.
My granddaughter picks up a plate and I say, "Take care; that belonged to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother!" I am telling her that the plate is dear, rare, valuable, vulnerable. I am asking her to accommodate her young hands to its oldness. She has to adjust to its pace, handle it gently, walk it slowly across the room, feel its fragility. I am telling her that it has lasted and that it is valuable because it has lasted, proving its sturdy reliability and also its frailty. History has layered the plate with years of time, but it is not time alone that gives the feeling; it is the oldness as character, character as layering, a complexity that makes the plate unique and calls from us respect.
Aging opens the door to "old," and old age opens it yet wider. That could be its point. Can we know the world's oldness or enter into the character of anything until we are ourselves old? That the old are burdened with wisdom means that they know the ways of the world because they are old, as it is. They share the same state of being.
Wearing thin and wearing out, of course, but old also holds time affectionately. It loves years, decades, centuries. Old holds off change, bringing all old things nearer to permanence.
Time is not only destructive; it toughens as well as weakens. Time lasts; it keeps on going and going and going and therefore is no enemy of age or of old. But time is indeed destructive to youth, which it eats away and finally stops dead. So when we hear of the corruption caused by time, we are listening to youth speaking, not age.
The desert monks of early pious Christianity kept youth at a distance, warning of its danger to the older person's purpose. Youth brought in the demonic. The monks' warnings focused not merely on youthful unruly behavior, sexual attraction, and lack of studious knowledge. The pedophobia (fear of children) of the older monks acknowledged that the perspectives of youth were poison to the tasks of constructing their character, which required silence, compunction, self-control, endurance, vigilance, patience, and discretion.
The habits of the early English language seldom put youth and age together in the same phrase. Today, we compliment the elderly on their youthfulness, bringing the two archetypal kinds of existence in closest proximity and letting the empire of young colonize the old. But in Old English, the old and the new will rarely be found side by side. A hard line between the two must be kept: "Don't try to judge the old and the young, the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, or the learned and the lewd by the same rules," advises a psychology text of the time. To realize that old is like a species of its own, study an aged elephant or horse, your house cat or dog. See it for itself, as if the young of the species were of another breed.
What does an old monk have to say to an old person today? To stand as we are in our character as older people we need to keep youthful attitudes at arm's length. Maybe young people, too---not because their fresh bodies and vacant minds lure us toward them, but because we expend into their lives too much of our spiritual substance. If "old men ought to be explorers" because "here and there does not matter," as T. S. Eliot said, that exploration is of oldness itself, mapping that terrain and entering that kingdom.
We have a huge business to tend to, and with little profit. Reviewing our life for its character costs more than passing out free advice to young people as their supposed mentors. Mentors and elders are recognized for their character; they have character, are characters. Otherwise they are simply oldsters, a term that is derived from "youngsters" and that collapses old and young into a sterile hybrid of cheerful consumerism.
The plight of youth in contemporary culture energizes our compassion. The destitution of children and the exploitation of adolescents call us to step in and take part, for we are not ancient desert monks but living citizens. But what is our part? It is to incorporate oldness rather than to go along with a hypocritical culture that extols youthfulness while neglecting, trivializing, manipulating, and even imprisoning actual young people. We play the part the old have always played: preserving and transmitting knowledge and modeling on the ramparts of actual life the force of character.
Only if it's right to stick to our own last can I make sense of the terrifying, spontaneous pedophobia rising up in me at the noise of boys, their chase of fun and sleep and brand-new stuff; at a gaggle of girls, their breathy intonations and sullen reluctance; at the ignorance of youth that comes on as innocence; at the clothing, the manners, the music. I can so quickly become a crank, cruel, mean, and hateful, ruining every direct engagement with young people. If the task of old people is to enter civilization in young people's behalf, why does the old soul harbor this pocket of hatred? Must it not be purged?
I think blessed, instead. As with any symptom, we need to see its possible purpose. Pedophobia leaps up like an instinctual reaction. It functions protectively, keeping youth away. The monks say youth tempts the old from our principal occupations: character and our aging fate. Rather than blurring the distinctions between old and young, and confusing their different tasks, the sudden hatred says that companionship with youth, except in rare cases, cannot be our calling and leveling cannot be our mode; sharing is altogether illusory. Attending upon the character development of the young, important though it may be, is less our daily job than uncovering our own. To be fully old, authentic in our being and available in our presence with its 'gravitas' and eccentricity, indirectly affects the public good and thereby their good. This makes oldness a full-time job from which we may not retire.
This word or idea "old" that we old ones enact is more than a word and an idea. It is an image of compacted layers. The mind's eye can imagine old in the elephant, gnarled trees, Great-Aunt Evelyn wrapped in a blanket, the neighborhood alley before it was redeveloped. Images spring to mind. That is why "old" is the appropriate term for people in late life. They are called "old" not simply because of their aging, but because of their value as images of oldness.
On the one hand, life review is the study of one's personal biography and its main character who lived it, tells it as a story, and now reviews it as critic, appraiser, judge, inquisitor, and defendant. Life review is an activity that separates the strands of "old"---the aged sensibility, the olden times, the tottering body, the accumulated richness of days, the whitened head of the authoritative elder, the forgetful fumbling foolishness that lapses into fantasy. These strands of complexity give "old" its substance and present themselves together "in an instant of time," fulfilling Pound's definition of "image." Old age means arrival at the condition of an image, that unique image that is your character.
Far better than comparing "old" with external ideas like "fresh" and "young" would be teasing apart the web of ideas stuffed into that one short syllable. The Bible needs at least nine different Hebrew terms plus many variations, while our English language compacts them all together.
Olam = ancient olden times. Gedem = days of old, as before time. Rachoq = old as far away and long ago. For old people like Sarah and Job and for old counselors there is zagen. Ziqnah = old age. "Cast me not off in the time of old age;/When my strength faileth"---a theme restored in our time and reduced to personal love in the Beatles' line: "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four."
There is sebah, a good old age of gray hairs, full of days; balah, a sad one, worn out like old clothes. Then there is athaq, to be removed (advanced in years): "Wherefore do the wicked live,/Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?" Also, y'shiysh, to become very old, and yashan, which is said of old things like stored fruits, gates, pools.
These kinds of old, and more, course through us. These are the strands and rhythms of human complexity. One morning we feel we are a bag of bones, a tattered coat upon a stick; on another day, we belong to a time before time began, an anachronism as old as Methuselah. Some days we know ourselves as a number only: 76, 81, 91.
I am a forgotten castaway, a sharp-eyed wise man, still standing like an old gate, immersed in reminiscence of long ago and far away, enjoying wickedness and power, an old plaything of God like Sarah or Job. On yet another morning I awaken in fullness of my character and all the days of my life, tearful, grateful, and satisfied. My complexity cannot be reduced to any one of these strands. To be only a mean old man, or always a list of complaints, or a record-breaking centenarian of 105, or a head flowing with long white hair and issuing long tales of cautionary experiences is to reduce the uniqueness of character to the unity of a caricature. The Bible does not allow that monistic mistake.
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From Dictionary (Copyright © 2005 Apple Computer, Inc.):
caricature
noun
a picture, description, or imitation of a person or thing in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.
• the art or style of such exaggerated representation : there are elements of caricature in the portrayal of the hero.
• a ludicrous or grotesque version of someone or something : he looked like a caricature of his normal self.
verb [ transitive ] (usually: be caricatured)
make or give a comically or grotesquely exaggerated representation of (someone or something) : he was caricatured on the cover of TV Guide | a play that caricatures the legal profession.
DERIVATIVES
caricatural adjective
caricaturist noun
ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from French, from Italian caricatura, from caricare ‘load, exaggerate,’ from Latin carricare (see charge).
THE RIGHT WORD
Skilled writers and artists who want to poke fun at someone or something have a number of weapons at their disposal.
An artist might come up with a caricature, which is a drawing or written piece that exaggerates its subject's distinguishing features or peculiarities (: the cartoonist's caricature of the presidential candidate).
A parody is similar to a caricature in purpose, but is used of written work or performances that ridicule an author or performer's work by imitating its language and style for comic effect (: a parody of the scene between Romeo and Juliet). While a parody concentrates on distorting the content of the original work, a travesty retains the subject matter but imitates the style in a grotesque or absurd way ( their version of the Greek tragedy was a travesty).
A lampoon is a strongly satirical piece of writing that attacks or ridicules a person or an institution; it is more commonly used as a verb (: to lampoon the government in a local newspaper).
While a caricature, a parody, and a travesty must have a specific original to imitate, a burlesque can be an independent creation or composition; it is a broad comic or satiric imitation, often a theatrical one, that treats a serious subject lightly or a trivial subject with mock seriousness (: the play was a burlesque of ancient Rome).
Mimicry is something you don't have to be an artist, a writer, or an actor to be good at. Anyone who successfully imitates another person's speech or gestures is a good mimic or impressionist, whether the intent is playful or mocking (: he showed an early talent for mimicry, entertaining his parents with imitations of their friends).
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From Thesaurus:
caricature
noun
a caricature of the Baldwin brothers cartoon, parody, satire, lampoon, burlesque; informal: sendup, takeoff.
Verb
she has turned to caricaturing her fellow actors parody, satirize, lampoon, make fun of, burlesque, mimic; informal: send up, take off.
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monism
noun Philosophy & Theology
a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in some sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world.
• the doctrine that only one supreme being exists. Compare with pluralism.
DERIVATIVES
monist noun & adjective
monistic adjective
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from modern Latin monismus, from Greek monos ‘single.’
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Chapter 2 The Last Time
Last time I saw Chaplin, all he said was, "Stay warm. Stay warm." (Groucho Marx in conversation with Woody Allen)
Last chance, last minute, last round, Last inning, last exit, last ditch. Last rites, Last Supper, last days, Last Judgment. Last words, last breath. Last word, last laugh, last dance, last rose of summer, last good-bye. What an enormously weighty word! Why does it give such importance to the words it qualifies? And how does "last" bear on character? We shall have to find out.
Already I can tell you this: Our inquiry will aim deeper than the evident meaning of "the last time" as the end and therefore death. If that were all, the inquiry could stop here, satisfied with this banal result. Remember, we are eluding death all through this book, trying to prevent death from swallowing into its impenetrable darkness the light of intelligent inquiry. Death is a single stupefying generality that puts an end to our thinking about life. The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?
If a pair of socks helped us in the previous chapter, the fiction of a couple may help in this one.
"She just got into her car and drove off. That was the last time I saw her." How casually the moment slips by, blurring into the everyday. But when the simple action is marked by "last," the event becomes an indelible image. "Last" makes an event eventful, elevates it beyond the everyday, leaves a lasting impression. Last words become "famous," last moments enigmatic emblems to ponder for years to come.
Why? Because what happens at the end of a sequence stamps its closure, gives it finality. Reverberations of fate. The events that composed the marriage, the love affair, the life together become essentialized into the last scene. She gets into her car and drives off. To her death in an accident? To another city and a new start? To another lover? Home to Mother? Back to her husband and children? Where she drives to belongs more to the next story than to the last scene of this fiction of a jointly attempted life.
Had she returned later as on any other day, the image of her getting into her car would have no significance and therefore would not last. But now it tells of character: The abiding character of the relationship---its commitment to casualness; its apparent openness, which conceals truth. Or it reveals her rebellious independence; or her adventurous courage; or her failure of nerve; or her diffident coldness. . . . It says something about his character, too---the unspoken feelings; the dulled sensitivity that cannot perceive and does not foresee. Their character together, his, hers---all compressed and expressed, at last, as she drives off.
So the last time is more than information for a detective's report. "Just the facts." She does, in fact, just get into her car and drive away. But the last time transforms the facts into an image. The impression of her at the curb as the ignition catches lasts because it is compressed into a significant image, a poetic moment. Other times are held captive by the last time and everlastingly signified.
Poetry depends on compression for its impact. The word for poet in German is 'Dichter,' one who makes things 'dicht' (thick, dense, compact). A poetic image compresses into a snapshot a particular moment characteristic of a larger whole, capturing its depth, complexity, and importance. By putting closure to a series of events that otherwise could run on and on, the last time is outside serial time, transcendent.
This kind of moment is hard to bear and hard to relinquish. It feeds nostalgia, coming back to mind, a refrain that will not let go. Older age makes room for what T. S. Eliot refers to as "the evening with the photograph album," snapshots that bring back a world. Gerontology names these evenings "life review" and claims that they are the main calling of later years. Since anyone at any age can slip into nostalgic reverie, "later years" can be taken less literally, to mean a poetic state of soul favored by the old but not exclusive to them.
The last time turns love, pain, despair, and habit into poetry. It puts a stop to, arrests forward motion, and lifts life out of itself. This is transcendence. We feel shaken to the bones, as if the gods had stepped into the middle of our lives.
Transcendence of the daily does not occur until the epiphany of the last time. She got into her car every day. The last time becomes utterly different. In no succession of events do we imagine any one moment to be the last. We can always come back another time, do this again. "The last time" says there is no "again." The last time is unique, singular, fateful. Pop lyrics play on this poetic moment: "The days dwindle down to a precious few, September. . . ." (Maxwell Anderson); "The last time we saw you . . ." (Leonard Cohen); "The last time I saw Paris" (Oscar Hammerstein); "Last time I saw him" (Pamela Sawyer); "This could be the last time . . ." (Jagger and Richards---the Rolling Stones); "The last time I saw George alive . . ." (Rod Stewart). "Again, this couldn't happen again. . ."; etc. Each scene of life may be a last time, like the morning she drove off in her car.
To call the last time unique, singular, and fateful makes it sound inevitable and necessary, as if she drove off because it was determined by her character. If character is fate, as Heraclitus said, then this was her day to die. Or she had to cut out, because "that's just the kind of freewheeling person she was; we should have expected it." Yet it might have been a spontaneous impulse to which her character gave in: "Enough is enough; I'm out of here." A whim, seemingly out of character. We can't know. For us the story stops as the car pulls away.
Right here, we have to be careful. Character could become an iron law, permitting only those acts that are "in character." In that case, the idea of character engenders little waves of repression. "It's not my nature to do this, think that, want those, behave like this." Is there no room for the spontaneous, for moments of speaking, thinking, and feeling quite "out of character"? The answer depends on how we think about character.
I would claim that nothing is out of character. Character is inescapable; if anything were truly out of character, what would its source be? What stands behind a whim? Who pushes the urge and ignites an impulse? Whence do stray thoughts arise? Whims emerge from the same soul as choices and are as much part of your character as any habit. That last time belonged to her just as all the other times did. Belonged to her? Which "her"?
Her character must consist in 'several' characters---"partial personalities," as psychology calls these figures who stir your impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what you would not, who push and pull you off the beaten track, whose truth breaks through after a carafe of wine in a strange town. Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. That's why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight.
I like to imagine a person's psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.
Fitting them in is called by Jungian psychologists integration of the shadow personalities. Fitting them in, however, means first of all finding them fitting, suitable to your idea of your character. The Jungian ideal calls for a more integrated character, for the full boardinghouse with no exclusions. This may require conversion of the more disreputable and obstreperous (unruly, rowdy) to the morals of the majority, an integration leading to the integrity of the matured character.
These noble ideals are better in the recipe than on the table, for old people, as Yeats wrote and Pound demonstrated, are often disheveled, intemperate, whimsical, and closer to chaos than to the sober well-honed wisdom that the idea of integration suggests. The integrity of character is probably not so unitary; rather, the full company is onstage as at the end of the opera, when the chorus, the dancers, the leads, and the conductor take their uncoordinated bows. Life wants the whole ensemble, in flagrante delicto (adverb: in the very act of wrongdoing, esp. in an act of sexual misconduct). Even the cover-ups belong to the character.
The study of how each of these characters belongs is a main activity of later years, when "life review" consumes more and more of our hours. Whether going through piles of papers and closets of things, or regaling grandchildren with stories, or attempting to write autobiography, obituary, and history, we try to compress life's meanders and accidents into a "character study." That's why we need so many later years and why, as the days shorten, more and more evenings are absorbed in the photograph album. Regardless of whether contrition (remorse), nostalgia, or vindictiveness marks our feeling as we turn the pages, we are as engrossed in study as if for a final exam.
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