Age before beauty

This week’s dispatch is in praise of age. Yes, young bloom and exuberance and teenage rage will always have their allure. That fine old man of letters Mr Cohen once remarked that the culture understands there’s nothing so compelling as the sight of a naked woman at the height of her reproductive powers. But there’s also something very powerful about passion and anger beating in an old breast, as illustrated by Yeats’s poem ‘The Spur’: “You think it horrible that lust and rage/Should dance attention upon my old age/They were not such a plague when I was young/What else have I to spur me into song?”

Back in the ‘80s, we saw Muddy Waters in The Last Waltz and could only marvel at his unassailable old geezer cool. Cue that chestnut about the two bulls standing on a hill overlooking a field of cows. The young bull says, “Let’s run down there and nail one of them heifers.” The old bull says, “No, let’s walk down there and nail ‘em all.”
But the silent old fogeys, they’re the ones to watch. The ones who know. A line that stuck in my head many years ago, from a John Montague poem: “Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.” Aged, immovable, all-knowing.
Many of us first encountered Emperor Marcus Aurelius as played by Richard Harris in Gladiator. Investigate the old stoic’s maxims and you’ll get a potent dose of commonsense. “A cucumber is bitter,” he said. “Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, ‘And why were such things made in the world?’” Or his exhortations for us, “not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human – however imperfectly – and fully embrace the pursuit you’ve embarked on. Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years… Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”
So here’s to the justified and ancient, to the venerable and the evergreen, whether it’s Louise Bourgeois or Peter O’Toole, Jeanne Moreau or Neil Young, Cormac McCarthy or Toni Morrison. Or Stanley Kunitz, who, in his ninth decade, wrote: “I am not done with my changes.”
Now that’s real rebellion.