How many cases do we know of someone singing old age? Unlikely. The only exception is Leo Tolstoy: «I never thought that old age is so beautiful.» And even then — was it not cunning?
They say that in old age not only carnal desires dry out, but also all sorts of other thoughts. The world is shrinking. Old people are treated with pity, they are laughed at, and they themselves are advised to save themselves by laughter.
It is difficult to dispute any of this, generally speaking. But it seems to me that the trouble not only for the elderly, but for the whole society is that we have no idea of the value of old age. Where? We know almost nothing about the state of mind of old people and about how they see life, what they understood in it beyond our young understanding. The young man obviously imagines that nothing but boring teachings, idealization of past times, or, on the contrary, glorification of the suffering suffered, can not be expected from the old man.
People talk so little about the essentials among themselves. Art could tell about this, but all the old men in literature are written by young people. Few people lived to a creative, full-fledged old age, which could tell about themselves. Perhaps it is only today that this becomes possible.
I remember the book of our first gerontologist and Nobel laureate Ilya Mechnikov «Etudes of Optimism» (Nauka, 1987). He argued that with the right lifestyle, a person can live up to 120 years and die without fear of death. The book was a huge success, but there were also skeptics: can longevity be the highest goal of life? These people did not notice the main thing in Mechnikov’s book. The strict scientist mentioned this main thing only once, talking about the death of his elder brother Ivan Ilyich.
My brother was 45 years old, and the thought of death frightened him for a long time. But in the end he reconciled, telling himself that since everyone must die, then, «in essence, there is only one quantitative difference between death at 45 years old or later.» This thought, of course, eased the suffering, and yet, in the opinion of Ilya Ilyich, the elder brother was wrong. At different ages, the feeling of life is very different, after 45 years a person experiences many sensations that were previously unknown to him: “Soul evolution in old age takes a significant step forward. Even without accepting the hypothesis of the instinct of natural death, which completes normal life, one cannot deny that youth is only a preparatory stage and that only at a certain age does the soul reach its full development.
It seems to me that this is very close to the truth. And then old age is not only difficult, but also a priceless time, and we will learn something completely new about life when the old people speak.