Middle-aged man

“ Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood, or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age. There are no other states. Frequently there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and the setting in, in the case of the middle-aged man, of the tendency toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly balanced and there is little doing in either direction. ”

“ And what the middle-aged and old have to do is to feed the young, to encourage them, laugh at them, give them health and strength and brains, such as they are, to stiffen them, to be patient with them, and for them, not to lie down and let the young trample, but to work with them, behind them, around them—above all, to love them, to clear the ground for them, to sympathize and understand them, and to tell them, if they shouldn't see it, that they have such a chance, such an opportunity, as has never before been given to the son of man. ”

“ In my middle forties business associates have asked me for the recipe for perennial youth. Before reaching my fortieth year, possibly no other male was so horrified as myself at the thought of waning youth and approaching old age. But now (1918) , in my middle forties, I am reconciled to growing old.
I am rather vain, and have been guilty of contemplating my reflection in a mirror. Prior to my middle forties I was of a bashful disposition and lacked self-confidence, except when following out my fairie instincts. ”

“ Shall well-trained old men, then, fear what youth, and they not only untrained, but even fresh from the country, despise?—In fine, satiety of life, as it seems to me, creates satiety of pursuits of every kind. There are certain pursuits belonging to boyhood; do grown-up young men therefore long for them? There are others appertaining to early youth; are they required in the sedate period of life which we call middle age? This, too, has its own pursuits, and they are not sought in old age. ”

“ It is only by an effort that I can think of myself as running toward middle age. If I meet a stranger, usually, by a pleasant deception, I think myself the younger, and because of an old-fashioned deference for age I bow and scrape in the doorway for his passage. ”

“ There are old men whose manner and bearing are infinitely more attractive than the self-satisfied, self-relying composure of our modern young ones. Any thing, however, even boyish awkwardness, is preferable to your middle-aged gentleman, who, with a slight bald spot on his head, and a very permanent flush on his cheek, adds the stately pomp of his forty autumns to a levity that has no touch of younger days. ”

“ It seems to me that our great problem, or rather our chief concern, should not be so much how to stay young in the sense of possessing all the attributes of youth, for the passing of the years does bring changes, but how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently, [Pg 41] and with undiminished vigour from youth to middle age, and then how to carry that middle age into approaching old age, with a great deal more of the vigour and the outlook of middle life than we ordinarily do. ”

“ The enthusiasms of my youth had given place not to cynicism but to weary sadness. It was perhaps unfortunate for myself that I had no cynicism.
Very well. In other words, a disinterested observer might say: You became middle-aged--the common lot--and dyspeptic: the usual penalty of sedentary life. But there is a difference. If middle age brings to most, as no doubt it does, some failure of health and a notable attenuation of aims, desires, ambitions, and zest, does it not also bring some satisfaction in the present? ”

“ Middle age, with few exceptions, looks upon new clothes with abated interest. Old clothes, like old customs, fit easy. Comfort, anyhow, says middle age—appearances as the gods please; so new shoes lie on the shelf unworn for weeks, for fear of stiff heels or squeaky soles; and new clothes look and feel so spick-and-span and glossy, that middle age can no more say or do a natural thing in them, than the boy could spell right "before he had got the hang of the new school-house;" middle age resents this petty, fretting intrusion on its much-loved quiet. ”

“ So a series of sad persecutions took place.
It became the land of extreme youth. Middle age was merely a struggle; old age was a time when failure could not be disguised, or a time of success which did not satisfy. ”

“ What the child is, that the middle-aged person and the old man will be also. The reason of this appears to be sufficiently obvious: the unchanging personality that grows not old, the animating spiritual “ego,” is there, and practically identical at all periods of life. ”

“ A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. ”

“ But the middle span of life is like a cantilever bridge: if it can bear its own weight it is expected to bear anything that can possibly be put upon it. "Old age deferred" has no attractions for me. I decline to be middle-aged. I much prefer to be old. ”

“ Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. ”

“ A MIDDLE-AGED MAN, whose hair had begun to turn gray, courted two women at the same time. One of them was young, and the other well advanced in years. The elder woman, ashamed to be courted by a man younger than herself, made a point, whenever her admirer visited her, to pull out some portion of his black hairs. The younger, on the contrary, not wishing to become the wife of an old man, was equally zealous in removing every gray hair she could find. Thus it came to pass that between them both he very soon found that he had not a hair left on his head.
Those who seek to please everybody please nobody. ”

“ The reason they thought to be that the interests of age have contracted to about the same scope as those of childhood before it has expanded into maturity. The skein of life is drawn together to a point at the two ends and spread out in the middle. ”

“ And thus, in a word, whatever advantages youth and age have divided between them, the middle age possesses both.”
We must admit that Aristotle, who has so admirably depicted young and old men, is weak on the subject of manhood. ”

“ But old age has its joys and pleasures as keen as youth or adult age, if the youth and adult ages were lived sanely, worthily and properly.
If middle age is spent in getting dollars only, then old age will be days of empty nothingness.
Youth is the planning time of ideals and ambitions, middle age the building time and old age the dividend time.
With many, old age is reading the book of the past, with sadness as the reader recognizes that the ideals, plans and hopes were shattered. As age turns the page in the book of the past he reads one hope after another vanished in smoke. ”

“ Age, like most things, is relative. When one is in one’s teens forty appears senility; when one approaches forty it wears quite another aspect,—a comfortably matured, youthful aspect compared with which the teens are puerile. The heart defies wrinkles. I resent being described as middle-aged: it tempts me to the committal of youthful follies.”
They had reached the end of the path and were beyond the circle of light from the stoep. Dare brought up abruptly, and instead of turning, halted, and faced her in the gloom of the overhanging trees. ”

“ No fool like an old fool.” “Every age has pleasures sufficient which are appropriate to it, and these alone should be sought after.” If youth respects the laws of nature, old age is very tolerable. It brings many compensations for losses, and although not likely to be so happy as the best of middle life, it should be and often is superior in this respect to youth. ”

“ To the old we wish the ease which belongs to the dignity of years, and that degree of health which makes the twilight of life delightful.
To the middle-aged we wish the maturity of intellect which secures wisdom to plans, and success to efforts. ”

“ Barring the single blue necktie and the pajamas, I drifted into and have stuck to blacks and browns and the least ostentatious cuts until my own wife and children have felt called upon to proclaim me fusty.
To tell the truth, I had been more or less conscious for some time of my degeneration in this respect, but it is no easy matter to escape from a rut when one is middle-aged. ”

“ On the other hand, I think we detect, not only in these returns but in life, a tendency to prefer associates of the next generation, that is, those of such an age that they might have been our own children. Some old men especially state that they prefer the society of men of middle life and it has often been thought that young teachers are best for young and older teachers for older children and that the young have a certain attraction for those near the age limits of their parents. ”

“ On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. ”

“ I see a crowd of older people, men and women dull, uninterested. "We are no longer young," they say, "we are middle-aged or elderly. And we have ceased looking forward. We have lost the vision. We have not become as great as we expected, or as good as we expected. ”

“ They are old enough now—such of them as survive to this day. None of that group who yet lives will ever see seventy-five again. In those times grown people would have called them middle-aged men, or, at the most, elderly men ”

“ Both are really matters of the spirit, rather than of years. One may be aged at twenty, and a youth at eighty.
The spirit of youth has courage, is venturesome, progressive, optimistic, creative. The spirit of old age is afraid, reactionary, pessimistic, and stagnant. Youth laughs. Old age sighs. Youth is eager to discover new paths. Old age wants to stay in the prison of habit and travel the same old ruts.
I had been traveling in ruts. And I had worn them deep. For twenty years I had let myself live in the same old dark apartment, and take the same old route to the same old printing-plant. ”

“ I suppose you have seen thirty years. It has been my experience, albeit I’m but fifteen years your senior and not therefore as old as a hill, that no man uproots a habit after he has reached middle age. ”

“ The men who furnish this category with us are neither young nor old, they are the middle-aged, retaining some of the spring and elasticity of youth, but far more inclining to the solidity of riper years. ”

“ There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in life’s lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile, like most kings. ”

“ Cold and bare is youth without the glow of generous idealism. Con{11}temptible is middle age without the sense of definite attachments and the willing acceptance of limitations. And ungracious and unlovely is old age if it be not illumined by the light of contemplation, if it be not fruitful in counsel. ”

“ It is something cruelly incomprehensible to youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderly people, whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent, to whose faces a smile becomes so strange that the sad lines all about the lips and brow seem to take no notice of it, and it hurries away again for want of a welcome. “Why will they not kindle up and be glad sometimes?” thinks young elasticity. “It would be so easy if they only liked to do it.” ”

“ In the latter is included what middle-aged men call the rational attachment, the charm of congenial minds, as well as the homely and warmer accumulation of little memories of simple kindness, or the mere brute habitude of seeing a face as one would see a chair. ”

“ For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; ”

“ Change is the greatest regulator. We now relegate older men to innocuous desuetude to give the younger a chance to forge ahead.
As to the proper sphere of the aged, there have been opposite views. Perhaps there are no more than five hundred really great men in history who were clearly above mediocrity. ”

“ There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the 'threshold of old age'—Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it? ”

“ how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. ”

“ In this stratum of society, although the young are often underfed and the middle aged overworked, the old have the hardest time. The burden of the aged falls hardest upon the children, who must get a work certificate as soon as possible to help feed their grandparents. The old generally have a horror of going to an institution ”

“ It is because the young cannot recognize the youth of the aged, and the old will not acknowledge the experience of the young, that they repel each other. ”

“ The middle-aged men evidently feel that he will make no mistake worth noticing, and so go to sleep as calmly as though they were at BOOTH'S THEATRE. The middle-aged ladies contemplate the dresses of their neighbors, and the young people flirt with cautious glances. ”