Octogenarian

“ An octogenarian with a good record, and free from annoying or distressing infirmities, ought to be the happiest of men. Everybody treats him with deference. Everybody wants to help him. He is the ward of the generations that have grown up since he was in the vigor of maturity. Yes, let me live to be fourscore years, and then I will tell you whether I should like a few more years or not. ”

“ As we grow old we see that nothing, after all, matters as much as we had thought. Smith finds comfort in the fact that, according to the census of 1900, one in every two hundred becomes an octogenarian and that out of a population of 36,800,000 there were 176,571 reputed to be 80 years of age or over. ”

“ When not only our habits but our ideas have become fixed, then we have grown old. An octogenarian may be young, if he has preserved the faculty of modifying his conceptions in correspondence with new evidence. ”

“ But if one lives to seventy he soon gets used to the text with the threescore years and ten in it, and begins to count himself among those who by reason of strength are destined to reach fourscore, of whom he can see a number still in reasonably good condition. The octogenarian loves to read about people of ninety and over. He peers among the asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the University for the names of graduates who have been seventy years out of college and remain still unstarred. He is curious about the biographies of centenarians. ”

“ It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder. We only need to focus upon you a little more completely. ”

“ Yet nowadays we frequently see in our cities those who have reached this age; octogenarians and nonagenarians are often to be met with, and no one is surprised, or offers sacrifices to them. If you recall Varro to me, or Cato, or others who reached their hundredth year, or Gorgias of Leontium who greatly exceeded that age, I have other modern instances to set off against them. ”

“ We look upon a centenarian as a miracle of longevity, and he is careful to tell us his age if he have not lost the power of speech; but if the coats of poor men could speak, how much more marvellous in our eyes would their powers of life appear! ”

“ Every age has produced a few long-lived men, and here and there a centenarian."
"The question of importance is not whether this age is yielding more centenarians than former ages, but whether, on the average, the age of man is longer than it was, and if so, how much longer? The grounds for an increased longevity—better doctors and more of them, better drainage, more wholesome food, wiser habits, and better facilities for [Pg 73] securing change of air—justify the belief that life is lengthening, to what degree it is hard to say. ”

“ Some years ago I became interested in cases of extreme longevity, particularly of centenarianism, and for some months every conversation seemed to lead to this topic, and every magazine and newspaper offered some new item about old people. ”

“ We are both so old, so old, Ottilie.... He must have forgiven us by now. Else we should never have grown so old. Our life has passed peacefully for years: long, long, old years; nothing has ever disturbed us: he must have forgiven us.... ”

“ I shall be satisfied and I shall grow old, quietly, quietly old...."
"Oh, Ottilie, and I ... I suffer from growing old, from growing older."
"Lot, that's a disease. You're happy now, you have Elly, life is beautiful, there is sunshine, there is happiness. Take all that, enjoy it and be happy and don't think of what is to come."
"Don't you then ever think of growing old and of the horror of it?"
"I do think of growing old, but I don't see anything horrible in it."
"If Aldo were to leave you to-morrow, you would be alone ... and you would grow old." ”

“ The paths of glory lead but to the grave. We are not, therefore, surprised at the implicit belief in such records in times gone by, when no populous village in England was without a man or woman of fourscore years old. It has, however, become of late a matter of some moment to inquire into the authority on which statements of extreme old age have usually rested; and the result has been to shake the testimony of many recorded cases of great longevity. ”

“ Several recent circumstances have fixed attention on the great prominence of Old Age as a feature of our time:—Old Age, not coddled in cotton-wool, and kept warm by the fireside, but active, intelligent, efficient, and agreeable;—not only venerable through wealth of years, but admirable in its own character. Physiologists and statisticians tell us that the longevity of our own nation improves,—a marked increase in the length of life having been established within this century ”

“ At fifty a man is wrinkled, and may be bald or gray;
I call men old at fifty, in spite of all they say.
At last comes another August with mist and rain and shine;
Its mornings are slowly counted and creep to twenty-nine,
And when on the western summits the fading light appears,
It touches with rosy fingers the last of my fifty years.
There have been both men and women whose hearts were firm and bold,
But there never was one of fifty that loved to say "I'm old;"
So any elderly person that strives to shirk his years,
Make him stand up at a table and try him by his peers. ”

“ There is nothing so comforting to the middle-aged as a stroll through a cemetery of centenarians; and I had the most uncharitable feelings against the person who could make such an attempt to deprive me of the pleasant hope of living another sixty or seventy years. ”

“ I have witnessed every sort of dutiful and beautiful care of the aged; and none with more respect and admiration than that in which the children—themselves elderly—have been the managers, as well as the nurses, of their parents; yet I have never got over the painful kind of surprise of the spectacle,—the violation of all one’s associations of deference with age, and one’s feelings of the sacredness of the liberty and the will of one’s elders. ”

“ The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. ”

“ As charity has always been praised as a virtue, it is now becoming also a science, and the peculiar nature and needs of old age are being better understood, although there is yet very much to be done in studying this stage of life which has in the past been so neglected and misunderstood. We are now far more ignorant of senescence than of adolescence, childhood, or middle age, but it is quite as unique, on the whole, and more apart than any of these other periods. ”

“ Then Old Man said, "This will never do. There'll be people after a while. Something has to be done for them." So Old Man sent Sun, Moon, and the Stars up into the sky. He made them just what they are now. He said to them, "Henceforth you shall not desert people nor hide yourselves; you shall remain where everybody can see you, either by day or by night." ”

“ When people said that he would die a centenarian, he used to think, like another illustrious old man, that no limit can be appointed to the goodness of Providence, The only sign that he was growing old was that he was more easily brought to tears, and was becoming every day more irritable. ”

“ Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a new vitality, physical and mental. ”

“ A young fellow slaps his companion on the shoulder and calls him ‘old man.’ The grey-haired veteran always addresses his elderly friend as ‘my boy.’”
“Under which category do you think you come, then?”
“Well, I don’t come under either exactly. I am sort of on the middle ground. I sometimes feel very old. In fact, to confess to you, I never felt older in my life than I did yesterday. Today I am a great deal younger.”
“Dear me,” replied the young lady, “I am sorry to hear that.” ”

“ The present horror of anything elderly comes, probably, from the fact that the preceding generation went to the other extreme, young women retiring at forty into becapped old age. Knowing how easily our excitable race runs to exaggeration, one trembles to think what surprises the future may hold, or what will be the next decree of Dame Fashion. Having eliminated the “old lady” from off the face of the earth, how fast shall we continue down the fatal slope toward the ridiculous? ”

“ But when he grows old—ah, then the saga is over. There is always a melancholy in old age, and nowhere more than here. These kindly old men have also in their day known strength and youth—times when they were the pillars of their little society. ”

“ Perhaps of all the young people we knew not one will accompany the late survivors. Old age is a benefaction because service to it ennobles all who render it. When wrinkles come in the mind, one sings, the old is ever old ”

“ My friends would be dead, or old, old people who had long forgotten me. Of what use would all this wealth be to me an old and forgotten friendless man. Old! yes, I must be an old, old man myself. And yet, now the fever had gone, I felt strong and vigorous indeed, the doctor had said that I was exceptionally strong and that I was not forty and the Consul too had said I was a "young, strong man!" ”

“ Thus few reach old age. Were it otherwise, affairs would be better and more discreetly managed; for old men have mind and reason and practical wisdom; and if there were none of them, communities could not hold together. But to return to impending death,—can this be urged as a charge against old age, when you see that it belongs to it in common with youth? I felt in the death of my most excellent son, [86] and equally, Scipio, in that of your brothers, [87] who were born to the expectation of the highest honors, that death is common to all ages. ”

“ Many modern writers, like Cicero’s Cato, ascribe great efficacy to the accumulated examples of old men who have achieved exceptional success late in life, not only in business, arts, and letters but in the greatest art of all, that of conserving health and youth. We can easily conceive of a new temple of fame to immortalize those who have mastered the art of deferring senility and death. ”

“ Careful investigation has thrown doubt almost amounting to disproof on the much-quoted cases of great longevity, such as that of Thomas Parr, the Shropshire peasant, who was supposed to have reached his hundred and fifty-third year, and, although the existence of centenarians is thoroughly established, any ages exceeding a hundred by more than two or three years are, at the most, dubious. ”

“ Listen to the young ’un,’ said the old man at last, with a quaver in his voice. ‘But I’m glad you take it like this, my boy. We’re old folks, and we’re growing older every day. We’d like to live just to see you settled for yourself in the world. ”

“ You see old men without an ounce of fat on their bodies, their skin loose on their bones, wizened, their little faces wrinkled and apelike, with hair thin and grey; and they totter under their burdens to the edge of the grave in which at last they shall have rest. And still the coolies go, not exactly running, but not walking either, sidling quickly, with their eyes on the ground to choose the spot to place their feet, and on their faces a strained, anxious expression. ”

“ An observer of how old age is neglected in America said to me the other day, "It seems an impertinence to be alive after sixty on this side of the globe"; and I have often thought how much we lose by not cultivating fine old-fashioned ladies and gentlemen. Our aged relatives and friends seem to be tucked away, nowadays, into neglected corners, as though it were the correct thing to give them a long preparation for still narrower quarters. ”

“ Happily for her dawning senescence, it is one of the great achievements of our age that she has found a splendid vicarious function in culture and new social, vocational, professional, and political services, so that she can now give to mankind much that is best in her that was once confined to the narrower sphere of domestic life, and be little or none the worse but perhaps the better for it. ”

“ III. This fatal stroke spoken of in the text may be our exit from this world. I hear aged people sometimes saying: "I can't live much longer." But do you know the fact that there are a hundred young people and middle-aged people who go out of this life to one aged person, for the simple reason that there are not many aged people to leave life? The aged seem to stand around like stalks—separate stalks of wheat at the corner of the field; but when death goes a-mowing, he likes to go down amid the thick of the harvest. ”

“ I said to him, ‘I hope, sir, that you do not feel yourself unwell.’—‘Unwell!’ he replied, ‘to be sure I do. I am an old man; and old age is a disease that must end in death.’—‘But, sir,’ said I again, ‘though you may be advanced in years, yet you enjoy a tolerably good state of health ”

“ Oh, I hope, if I should live to be over fifty, that I may be a pleasant old person. I hope my teeth will fit me, and the parting to my wave be always in the middle. I hope my fingers will always come fully to the ends of my gloves, and that I never shall wear my spectacles on top of my head. ”

“ Speaking of old age, he remarks that the hair of some men ripens sooner than that of others, but that our heads must all grow grey as our brains get thin. He discourses on anatomy, food, digestion, the advisability of lying down on the left side for twenty minutes after meals, and on many things in heaven and earth which are not dreamed of in our philosophy. As the morning wears on, the old man, who is not accustomed to sitting on chairs, begins to fidget, and shows signs of a desire to gather up his feet into the seat and nurse them. ”

“ We certainly have not yet heard the last word from zoölogy which, while stressing the hereditary factors, for example, and individual longevity, must admit that old age in general is a more or less acquired character. ”