We are coming down from a very self-indulgent weekend. Our actual sixtieth wedding anniversary was in early June, but as it was only two days before the wedding of our granddaughter Sophia and her husband Raymond, it was decided in family conclave that the “official” anniversary celebration be postponed for about six weeks until a time was available when the whole family could once again reconvene. Although the pandemic has somewhat slowed down the globetrotting of its younger members, it is still not easy to get all Flemings on the same continent at any particular moment. This past weekend, however, found everybody here save for granddaughters Lulu, who is helping somebody mount an art show in Paris, and Ruby, who is at a non-negotiable summer camp. These serious lacunae were in some ways compensated for by the happy fact that the whole family of Joan’s niece Elizabeth and Alan Dignam, normally resident in Cambridge but fortuitously in the States for a vacation, were able to be at the celebrative dinner. Eighteen of us in all dined under awnings at Mediterra, an upscale eatery in the center of Princeton. I felt like a patriarch of old with my own fig tree and shade-giving grapevine. I think we both are feeling rather old, but in a pleasant way. For just as children can be injured by being made to grow up too fast, the elderly can abuse themselves by failing to acknowledge their antiquity.
I cannot help but think about this in terms of our disturbing politics. After two years of heroic silence on the subject, the New York Times has finally discovered and found worthy of mention that President Biden is an old guy in a very demanding job requiring physical energy, mental acuity, and elementary linguistic coherence that he does not now possess. Whether the press is leading or following the likewise geriatric leadership of the Democrats in Congress in this realization, a general awareness seems to have emerged, with a panic brewing in certain quarters that he appears ready to run for a second term. I have no personal animus against Joe Biden. I voted for him. He was in my opinion elected for who he was not more than for who he is, and he has persevered in not being Donald Trump. I believe that has been a useful achievement, but not one in itself sufficient to address our very difficult problems, some of them indeed insoluble, nor even mitigable, without a spirit of national self-effacing cooperation not to be found in our ailing politics today. Why cannot Mr. Biden be allowed his own fig-tree and grapevine? Why must he be forced to fly about the globe fist-bumping with autocrats or stare dully into a teleprompter, puzzling over the three-syllable words? I feel sorry for him. I know what it’s like to need a nap or forget a name or lose your place while reading a document. He ought to be at the beach, or in a Florida condo, or at a black-tie dinner getting an award for the latest service of his post-political career as the honorary chairman of notable charitable enterprises. In sensible societies seniors, the old guard, the elders, los viejos, are venerated for their achievements and sometimes sought out for their wisdom but relieved of the obligation of having to pretend they are still young by trying to rush up to the podium.
Being old is a sufficient occupation on its own. Old age, life’s final stage, is unlike all the others in the degree of its necessary unpredictability and capriciousness. In any event that has been my experience of it. Not too many authors have taken it head-on. Great stories of youth are a dime a dozen, one of the greatest, indeed, being Conrad’s Youth. Old Age, on the other hand, is a subject to avoid. Who can forget the chilling final lines of the “Seven Ages of Man Speech” in As You Like It, that thus rounds out life’s pattern: “Last scene of all, /That ends this strange eventful history, /Is second childishness and mere oblivion; /Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Mere oblivion. Dr. Alois Alzheimer had not yet appeared on the scene. And Arnold Bennett’s truly great novel The Old Wives’ Tale, which terrified me when I was twenty, I would not dare reread today. But there is at least one great treatment of the subject: Cicero’s On Old Age (De senectute), an essay written in the voice of the sage Cato, imagined to be about my own current age. That would make him a real Ancient of Days in his historical setting. Cato does not pussyfoot around in identifying the downers: the first of all, the necessary retirement from public life with the likelihood of infirmity, always potential and frequently actual; then the disappearance of old pleasures, the growing awareness of the proximity of death, followed of course by the thing itself. But he insists also on a philosophical maturation—I would call it spiritual growth—that can lead to a more mature wisdom and the more mature pleasures of the mind of which Cicero speaks.
The ancients saw their ideal world in terms of harmony and hierarchy, principles they thought they found everywhere in Nature. A place for everything, and everything in its place. All parts of the ideal world were linked, or as we say, connected. Existence was according to one favorite image a Great Chain of Being. I prefer Chaucer’s phraseology: the fair chain of love. And though human beings exist in dazzling variety and have organized themselves in myriad ways, what is called the nuclear family with its biological basis in stable heterosexual mating, its economic basis in cooperation, and its spiritual basis in love, has a pretty impressive record of ubiquity and longevity. Sixty years seems a long time until you compare it with sixty generations, and sixty behind that of productive familial transition. But as Dr. Johnson remarked, precept is generally posterior to performance. At our anniversary dinner we were having no such lofty philosophical musings, surrounded by the energy, ambition, promise and achievement of our wonderful children and grandchildren, happily conversing and laughing as we downed a good meal in a happy setting. We were not required to try to jog up any podium stairs, or to fist-bump even a tolerable tyrant. Mostly we were exchanging a few highlights of happy memories too numerous to count. It was all very age-appropriate. I was not trying to run anything. I had had to arrange nothing, or even pay for it. All Joan and I had to do was show up. Then we could just sit there and bask in a seniority sentimental rather than executive in its nature. Naturally, my favorite lines from Tennyson, ones from the “Morte d’Arthur” once again came to mind. It is the response of the old king to Sir Bedivere as the latter laments the dissolution of the Round Table. The ailing king says this: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” We do hope, of course, that we really have been a good custom. There’s less doubt surrounding the new order.
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