Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Preparing for Old Age

      It is said that Socrates was once asked by a pupil, this question: "What kind of people shall we be when we reach Elysium?"   And the answer he was given was this: "We shall be the same kind of people that we were here."

     When I was younger my father, who I didn’t consider a well-educated man at the time, once told me: “Son, if you live long enough, you’ll be old!”  How true his words have turned out to be!

     Have you ever asked yourself, “What kind of a man shall I be tomorrow?”  “Oh, about the same kind of a man that I am now”, should be your answer.  The kind of a man (or woman) that I shall be next month depends upon the kind of a man (or woman) that I am preparing myself to be this month.

     If I am miserable today, it is not within the round of probabilities that I shall be supremely happy tomorrow. You have probably heard it said, “Practice makes perfect.”  However, you can “practice” something WRONG all day long and you will not be any closer to perfection than you were when you started.  You cannot do the same thing over and over again the same way and expect to get a different result!

     Everyday life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none!  This may sound strange, but consider: “If you want your life to improve and be better when you are older, you must begin NOW to make it that way in the future.  How many of us have looked back on our lives and wished that we had done things differently when we were younger?  There’s probably more of us than want to admit it.

     In this present world, we are preparing all the time for old age. From the moment of our birth, we begin to age.  That is a biological fact!  There are none of us who can escape it.  However, being older doesn’t have to the “down” side of our lives.  The two things that make old age beautiful are resignation and a just consideration for the rights of others.

     In the play of Ivan the Terrible, the interest centers around one man, the Czar Ivan.  If anybody but Richard Mansfield played the part, there would be nothing in it.  We simply get a glimpse into the life of a tyrant who has run the full gamut of grumpiness, selfishness and grouch.  Incidentally this man had the power to put other men to death, and this he does and has done as his whim and temper might dictate.  He has been vindictive, cruel, quarrelsome, tyrannical and terrible.  Now that he feels the approach of death, he would make his peace with God.  But he has delayed that matter too long.  He didn't realize in youth and middle life that he was then preparing for his old age and the consequences of his earlier actions.

     Man is the result of cause and effect, and the causes are to a degree in our hands.  Life is a fluid, and well has it been called the stream of life we are going, flowing somewhere.  Strip Ivan of his robes and crown, and he might be an old farmer and live in Ebenezer.  Every town and village have its own Ivan counter-part.  To be an Ivan, just turn your temper loose and practice cruelty on any person or thing within your reach, and the result will be a sure preparation for a querulous, quarrelsome, pickety, snippety, fussy and foolish old age, accented with many outbursts of wrath that are terrible in their futility and ineffectiveness.

     Babyhood has no monopoly on the tantrum.  The characters of King Lear and Ivan the Terrible have much in common.  One might almost believe that the writer of Ivan had felt the incompleteness of Lear, and had seen the absurdity of making a melodramatic bid for sympathy in behalf of this old man thrust out by his daughters.  Lear, the troublesome, Lear to whose limber tongue there was constantly leaping words unprintable and names of tar, deserves no soft pity at our hands.  All his life he had been training his three daughters for exactly the treatment he was to receive.  All his life Lear had been lubricating the chute that was to give him a quick ride out into that black midnight storm.  "Oh, how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," he cries.  There is something quite as bad as a thankless child, and that is a thankless parent an irate, irascible parent who possesses an underground vocabulary and a disposition to use it.

     The false note in Lear lies in giving to him a daughter like Cordelia.  Tolstoy and Mansfield ring true, and Ivan the Terrible is what he is without apology, excuse or explanation.  Take it or leave it if you do not like plays of this kind, go to see Vaudeville or some other comedy.  Or perhaps you are the type to consider something from the Marvel Universe!

     Mansfield's Ivan is terrible.  The Czar is not old in years not over seventy but you can see that Death is sniffing close upon his track.  Ivan has lost the power of repose.  He cannot listen, weigh and decide he has no thought or consideration for any man or thing this is his habit of life.  His bony hands are never still the fingers open and shut, and pick at things eternally.  He fumbles the cross on his breast, adjusts his jewels, scratches his cosmos, plays the devil's tattoo, gets up nervously and looks behind the throne, holds his breath to listen.  When people address him, he damns them savagely if they kneel, and if they stand upright, he accuses them of lack of respect.  He asks that he be relieved from the cares of state, and then trembles for fear his people will take him at his word.  When asked to remain ruler of Russia he proceeds to curse his councilors and accuses them of loading him with burdens that they themselves would not endeavor to bear.

     He is a victim of amor senilis, and right here if Mansfield took one step more his realism would be appalling, but he stops in time and suggests what he dares not express.  This tottering, doddering, slobbering, sniffling old man is in love he is about to wed a young, beautiful girl.  He selects jewels for her he makes remarks about what would become her beauty, jeers and laughs in cracked falsetto.  In the animality of youth there is something pleasing it is natural but the vices of an old man, when they have become only mental, are most revolting.

     The people about Ivan are in mortal terror of him, for he is still the absolute monarch he has the power to promote or disgrace, to take their lives or let them go free.  They laugh when he laughs, cry when he does, and watch his fleeting moods with thumping hearts.  He is intensely religious and affects the robe and cowl of a priest.  Around his neck hangs the crucifix.  His fear is that he will die with no opportunity of confession and absolution.  He prays to High Heaven every moment, kisses the cross, and his toothless old mouth interjects prayers to God and curses on man in the same breath.

     If anyone is talking to him, he looks the other way, slips down until his shoulders occupy the throne, scratches his leg, and keeps up a running comment of insult "Aye," "Oh," "Of course," "Certainly," "Ugh," "Listen to him now!"  There is a comedy side to all this which relieves the tragedy and keeps the play from becoming disgusting.  Glimpses of Ivan's past are given in his jerky confessions he is the most miserable and unhappy of men, and you behold that he is reaping as he has sown.

     All his life he has been preparing for this.  Each day has been a preparation for the next.  Ivan dies in a fit of wrath, hurling curses on his family and court, dies in a fit of wrath into which he has been purposely taunted by a man who knows that the outburst is certain to kill the weakened monarch.  Where does Ivan the Terrible go when Death closes his eyes?

     According to scriptural fact, he now lies in death, the place of “sleep” for those who have finished their life course.  But this I believe and know to be true, that in the case of Ivan and all others, no confessional can absolve them, nor any priest can benefit them.  He has damned himself, and he began the work in youth.  He was getting ready all his life for this old age, and this old age was getting ready for the final scene of his life.

     The playwright does not say so, Mansfield does not say so, but this is the lesson:  Hate is a poison, wrath is a toxin, sensuality leads to death clutching selfishness is a lighting of the fires of being cursed.  It is all a preparation cause and effect.

     We often hear of the beauties of old age, but the only old age that is beautiful is the one the man has long been preparing for by living a beautiful life.  Every one of us, regardless of our current age, are right now preparing for old age.

     Sadly, this is a reality that we often don’t realize until it is too late for us to make any necessary changes.  But we should still try to do so.  As part of our temperament, we try to stall off to the last minute the things that we should be working on constantly.  We tend to procrastinate on so many things within our lives.  However, preparing for our later years should not be one of them.  The biggest problem is we’re only human!

QUOTE TO CONSIDER


THOUGHTFUL GEM

"If only youth had the wisdom,

and old age had the strength!"




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