“In outdated age we must always want nonetheless to have passions sturdy sufficient to forestall us handing over on ourselves,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote as she thought of how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, whereas throughout the English Channel the ever-sagacious Bertrand Russell was providing his prescription for how to grow old and throughout the Atlantic the vivacious aged Henry Miller was distilling the secret to remaining young at heart as a matter of having the ability to “fall in love many times… forgive in addition to overlook… maintain from rising bitter, surly, bitter and cynical.”
However nobody has approached the common downside of advancing from youth to outdated age, or the dialogue between the 2 inside a lifetime and throughout generations, extra insightfully, delightfully, and with richer nuance than the nice classics scholar and linguist Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928), whose extraordinary life I stumbled on in Francesca Wade’s altogether delicious guide Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (public library) and whose work revolutionized the fashionable understanding of Historical Greek tradition by upending millennia of patriarchal revisionism with Harrison’s discovery of a complete class of “matriarchal, husbandless goddesses” central to neighborhood life and ritual.
In her sixty-fifth yr, as World Conflict I used to be breaking out, Harrison mirrored in a letter that “work & friendship come to be the entire of life.” Because the ledger of her life grew thick with a long time, she by no means misplaced her mental vivacity, her full of life intergenerational friendships, her lively engagement with the ever-pulsating world of students and artists — in no small half due to the life and love she shared together with her considerably youthful companion: the poet, novelist, and translator Hope Mirrlees.
That very same yr, Harrison was startled to listen to certainly one of her younger, proficient colleagues at Trinity School proclaim that “nobody over thirty is price talking to.” Along with her winking intelligence, she noticed:
That is actually very attention-grabbing and terribly useful. Right here we have now, not a reasoned conclusion, however an actual reside emotion, a superb strong prejudice, a real perspective of gifted Youth to Crabbed Age. It’s my enterprise to know and, if I can, study from it. Give me an trustworthy prejudice, and I’m at all times able to attend to it.
In a sentiment that must be the final word manifesto for mental and emotional humility, direly wanted in our personal time, she provides:
I’m long gone blame and reward, or, quite, I’m not but prepared for them; there may be a lot nonetheless ready to be understood.
And so she got down to do exactly that in an entertaining, existentially profound essay titled “Crabbed Age and Youth,” printed in her 1915 essay assortment Alpha and Omega (public library).
Harrison considers the rudiments of maturity and what makes us who we’re by inspecting the “relations between pretty mature youth and fairly early center age,” defining the latter as “something fully or hopelessly grown up — something, say, effectively over thirty,” winking on the relativity of age with the reminiscence of a time when an individual of fourteen appeared to her child-self “completely grown up.” Reflecting on the younger scholar’s comment, and noting in herself with even better alarm an analogous “counter-prejudice” in opposition to youth, she observes:
The explanations by which individuals again up their prejudices are largely negligible — not cause in any respect at backside, however simply instinctive self-justifications; however prejudice, rising because it does in emotion, has its roots in life and actuality.
She notes that whereas there may be usually nice friction between the younger and the outdated, this friction can, “if rightly understood and considerately dealt with on either side, take the type of mutual stimulus and attraction” — for it most frequently springs from a lack of knowledge of one another’s state of being and body of reference. The supply of this friction can be the supply of the beautiful complementarity of the 2 life-stages:
Youth and Crabbed Age stand broadly for the 2 reverse poles of human dwelling, poles equally important to any actual vitality, however at all times contrasted. Youth stands for rationalism*, for the mind and its concomitants, egotism and individualism. Crabbed Age stands for custom, for the instincts and feelings, with their concomitant altruism. (*Observe: Due allowance in fact being made for the anti-intellectual response within the current technology.)
[…]
The entire artwork of dwelling is a fragile stability between the 2 tendencies. Virtues and vice are however handy analytic labels hooked up to explicit types of the 2 tendencies. Of the 2, egotism, self-assertion, are to the youth as needed — typically, I sadly suppose, extra needed — to good dwelling than altruism. Furthermore, the egotism of youth is obligatory, inevitable, and equally the altruism of age is ineductable.
A century earlier than the selfing pandemic of social media, Harrison considers the chief handicap of the younger — their tendency to “masquerade,” which calls to thoughts Hannah Arendt’s perception into being vs. appearing and our impulse for self-display, and Walt Whitman’s reflection on what trees teach us about being rather than seeming. She writes:
Appearing is sinking your individual character so as that you could be mimic one other’s. Masquerading is borrowing one other’s character, placing on the masks of one other’s options, costume, experiences, feelings, and thereby enhancing your individual… Youth, and particularly shy Youth, is strongly possessed by the instinctive want to masquerade.
[…]
Masquerading bores Crabbed Age. Why?
Just because the impulse to imaginative self-enhancement dies down as quickly as liberty to reside is granted… Crabbed Age is busy dwelling, not rehearsing, and dwelling, if typically much less amusing, is infinitely extra absorbing. It takes a lot out of you.
And but the outdated have their very own approach of oppressing the younger, equally alienating to each and equally damaging to the collective mosaic of tradition:
It’s a waste of time placing up signposts for others who essentially journey by one other, and often a greater, highway. Previous individuals are apt to make disastrous confusion between info that may be collected and conveyed, that’s equivalent forever, that’s information, and expertise, that which have to be lived and can’t be repeated.
However Previous Age does worse than that. In making an attempt to impose its expertise as a regulation to youth it sins not solely by ignorance, however from sheer selfishness. Dad and mom attempt to impose their view of life on their youngsters not merely or largely to avoid wasting these youngsters from catastrophe — that to a sure extent and as much as a sure age we should all do — however from possessiveness, from a want, usually unconscious, to fill the entire stage themselves.
[…]
The reality that it has failed to know is a tough one for human nature. This reality is that, in all issues that may be analyzed and identified, Youth begins life on the shoulders of Age, and due to this fact… sees farther and is definitely extra more likely to be proper.
Throughout this divide youth and outdated age frustrate and bore one another — one enthusiastic about all the things, particularly the masquerade of the self, the opposite more and more specialised and outward-focused in its excitations, and at occasions oppressively so. However finally, Harrison observes, life intercedes and the younger are pressured — by falling in love, by inventive self-actualization, by some nice calamity or sickness, by the calls for of a profession, by the calls for of a household — to shed their masks and slim their locus of issues, rising extra entwined with different selves:
By means of any little bit of precise work or accountability, Youth takes a half in life, turns into an actual half, as a substitute of claiming a theatrical complete, straight-way Youth mellows, turns into attention-grabbing and simpler to reside with.
In a passage of extraordinary perception into the meat of life, she writes:
Actual life — and right here comes the essential level — actual life, as contrasted with life imagined and rehearsed, on the entire compels no less than a sure measure of altruism. There are numerous strategies of compulsion, some mild, some violent. We’ll contemplate for a second solely two, and these probably the most regular.
Usually, within the first place, life itself will lure you, catch you, and marry you, make a father or a mom of you, and your youngsters will quickly cease your masquerading, and train you that you’re not the centre of their universe — nay, compel you to revolve around the circumference of theirs. Marriage, by the lure of ardour for the person, compels your service to the race. This nice training in altruism is essentially extra drastic and full for girl than for man.
However suppose you elude the pure lure of life. There’s society ready with its synthetic lure — ready to catch you and make an official of you, a functionary, a factor that’s solely half or 1 / 4 maybe your self, and a big three-quarters that software and mouthpiece of the collective conscience. How usually one has seen a yr’s officialdom flip a person’s non secular hair gray! The gist of all officialdom just isn’t its labels, its honours, however the sacrifice of the person will; and for this society is at all times prepared, and rightly, to pay a giant value. After all, although there may be loss, there may be nice acquire in officialdom as in marriage. Every is a godly self-discipline by which the younger man learns to not be the centre of his personal universe.
Recognizing that youngsters are sometimes probably the most distilled and unalloyed model of all of our grownup puzzlements and confusions, she provides:
This being the centre of your individual — in fact, fairly fictitious — universe is greatest seen within the excessive case of the megalomania of younger youngsters, as but untaught by life. Their very own expertise is at all times illuminating.
[…]
At seven years outdated one can not analyze, so one should agonize. That’s the reason it’s so horrible to be a baby, or perhaps a younger factor in any respect. One sees issues, feels them, complete. There isn’t a such devastating, desolating expertise as to have been on the centre, heat and sheltered, and abruptly to be on the outmost circumference, and be requested to revolve as spectator and sympathizer spherical a newly-formed centre.
We stock a lot of that primal self-centeredness, and the grief of its loss, effectively into younger maturity — a time period, and idea, that didn’t exist in Harrison’s period. Eric Berne’s revolutionary framework of the Child, Parent, and Adult ego-states that live in each of us was nonetheless half a century away. Along with her personal singular lens on how we turn into ourselves — and our selves — Harrison writes:
So long as you need to be, and really feel your self to be, the entire of life, so long as you don’t specialize and turn into a functionary, you don’t co-operate, you can’t apprehend or have an interest within the personalities of others. You might be solely certainly one of a terrific refrain, all masquerading, all shouting, “Me, Me—take a look at ME!” When you specialize, when you turn into an actor with a half in life, then you definately want all the opposite actors; the play can not go on with out them. Even your half in it is dependent upon them. The me turns into us.
[…]
Removed from it being true that specialization narrows the individuality, specialization is sort of the situation of any true individualism. By means of co-operation the sense of character is born and nourished… The slim, tedious individuals are those that are “dwelling their very own lives” and consciously “growing their very own individualities” — making an attempt to out-shout the opposite members of the refrain as a substitute of singing in tune, enjoying their half as actors in a troupe.
With the form of lucidity that solely conscientious hindsight confers, she paints a picture that captures the entire paradox of changing into:
It is without doubt one of the tragic antinomies of life that you simply can not without delay reside and have imaginative and prescient… Trying again on life I appear to see Youth as standing, a small, intensely-focused spot, outdoors a terrific globe or circle. So intense is the main target that the tiny spot believes itself the centre of the nice circle. Then slowly that little burning, throbbing spot that’s oneself is sucked in with hundreds of others into the nice globe. Humbled by life it learns that it’s no centre of life in any respect; at most it is without doubt one of the myriads of spokes within the nice wheel. In Previous Age the speck, the person life, passes out on the opposite aspect, now not burning and but not fairly consumed. In Previous Age we glance again on the nice wheel; we will see it a bit of as a result of, no less than partially, we’re outdoors of it. However this wanting again is unusually completely different from the wanting ahead of Youth. It’s disillusioned, however a lot the richer. Often these days I get glimpses of what that imaginative and prescient is likely to be. I get my head for a second out of the blazing, blinding, torturing wheel; the imaginative and prescient of the factor behind me and with out me obscurely breaks. It appears to be like unusual, virtually portentous, but comforting; however that imaginative and prescient is incommunicable.
Crowning the essay is a splendidly nuanced definition of age, emanating a form of knowledge tough for the ego to nod at however stunning and needed:
Anybody who cares passionately for summary dialogue, be his hair by no means so gray, his hand by no means so palsied, is in spirit younger. I don’t say this is a bonus. It’s potential to remain younger too lengthy. There’s a “time to develop outdated.”
[…]
Folks ask: “Would you or would you not prefer to be younger once more?” After all, it’s actually a type of silly questions that by no means must be requested, as a result of they’re unimaginable. You can’t be — you which might be — younger once more. You can’t unroll that snowball which is you: there is no such thing as a “you” besides your life — lived. However other than that, if you rise from what any person calls “the banquet of life,” flushed with the wine of life, are you able to need to sit down once more? When you’ve got climbed the hill, and the view is simply breaking, do you need to reclimb it? A thousand occasions no! Anybody who truthfully needs to be younger once more has by no means lived, solely imagined, solely masqueraded. After all, in the event you by no means eat, you retain your urge for food for dinner.
The day after Jane Harrison died — an unseasonable spring day of “bitter windy rain” — Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that she had gone for a stroll within the cemetery and run into Hope, Jane’s companion, distraught and “half sleep” with grief. Virginia, who was months from publishing Orlando — her four-century love letter to Vita, the great love of her own life — recounted her encounter with the brokenhearted Hope:
We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, the place Shelley used to stroll, for Jane’s loss of life. She lay lifeless outdoors the graveyard in that again room the place we noticed her recently raised on her pillows, like a really outdated individual, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, happy, exhausted.
Hope later acquired a word of condolence from Virginia, containing a single line. “It was extra comforting than all my different letters put collectively,” she advised a buddy half a lifetime later. It learn:
However keep in mind what you’ve got had.
