Hymn to Old Age Read online

  I leave the dazzling road and go past the chapel in the shadows of the dark, age-old wall that winds its way defiantly along the rocky ridge and knows no time, no other present than the ever returning sun, no change but that of the seasons. Decade after decade, century after century. One day these old walls will also fall, and these lovely, dark and dirty quarters will be rebuilt with cement, metal, running water, hygiene, gramophones and other cultural artefacts, and over the bones of old Nina they will build a hotel with a French menu, or a Berliner will build himself a summer retreat. But today they are still standing, and I climb over the high stone threshold, mount the curved flight of stone steps and enter the kitchen of my friend Nina. As always it smells of stone and cold and soot and coffee and the intense odour of smoke from unseasoned wood, and on the stone floor in front of the huge fireplace, sitting on her low stool, is old Nina—she has lit a little fire in the fireplace, and the smoke is making her eyes water slightly, and with her brown, arthritic fingers she is pushing bits of wood back into the fire.

  “Hello, Nina, do you recognise me?”

  “Oh, signor poeta, caro amico, son contento di rivederla!”

  She gets up, although I don’t want her to—she stands up, which takes her a while, and then takes a few stiff-legged steps. In her trembling left hand she is holding the wooden snuffbox, and she has a black woollen shawl draped round her bust and back. Her sharp bright eyes gaze with a mixture of sadness and laughter from the beautiful old eagle face. She gazes at me with a teasing but affectionate expression. She knows Steppenwolf, and knows I am a signor and an artist, but that I’m not much good for anything and that I wander round Ticino all on my own, and have found as little happiness as she has, even though both of us have certainly kept an equally sharp lookout for it. What a pity, Nina, that you were born forty years too soon for me. What a pity. It’s true that not everyone thinks you’re beautiful, and some even think you’re an old witch with those fiery eyes, those bent legs, those dirty fingers and that snuff in your nose. But what a nose it is in that wrinkled eagle face! What bearing, once she has pulled herself upright and stands at her full gaunt height! And how intelligent, how proud, how disdainful and yet not wicked is the expression in those finely carved, frank and fearless eyes! Old woman, what a beautiful girl you must have been, and what a beautiful, bold and spirited woman you must have become! Nina reminds me of past summers, of my friends, my sister, my mistress—all of whom she knows. In the meantime, she takes a quick look at the kettle, sees the water boiling, shakes some ground coffee out of the coffee grinder, makes me a cup, offers me some snuff, and then we sit by the fire, drink our coffee, spit into the flames, tell tales, ask questions, gradually fall silent, and say a few words about gout, winter and the uncertainty of life.

  “Gout! It’s a whore, a bloody whore! Sporca puttana! The Devil take it! I wish it would go to hell! Ah well, no use swearing. I’m glad you came, very glad. We should stay friends. Not many people come to see you when you’re old. I’m seventy-eight now.”

  Once more she struggles to her feet and goes into the next room, where faded photographs are stuck in the mirror. I know she’s now looking for a present to give me. She can’t find anything, and so she offers me one of the old photographs as a gift, and when I refuse to take it, at least I have to have another sniff out of her snuffbox.

  My friend’s smoky kitchen is not very clean and is not at all hygienic—the floor is covered in spittle, the wicker from her chair hangs down in threads, and few of you readers would like to drink from her coffee pot, that old metal coffee pot which is black with smoke and grey with ashes, and whose sides are thickly crusted with dried-up coffee accumulated over the years. Life here is remote from the modern world and time, maybe pretty crude and grotty, pretty rundown, and anything but clean, but on the other hand it’s close to the hills and forests, close to the goats and hens (they run clucking round the kitchen), close to witches and to fairy tales. The coffee from the battered old coffee pot smells wonderful—a strong, deep black coffee with a gentle aromatic hint of bitterness from the woodsmoke, and our sitting together drinking coffee, and the curses and the affection, and Nina’s undaunted old face are infinitely more attractive to me than a dozen invitations to a tea dance, a dozen evenings of literary conversation in a circle of famous intellectuals, although of course I should not like to deny these charming occupations their relative value.

  Outside, the sun is now setting, Nina’s cat comes in and jumps onto her lap, and the light from the fire glows more warmly on the whitewashed stone walls. How cold, how cruelly cold winter must have been in this high and empty stone cave that contains nothing but the little open fire flickering in the fireplace, and the lonely old woman with gout eating her joints and no other company than the cat and her three chickens.

  The cat is chased out. Nina gets up again and stands tall and ghostly in the twilight, a thin, bony figure with a shock of white hair falling over the sharply watchful eagle face. She won’t let me leave yet. She invites me to be her guest for another hour, and goes to fetch bread and wine.

  1927

  AS WE GROW OLD

  To be young and do good is a simple matter

  On evil one’s back to turn,

  But to smile when the heart beats pitter-patter

  Is something one has to learn.

  And whoever succeeds has not grown old

  But stands as bright as the sun

  And has the world in his powerful hold

  Bending its poles to one.

  We think that death is waiting there

  And so we should not stay

  But march to meet him fair and square

  And drive him far away.

  But death’s not here or there to see

  Though everywhere displayed.

  He is in you and is in me

  When life we have betrayed.

  Since old folk can’t do anything else but give wise advice to young folk, I’ll give you a few handy tips, because a man’s sixtieth birthday is just the right time to do it. At this age it’s time to give up some of one’s youthful or manly pride and obstinacy, and start handling life—which one has hitherto bossed around—a bit more gently and warily. This includes a degree of care and attention and flexibility in relation to weaknesses and illnesses—one should stop moaning about them and forcing them to take a back seat, and instead one should give way to them and be nice to them, coddle oneself and, with doctors and medications, as with rest periods, taking the waters, having breaks at work, show them the respect they deserve, because they are all messengers from the greatest power that exists on earth.

  From a letter written on

  24th August 1947 to Max

  Wassmer

  FOR MAX WASSMER

  ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

  So far life hasn’t been too bad

  No one can say we didn’t try—

  Enough good laughs and drinks we’ve had

  And felt the wild winds whistle by.

  Some stupid things we’ve also done

  Because we had our stubborn streak

  That led to many a soulful sigh.

  Life has pulled us to and fro

  We’ve had our woes, we’ve had our fun.

  I am ten years older, though,

  And now I’m getting tired and weak.

  But life’s been full and life’s been rich

  With love, work, friends, all sorts of fests

  With wine and music, laughing guests

  And if life still can be a bitch

  It’s generally turned out fine

  Thanks to the music and the wine

  So all in all it’s been a ball.

  As time goes by, we may complain

  That things no longer taste so sweet

  And limbs and senses feel the strain

  But we must bear our human fate.

  Our minds go back to days of old

  To memory’s gardens bathed in light

  W
here beautifully preserved in gold

  The flowers still blossom fresh and bright

  And parties every day we hold.

  And when, dear friend, you too grow tired

  You’ll find, like me, you’re still inspired

  By memories, for you’ll have seen

  How rich and royal life has been.

  All is well, you’ve naught to rue

  For you’re a soul that’s good and true

  Who goes through life, bright and bold

  Bringing joy to young and old

  Wise and kind in all you do—

  With radiant smiles we think of you.

  Giver of pleasure, master of mirth

  May you never have to part

  From light of love and warmth of heart

  Until your final day on earth.

  The people who in their youth you can’t possibly think of as old—they are the ones who make the best old folk.

  From a book review

  The most youthful of youngsters make the best old folk, and not those who behaved like grandfathers even when they were at school.

  From Gertrud

  The fact that young people like to show off a bit, and sometimes get away with doing daring things the old folk could never do themselves, is not so terrible when all is said and done. But it gets really bad at that miserable moment when the old, the weak, the conservative, the bald-headed, the die-hard old-fashioned take it personally and say to themselves: No question, they’re only doing it to annoy me! From this moment on, it all becomes unbearable, and anyone who thinks like that is a lost soul.

  From an undated letter

  I’ve never felt attuned to youth being emphasised or organised; there’s only young and old among humdrum people; all gifted, differentiated people are old one minute and young the next, just as they’re happy one minute and sad the next. Older people are able to act with more freedom, playfulness, experience, kind-heartedness in relation to their own capacity for love than young people can. Age is quick to regard youth as precocious. But age itself always likes to imitate the gestures and movements of youth, is fanatical, is unjust, thinks it’s always right and is easily offended. Age is not worse than youth; Lao Tse is not worse than Buddha. Blue is not worse than red. Age is only pathetic when it wants to play at being young.

  From a letter written on

  17th December 1930 to Wilhelm

  Kunze

  What has disgusted me for decades is firstly the idiotic worship of youth and all things young, such as is flourishing in America, and then even worse the establishment of youth as a status, a class, a ‘movement’.

  From a letter written on

  9th December 1948 to Rolf Schott

  I’m an old man and I like youth, but I’d have to tell a lie if I tried to say I’m really interested in it. For old people, especially in times as difficult as these, there is only one interesting question—that of the mind, of faith, of the kind of sense and devoutness that proves its own worth, that can cope with suffering and death. Coping with suffering and death is the task of age. Waxing enthusiastic, being with it, getting excited—that’s the mood of youth. The one can talk to the other, but they speak two different languages.

  From a letter written c1933

  to Ernst Kappeler

  The history of the world is basically created by the primitives and by the young, who take care of the onward movement and acceleration, in the sense of Nietzsche’s somewhat theatrical aphorism: “What’s going to fall should also be pushed.” (Highly sensitive as he was, he could never have given such a push to an old sick person or animal.) However, if this history is to contain islands of peace and to remain bearable, it also needs delay and conservation as a counter-force, and this task falls to the old and cultured among us. But if the humans we think we are, and wish to be, were to follow different paths from our own, and evolve into beasts or ants, then it would indeed be our task to help slow this process as much as possible. Unconsciously, the militant forces in the world acknowledge the validity of this counter-movement in accordance with which—albeit pretty clumsily—they promote their cultural work alongside their weapons and their loudspeaker propaganda.

  From a letter written on 12th–13th March

  1960 to Herbert Schulz

  SKETCH

  Cold winds of autumn rustle through the withered reeds

  Grey in the evening;

  Crows flicker inland from the willow trees.

  Standing still and alone on the strand, an old man

  Feels the wind in his hair, the night and approaching snow.

  He gazes across from the shadowed shore to the brightness

  Where, between the clouds and lake, a band

  Of distant shore still warmly glows in light—

  The gold beyond, blissful as dreams and poems.

  He holds the glowing image in his eye

  And thinks of home, and thinks of his good years

  Sees the gold grow pale, sees it die out

  And then he turns away and very slowly

  Wanders inland from the willow trees.

  Growing old is not just a winding down and withering —like every phase of life it has its own values, its own magic, its own wisdom, its own grief, and in times of a fairly flourishing culture, people have rightly shown age a certain respect, which nowadays is somewhat lacking in youth. We shall not hold that against youth. But we shall not let them talk us into thinking that age is worth nothing.

  From a letter written on 10th January

  1937 to Georg Reinhart

  DYING

  When children playing games I see

  Their foolish laughter strange to me

  And I no longer understand their play

  I know it is a warning note

  From an evil foe once so remote—

  A foe from whom I cannot run away.

  When I see young lovers kiss

  And gladly leave them to their bliss

  And Paradise has no appeal for me

  Implicitly, alas, I part

  With all the poetry of the heart

  That promised to give youth eternity.

  When I hear some vile oration

  Don’t react with indignation

  Pretend I don’t know what it’s all about

  Then I realise with a start

  That there’s a numbness in my heart

  And the light that burned within is going out.

  Growing old is in itself, of course, a natural process, and a man of sixty-five or seventy-five is, if he doesn’t long to be younger, every bit as healthy and normal as one of thirty or fifty. But unfortunately people are not always on a level with their own age—inwardly they often rush ahead, and even more frequently they lag behind; then their conscious mind and feeling for life are less mature than their body, they resist its natural manifestations, and demand from themselves something that they cannot achieve.

  From a letter written in 1935 to

  Hans Sturzenegger

  As one matures, one grows ever younger. That’s how it is with me too, although that doesn’t mean much because basically I’ve always maintained the same feeling for life that I had when I was a boy, and always felt that being grown up and getting old was some sort of comedy.

  From a letter written on 24th January

  1922 to Werner Schindler

  Just as in youth, in times of beauty and enjoyment, one can never get enough of the pleasures of the eyes and the other senses etc, as one grows old it’s the same with knowledge—one knows one must gather in as many as possible of the endlessly knowable things on earth, and that is a wonderful occupation.

  From a letter written in 1938 to

  Fanny Schiler

  [THE LAST JOURNEY

  OF THIS KIND]

  A Fragment

  I ONCE KNEW A MAN who was nearly sixty years old and had led the life of an intellectual, and with such people it quite often happens that the body is neglected and becomes aged
and decrepit long before the mind, and that’s how it was with this man—although he had neither the burdens of office nor any great financial worries, and although he didn’t lead the hectic life of the city-dweller but wasn’t your actual stay-at-home either, age had prematurely marked and weakened him, and while his energy when in the service of his thoughts and work seemed just as great as ever, as soon as he had to make a physical effort or to exert his will in order to reach a decision, it would to a considerable degree desert him, and while the works of this intellectual were highly praised and had kept their youthful vigour, his physical everyday life had gradually become that of an old, sick man who suffered from all sorts of pains and problems, who had to be careful what he ate and drank, and in whose bedroom there were assembled more and more bottles, pots and glass tubes full of medicines. And so old age had crept up on him and caught him in its web, with the same slow and silent, almost imperceptible inevitability with which the apple ripens and the evening light fades away from the earth. Many people say that the natural processes of life occur in leaps, but I am more inclined to believe in the quiet, invisibly flowing forces of nature, as the poet Stifter describes them in the preface to his Bunte Steine. On the other hand, people frequently imagine they can see such leaps, both through perception and experience, when before their very eyes, after long slow preparation, something suddenly falls from the branch. That’s how it is for most people when they grow old—it happens imperceptibly, but there are moments in which all at once a mirror is held up to the ageing man, he is confronted with a test, and then the hitherto unnoticed decline is abruptly, often shockingly revealed.