Hymn to Old Age Read online

  When I refer to this good and positive side of an old man’s life, and to the fact that we grey-haired folk are also acquainted with sources of strength and patience and pleasure that play no part in the lives of the young, I am not talking about the comforts of religion and the Church. That is the province of the priest. But I think I can gratefully give names to the gifts that are given to us by age. For me the dearest of all these gifts is the treasure of images which after a long life we carry in our memory, and to which with the decline of our active powers we turn with a different attitude from ever before. The figures and faces of people who left the earth sixty or seventy years ago still live on in us, are part of us, keep us company and look at us with eyes that are still alive. Houses, gardens, towns that have now disappeared or completely changed we can see unscathed, just as they were before, and distant mountains and coasts that we saw decades ago on our travels we rediscover fresh and colourful in our book of pictures. Looking, observing and contemplating increasingly becomes a habit, an exercise, and imperceptibly the mood and approach of the watcher permeates all our actions. We are haunted, like most people, by desires, dreams, yearnings and passions, under attack through the years and decades of our lives, impatient, tense, expectant, deeply affected by successes and failures—and today, gently leafing through the great picture book of our own life, we are amazed at how good and beautiful it can be to have escaped the hunt and the headlong rush and to have landed safely in the vita contemplativa.

  Here, in this garden of old men, many flowers blossom which earlier we would never have thought of cultivating. There blooms the flower of patience, a noble plant, and we become calmer, more tolerant, and the less we insist on actively intervening, the greater becomes our ability to watch and listen to the life of nature and the lives of our fellow humans, and to let it all pass us by without criticism but with renewed amazement at the vast diversity, sometimes taking part or silently regretting, and sometimes laughing with shining joy and humour.

  Recently I was standing in my garden, and had lit a fire which I fed with leaves and dry twigs. Then an old woman, probably about eighty, came walking past the whitethorn hedge, stopped and looked at me. I greeted her, and she laughed and said: “You’re quite right to light a fire. At our age we need to gradually make friends with hell.” With this she had set the tone of a conversation in which we moaned to each other about all kinds of sufferings and deprivations, but always making fun of ourselves. And at the end of our conversation, we confessed to each other that in spite of everything, we were not at all so dreadfully old and indeed could hardly call ourselves old so long as the oldest inhabitant of our village, a centenarian, was still alive.

  When the very young, with their superior strength and their innocence, laugh at us behind our backs and mock our hobbling gait, our few white hairs and our scraggy necks, then we remember that once we had the same strength and innocence and also smiled, and we do not see ourselves as inferior or vanquished, but rejoice that we have grown out of this phase of life and have now become just a little wiser and a little more patient.

  1952

  AUTUMN RAIN

  O rain, you autumn rain

  And hills all veiled in grey

  Trees weighed down with weary foliage!

  It’s hard for the ailing year to leave

  Gazing through the steamed-up windows.

  Shivering in your dripping coat

  You stand outside. And at the forest’s edge

  There stagger from the bleached leaves

  Drunken toads and salamanders.

  Along the paths that run downhill

  Endless waters stream and gurgle

  Till they reach the grass and fig tree

  Where they stand in patient pools.

  And from the church tower in the valley

  Tired and timid comes the sound

  Of tolling bells for some dead villager

  Being buried in the ground.

  But you, dear friend, should not be grieving

  For the neighbour being buried

  Nor for summer’s pleasures passing

  Nor for festive joys of youth!

  All things are kept in pious memory

  Preserved in word, picture and song

  Ever ready to return in splendour

  Dressed in newer and in finer robes.

  Help to preserve, help to change

  And the flower of faithful joy

  Will blossom in your heart.

  Age has many hardships—but it also has its gifts of grace, and one of them is the protective layer of forgetting, of weariness, of submission which allows things to grow between us and our problems and sufferings. There may be inertia, calcification, hideous apathy, but there can also be—illuminated a little differently by the moment—serenity, patience, humour, deep wisdom and Tao.

  From Rigi-Tagebuch

  (Rigi Diary) 1945

  Old age helps you overcome many things, and if an old man shakes his head or murmurs a few words, then some see worldly wisdom in them, others merely ossification; whether his approach to the world is basically the result of experience and wisdom or simply the consequence of circulation problems remains undiagnosed, even by the old man himself.

  From a letter written in November

  1942 to Lajser Ajchenrand

  Only when you grow old do you see the rarity of beauty, and what a wonder it really is when flowers bloom between factories and cannons, and poetry still lives between newspapers and stock-market reports.

  From a letter written in November

  1930 to Hans Carossa

  For them, the young, their own existence, their searching and suffering, quite rightly is of prime importance. For the man who has grown old, the search was a false trail, and life has gone wrong if he has found nothing objective, nothing above himself and his cares, nothing absolute or divine to worship, in the service of which he can place himself, and the service of which alone can give his life meaning …

  The necessity for youth is to be able to take itself seriously. The necessity for age is to be able to sacrifice itself, because above it is something that does take things seriously. I don’t like formulating doctrines, but I truly believe that a spiritual life must run and play between these two poles. For the task, desire and duty of youth is to become, and the task of the mature man is to surrender himself or, as German mystics used to call it, ‘to de-become’. One must first be a full person, a real personality, and one must have undergone the sufferings of this individualisation before one can make the sacrifice of this personality.

  From a letter written in

  January 1933 to M K

  A GREY WINTER’S DAY

  It happens one grey winter’s day.

  All’s still, the light is dim

  A grumpy old man makes his way—

  No one should speak to him.

  He hears the flood of youth go by

  Full of storm and stress

  Profane and pointless to his eye

  This rash almightiness.

  Mockingly he knits his brow

  The grey light fades apace

  The snow is gently falling now

  He covers up his face.

  Up in the bare-branched mountain ash

  Troubling his old man’s dreams

  Squabbling blackbirds, loud and brash.

  He hates the seagulls’ screams.

  Silently he’ll scorn and scold

  Such pompous proud display.

  And so into the dark and cold

  He wends his hoary way.

  It should not be important to us to keep or copy the past, but we should be adaptable enough to experience the new and to engage ourselves in it with all our strength. In this context, grief in the sense of holding on to what has been lost is not a good thing, and is not in accord with true life.

  From a letter written on

  28th July 1916 to his sister Adele

  A SMALL BOY

  When they
punish me

  Very quiet I keep.

  I cry myself to sleep

  And waking up I’m free.

  When they punish me

  I refuse to weep.

  A small boy’s all they see

  But I laugh in my sleep.

  Grown-ups finish dead—

  Gramps and Uncle passed away—

  But I shall live instead

  For ever and a day.

  My life—this is what I decided—should be a transcendence, an advance from one stage to another; it should be a space around which others tread and then are left behind, just as music moves theme by theme, tempo by tempo, played, finished and left behind, never tired, never sleeping, always awake, always completely present. In connection with experiences of awakening, I had realised that such stages and spaces exist, and that the last phase of every section of life has within it overtones of decline and of a death wish, which then leads to a movement into another space, another awakening, a new beginning.

  From Das Glasperlenspiel

  (The Glass Bead Game) 1943

  STAGES

  Just as youth has to give way to age

  And flowers must fade, so at every stage

  All things of virtue, beautiful and clever

  Must bloom and fade, for naught goes on for ever.

  With each fresh call from life, prepare the heart

  To say goodbye, and then once more to start.

  Be bold and brave, for there is nothing tragic

  When bright new opportunities arrive

  Since all beginnings hold a kind of magic

  That shields and helps us all to be alive.

  From room to room let’s go, to none retire

  For gladly we should leave each one behind us.

  The World Spirit does not wish to bind us

  But step by step to raise us ever higher.

  Scarcely have we made a place our home

  When familiarity begins to weigh.

  Only those who are prepared to roam

  From chains of deadening habit break away.

  Perhaps one day even the final knell

  Will have yet more new rooms for us in store

  And life will go on calling evermore …

  And so, my heart, take leave and fare you well!

  Against the infamies of life, the best weapons are these: boldness, obstinacy and patience. Boldness strengthens, obstinacy is fun, and patience keeps you calm. Unfortunately, one usually acquires these only late in life, and it is as one withers and fades away that one has most need of them.

  From a letter written on

  23rd July 1950 to H S

  Nostalgia for a lost home is very similar to grieving over one’s childhood and one’s childish beliefs. We should not nourish or nurture such longings or make ourselves ill with them, but we should apply these spiritual powers to the present and to reality. A very large proportion of the human race today is homeless, and by adapting themselves to new places, people and tasks, these folk must try to make a home in the unknown.

  From a letter written in February

  1960 to a young person

  In the midst of overwhelming machinery, we must recapture nature, and after an exhausting day’s work make it possible to stop, and to get to the middle of the centrifuge. Forces that may help to achieve this are nature, music and above all one’s own creative powers.

  From a letter written in December

  1958 to a reader

  Next to the gifts of the mind and of art, those of nature are the only ones that never leave us in the lurch when things get really serious.

  From a letter probably written in the

  1940s to Erna Klärner

  LANGUAGE OF SPRING

  Every child knows the language of spring—

  Live and grow, bloom and hope, be true

  Love, and always find new things to do.

  Enjoy your life, and don’t fear anything!

  Every old man knows the language of spring—

  It’s time, so let them put you in the earth

  Let the boys take your place with mirth

  And so give way, for death’s no fearful thing!

  For old people generally, spring is not a pleasant time. Just as the foehn shakes and tests every old tree branch by branch, to see if it can’t break it down, so the spring shakes old people to see if soon they’ll be rotten enough. All the same, it’s beautiful.

  From a letter written at Easter 1948

  to Karl Kloter

  To grow old in a humanly dignified manner and yet at all times to maintain the attitude and wisdom appropriate to our age is a difficult art; generally our soul is either ahead of our body or behind it, and among the correctives to these discrepancies are those shocks to our inner feelings of life, those tremblings and fears at the very roots which again and again befall us through episodes of our lives or through illness. It seems to me that one should both be and feel small when confronted by them, just as a child can best restore its balance after some disturbance in life through weakness and weeping.

  From a letter written on 22nd May

  1935 to Joseph Feinhals

  As far as the wisdom of age versus the passions is concerned, indeed it is a good thing, but age—since it is also a part of life—continually brings us into new situations, in relation to which we are not wise because they are new and require new thoughts. And so one goes on making experiments and doing silly things, and the only advantage one has over the young is a plus for patience.

  From a letter written c1943 to Else Marti

  When one reaches a great age, one looks back at the remarkable sights of a long past life. The second half of my life was the dramatic one, rich in battles, rich in enemies, in bad times and finally in all too much success. But the power to survive this unruly second half came from the first, calmer half, from the almost forty years of peace that I was lucky enough to experience. People have spoken of the War as a baptism of fire. But in my experience it is only peace that advances people and gives them strength.

  From a circular letter written in

  August 1958

  What would things be like for us old people if we didn’t have this—the picture book of memory, the treasure of our experiences! It would be lamentably miserable. But in this we are rich, and we carry not only our worn-out body towards the end and oblivion, but also that treasure which lives and lights so long as we can breathe.

  From an undated letter

  WEARY EVENING

  Evening winds mumble

  With groans the trees resound

  Heavy raindrops tumble

  Singly to the ground.

  From cracks in crumbling walls

  Ferns and mosses sprout

  And old folk from their halls

  Silently peep out.

  On bony stiff knees pressed

  Crooked fingers lie

  And all prepare to rest

  And then to fade and die.

  Over the graveyard wheels

  A large and heavy crow

  And on the flat-topped hills

  Ferns and mosses grow.

  We and wisdom are like Achilles and the tortoise. It is always a little way ahead of us. But to be on our way to it, and to follow its powers of attraction, is a good path to take.

  From a letter written c1950 to

  Hans Huber

  Wonderful magic, glowingly sad magic of the ephemeral! And even more wonderful, the not-being-past, the not-being-extinguished-ness of what has been, its mysterious survival, its mysterious endlessness, its wakability in the memory, its being buried alive in the ever retrievable word!

  Diary entry 14th May 1953

  THE OLD MAN AND HIS HANDS

  Until the long, long night is over

  His weary way he makes

  And watches when he wakes

  And there at rest upon the cover

  Sees his hands, both left and right

  Worn-out servants, wooden
, tight

  And he chuckles

  Softly, not to wake his knuckles.

  Undaunted, they’ve worked hard and true

  When most have had enough

  For they’re still strong and tough.

  There’s even more that they could do.

  But though these faithful vassals stay

  They’d like to rest and turn to clay

  And say goodbye

  To serfdom, for they’re drained and dry.

  Softly, not to wake his fingers