When I launched my website, I not only invited visitors; I invited comment.
I received congrats from distant relations, pats on the back from long lost friends, general shows of support, conspiratorial winks, exclamations of surprise, and a few pithy observations. The latter mostly noted what I’d neglected to mention or given short shrift — husband, dog, theatre, dancing, editing, music, motherhood…
One noted what I’d dared to include. My age.
I once entertained the notion that when baby boomers start claiming social security, the sheer weight of our numbers must tip the scales, divesting “old age” of its exclusively pejorative connotations and restoring it some respect.
But the mythos of youth is too pervasive, and the trials of aging too real. Objectively, it sucks to be young in a world that’s warming, to be starting from scratch when the economy’s plummeting, to be facing so unpromising a future. But in a commercial, consumer culture where “youth” is sold with every product advertised, the young are inherently rich and the old inescapably poor. What though a 73-year-old Jack Palance can do one-arm push-ups for the cameras, what though octogenarian Maya Angelou is teaching a class at Wake Forest, composing poetry for the Summer Olympics, working on a collection of essays and hosting a weekly radio show, the achievements of a few exceptional elderly are only notable because an elder has accomplished them. They’ll hardly serve to persuade an age-phobic society that growing old is nothing to fear.
Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent moon;
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon;
It is not strength, but weakness; not desire,
But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire,
The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent,
In which some living sparks we still discern,
Enough to warm, but not enough to burn.
Time weakens our bodies, softens our minds, dulls our senses, pierces our hearts with sorrows. And the one advantage it confers — the wisdom of experience — is utterly devalued by a popular culture that first bought the folly-of-youth illusion that what age teaches isn’t worth learning, and now sells that fiction as fact.
The comment that sparked this tirade, by the way, was entirely complimentary. Because I was “… willing to tell all and sundry the year you were born!” I was lauded as a woman of great courage.
I’ve had my courageous moments, I suppose. This wasn’t one of them.
I didn’t reveal my age as a political gesture, an act of social rebellion, an expression of spiritual belief. I wasn’t making a statement. I wasn’t taking a stand. I didn’t bravely emblazon my birth-year on the masthead of my bio in defiance of ageist prejudice and cultural taboo. The date is there because I’m that out of touch with the way things work, with how things are done. It’s a measure of how far from the mainstream I’ve drifted.
So. Now I’ve been reminded how the world works, do I edit my bio to match my chronologically ambiguous résumé? Or do I leave the ancient, damning digits where they are, knowing that my work may and likely will be judged or dismissed because I am no longer young?
An easy choice. Crones need not bow to the Hierophant. The heavens may be brightest when the sun’s at her zenith, but they’re more colorful when she sets.
[excerpt from “Morituri Salutamus” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1875]