In the first place, I never said I will cure, or can cure, or would or could cure, or had cured any disease. My venerated instructor, Dr. James Jackson, taught me never to use that expression. Curo means, I take care of, he used to say, and in that sense, if you mean nothing more, it is properly employed. So, in the amphitheatre of the Ecole de Medecine, I used to read the words of Ambroise Pare, Je le pansay, Dieu le guarist." (I dressed his wound, and God cured him.) Next, I am not in the habit of talking about "the diseases to which flesh is heir." The expression has become rather too familiar for repetition, and belongs to the rhetoric of other latitudes. And, lastly, I have said some plain things, perhaps some sharp ones, about the abuse of drugs and the limited number of vitally important remedies, but I am not so ignorantly presumptuous as to make the foolish statement falsely attributed to me.]
I paused a minute or two, and as no one spoke out; I put a question to the Counsellor.
Are you quite sure that you wish to live to be threescore and twenty years old?
"Most certainly I do. Don't they say that Theophrastus lived to his hundred and seventh year, and did n't he complain of the shortness of life? At eighty a man has had just about time to get warmly settled in his nest. Do you suppose he doesn't enjoy the quiet of that resting-place? No more haggard responsibility to keep him awake nights,--unless he prefers to retain his hold on offices and duties from which he can be excused if be chooses. No more goading ambitions,--he knows he has done his best. No more jealousies, if he were weak enough to feel such ignoble stirrings in his more active season. An octogenarian with a good record, and free from annoying or distressing infirmities, ought to be the happiest of men.
Everybody treats him with deference. Everybody wants to help him.
He is the ward of the generations that have grown up since he was in the vigor of maturity. Yes, let me live to be fourscore years, and then I will tell you whether I should like a few more years or not."
You carry the feelings of middle age, I said, in imagination, over into the period of senility, and then reason and dream about it as if its whole mode of being were like that of the earlier period of life.
But how many things there are in old age which you must live into if you would expect to have any "realizing sense" of their significance!
In the first place, you have no coevals, or next to none. At fifty, your vessel is stanch, and you are on deck with the rest, in all weathers. At sixty, the vessel still floats, and you are in the cabin. At seventy, you, with a few fellow-passengers, are on a raft.
At eighty, you are on a spars to which, possibly, one, or two, or three friends of about your own age are still clinging. After that, you must expect soon to find yourself alone, if you are still floating, with only a life-preserver to keep your old white-bearded chin above the water.
Kindness? Yes, pitying kindness, which is a bitter sweet in which the amiable ingredient can hardly be said to predominate. How pleasant do you think it is to have an arm offered to you when you are walking on a level surface, where there is no chance to trip?
How agreeable do you suppose it is to have your well-meaning friends shout and screech at you, as if you were deaf as an adder, instead of only being, as you insist, somewhat hard of hearing? I was a little over twenty years old when I wrote the lines which some of you may have met with, for they have been often reprinted :
The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb.
The world was a garden to me then; it is a churchyard now.
"I thought you were one of those who looked upon old age cheerfully, and welcomed it as a season of peace and contented enjoyment."
I am one of those who so regard it. Those are not bitter or scalding tears that fall from my eyes upon "the mossy marbles." The young who left my side early in my life's journey are still with me in the unchanged freshness and beauty of youth. Those who have long kept company with me live on after their seeming departure, were it only by the mere force of habit; their images are all around me, as if every surface had been a sensitive film that photographed them; their voices echo about me, as if they had been recorded on those unforgetting cylinders which bring back to us the tones and accents that have imprinted them, as the hardened sands show us the tracks of extinct animals. The melancholy of old age has a divine tenderness in it, which only the sad experiences of life can lend a human soul.
But there is a lower level,--that of tranquil contentment and easy acquiescence in the conditions in which we find ourselves; a lower level, in which old age trudges patiently when it is not using its wings. I say its wings, for no period of life is so imaginative as that which looks to younger people the most prosaic. The atmosphere of memory is one in which imagination flies more easily and feels itself more at home than in the thinner ether of youthful anticipation. I have told you some of the drawbacks of age; I would not have you forget its privileges. When it comes down from its aerial excursions, it has much left to enjoy on the humble plane of being. And so you think you would like to become an octogenarian?
"I should," said the Counsellor, now a man in the high noon of bodily and mental vigor. "Four more--yes, five more--decades would not be too much, I think. And how much I should live to see in that time!
I am glad you have laid down some rules by which a man may reasonably expect to leap the eight barred gate. I won't promise to obey them all, though."
Among the questions addressed to me, as to a large number of other persons, are the following. I take them from "The American Hebrew" of April 4, 1890. I cannot pretend to answer them all, but I can say something about one or two of them.
