In my View [4]

It is hard to realise that in the eyes of the young one is incredibly old. I am a little over forty, and it does not seem any age at all; but I know that to my teenage children and their friends I am one of the ancients, and to those of the middle generation, an established man, one who has made his mark and therefore a man without problems. It could give one feelings of inferiority – if such were not already the walls and roof of one’s dilapidated mental burrow – to be so regarded. Something of this kind makes some unfortunate middle-aged men pursue teenage girls. It is not, as some have supposed, primarily a sexual motivation; it comes from the desire to be reassured and page 661 accepted, to be told that one is not yet standing high and dry on the shore of the sea of life.

And there is another danger which Lawrence Durrell expressed in one piercing line – ‘disguising a sense of failure in a hatred for the young . . .’.

This self-deception is, I think, the peculiar demon of the middle-aged. I see it again and again expressing itself in a certain brutal impatience among my own contemporaries. Some of them are ready to call out the Storm Troopers because a few adolescents wear their hair long or lack courtesy or want to have love affairs. How silly can one get? It is an open sign that one hates the buried adolescent in oneself, the source of ambivalence but also the source of energy. It is no answer to one’s own despair to scourge the peccadilloes of others.

Carl Jung asserted that all his patients over the age of thirty-five had to find their solution of life problems in a religious orientation. And this road is certainly not reserved for those who ask help of psychiatrists. Yet religion too can be a sign of ossification, if it is a means of escape from one’s own nature and not a simple assertion of the need of help from a Higher Power in order to detect meaning in life, and above all in death. Need is not in itself belief. But belief, if it comes, is an answer to need and the despair that evokes it can only be considered valuable. If I did not believe in God I would live always in despair. And this is no more than the ordinary result of the exhaustion of natural possibilities.

The young person who has grown up in one paddock can easily believe that life will become truly and vigorously itself if only he or she can climb a barbed-wire fence into a neighbouring paddock. But when one has climbed into all or most of the paddocks, then one realises with a sinking heart that the farm itself is small, and that new experience will not in itself make sense of the old. To change the metaphor, it seemed that some time in my early thirties I woke from a heavy daydream to find myself and all the other people I knew well, sitting or standing as bandaged and wounded casualties in an outpatients’ ward. I knew then that I had caused many of those wounds. It was a struggling belief in the Passion of Christ which made that knowledge endurable.

But how – to use Martin Buber’s unforgettable words – can the buried power to enter into relation with others re-assert itself while an active ghost tramples continually on the ruins? One has to learn to master the incubus by knowing its name. And this task is never solitary; it is a communal labour. Then calamities can be seen as open doors. To grow old is to become free from obsession. But I do not think my fellow countrymen can learn this easily. They have so many idols; they are so much afraid of walking in the dark. I am afraid also. But I can see no other road to walk on.

1968 (551)