The Pleasures of Middle Age

It is surprising to find oneself entering middle age and to know that broadly speaking one is twice as happy at forty as one was at thirty, and three times as happy as one ever was at twenty. It could of course be a kind of pre-senile page 450 complacency. Certainly it never occurred to me when I was young that there could be anything but grievous loss in growing older. And the discovery is itself so unexpected that I would like to share it, and isolate as far as I can some of the factors that have produced this peculiar state of mind.

Health in itself does not seem to be the main factor. Physically speaking, I was probably a good deal more healthy at twenty than I am now. I could dig a ditch or cut down a tree without getting over-tired. And even at twenty-eight I could sleep out for the night on a park bench without getting more than frozen feet and a slight cold in the head. I wouldn’t like to try the experiment now. There does seem to have been a marked improvement in my mental health, going along with a gradual recovery from the disease of alcoholism – but this might be in a large degree simply the result of my having stopped worrying – I don’t mind being a ratbag, as long as I am a sober ratbag. The increase in happiness seems more connected with changed attitudes than with any marked changes in my environment.

It’s still the same world. People are roasting children alive each day in Asia. (I am referring here to the use of napalm, which our Prime Minister has assured us is a conventional military weapon); people lose their moral bearings; people die painfully; people go into the mental hospitals; people say and do things that I’d prefer they wouldn’t – and those things don’t exactly cheer me up, but they no longer plunge me into a state of rage and anxiety and despair. The change has not occurred in the world; if there is any change, it must have occurred inside myself.

Does this mean that without noticing it I have become a saint? I doubt it very much. The daily and unbiased testimony of my wife and my teenage children points well away from that agreeable solution. I think rather that certain early misunderstandings have been cleared up for me, partly by the guidance and doctrines of the Church, partly by way of various personal experiences.

For example, I used to worry a good deal about the fact that this world is neither a Utopia nor the Garden of Eden. Naturally enough I wanted to live in one or the other – preferably the first, because there would be trees and animals and no policemen, and people could wander round undressed. The Church did not tell me to abandon my dream. She simply said – ‘All that you truly need will be given to you eventually; but not this side of death. If you try to make Utopias or Edens here, you’ll run slap up against the results of the Fall of Man – weakness of the will, blindness of the intellect, disorder of the passions. Wait. Be patient. Obey God; and he in his own time will certainly bring these things about. . . .’

The voice of the Church was not cynical. She did not tell me I was an absurd idealist. She just gave me a reliable compass and an accurate map to help me on my journey – the compass of an instructed conscience and the map of true moral and social doctrine.

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Again, there was the stumbling-block of sex. Here I had tended to oscillate between two extremes. Either I thought that the sexual instinct was itself the source of meaning in life; or else, in sour and baffled moments, I entertained the suspicion that God had played a bad joke on the human species by giving them sexual equipment. In this respect simply to grow older was in itself a big help. I began to see that the moral struggle for purity and detachment (whatever the setbacks might be) was in itself meaningful. The Church helped me by showing me that celibate people could live highly fruitful lives; though there was still a subdued sexual element in everyone’s activity, giving colour and energy even to the job of caring for a sick person or making a clay pot.

I have been like a boy learning to play chess, who wants to kick the board over because he can’t really understand the game. I had to learn the right moves. And the process of ageing helped to make me happier about it. It made me a great deal more detached. It slowed up my emotional reflexes so that I had time to draw breath and think things out. It freed me from the obsession that I had at all costs to try to be attractive to the opposite sex; and so I was able to make the shattering discovery that women also are people, and can be treated as such. In a sense the gradual closing of one door meant the opening of another. There was an interlude, a time of inner barrenness when both doors were closed at the same time; and then there was a strong temptation to go back and open the first one; but fortunately I had the counsel of patient and broad-minded priests who quietly pointed out to me the right direction to move in, whenever I came to them with symptoms of panic.

What a relief not to be chained by the absolute desire for sexual love! – such a blinding, crippling desire, when it fills one’s whole horizon; and which, by the very circumstances of man’s condition, cannot be fulfilled. The happy pagan is one of the illusions of the philosophy of liberal agnostic humanism. If you look more closely at him, you find he is a desperate man, with his head full of fantasies, and his mind and body full of hungers; for his actions do not in fact satisfy his needs. When I ceased to try to be a happy pagan, the problem became different. It was now necessary for me to make full allowance for the occurrence of this desire in others, to avoid becoming a Manichee, not to condemn what God after all had planted in the depths of our natures – knowing (as he must know, who knows everything) that many tensions and disorders would rise from its presence there. And the freedom, the sense of space that belongs to middle age, seems to me to come in quite a large measure from the slacking off of this imperious desire for some kind of sexual paradise – I think it is really a variant of the Garden of Eden myth, not to be condemned (there are many worse books than Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and a thousand prophets less altruistic than D.H. Lawrence) but neither to be taken too seriously. A sense of humour is the key out of this prison.

I recall how I used to come to a good friend with various tales of woe, particularly on this score, when I was just beginning to climb out of the page 452 badlands of booze – and how he used invariably to answer – ‘Does it matter, Jimmy?’

The gap between it mattering enormously and it not mattering much may be the gap between youth and middle age; yet I think to cross that gap requires at least the glimmer of a spiritual insight, and it may also be for many the bridge from misery to happiness.

I am aware as I write of a pain in my right shoulder. It is located somewhere under the shoulder-blade; and I think it comes from the time I caught a severe chill there, while standing up to my ankles in water for eight hours a day in the gut-room of a certain freezing works.

‘Does it matter?’ – comes the ironic echo from the preceding paragraph; No; of course it doesn’t matter. But a middle-aged man knows that such pains will gradually increase, year by year, especially if he comes from a family who are inclined to be rheumatic. The body tells us in middle age that we are not immortal – at least, not in the sense that any of us will be able to avoid dying. There are also mental symptoms – spasms of mental tiredness, gaps in memory, times of unaccountable depression. And here I remember another friend, a man in his early sixties, with whom I talked recently in the kitchen of a certain house, while younger people were whooping it up at a party in the next room. While he drank his gin and I drank my coke, we discussed the matter of ageing.

‘In some ways it’s a blessing, Joe,’ I said, ‘One gets more space. Sometimes, when I’m tired, I just lie down on the bed and sink into a kind of coma – I try to relax entirely, to let the tiredness flow over me, to let all the demands of life go away from me – and after ten or twenty minutes, when I get up again, it’s as good as if I’d had a bath.’

‘Yes! Yes!’ he almost shouted. ‘That’s what I want to do, too. It’s a new dimension – the blackness, the coldness, the space, right down inside yourself – that’s where I go myself – and when I come up again, everything looks smaller and the worries have gone. . . .’

Perhaps the habit we were discussing was for both of us a very primitive kind of prayer. I think it is connected with an obscure recognition of the value of death. When one is young, death is something to be resisted, the enemy of sex, the enemy of art, the enemy of life – but there comes a time in middle age when a man has to look long and hard at his own gravestone and get used to the idea that death also is a necessary part of life – that the person who accepts his own death wholeheartedly is less morbid, more realistic than the person who tries to run away from it. And then a new dimension begins to open out; as if some of the granite of the gravestone had passed into one’s own thinking – a gradual detachment from various illusory aims, a gradual adjustment to the fact that life itself is a kind of spiritual exile. This does not promote despair but hope if one can raise one’s eyes to the crucifix and see that the whole human race are in fact hanging there in the person of their page 453 only perfect representative. We cannot object to following where he has gone already.

In this context I remember the magnificent lines of T.S. Eliot in which he sets down a list of the gifts reserved for age:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer . . .

What Eliot describes here is the spiritual process of ageing, a steady maturing through diminishment, a reassessment of motives, a shrinking from the approval of others which once we ran forward to gain – it is in effect a coming of age in terms of the soul’s objectives.

The coldness and the darkness I have spoken of runs through these lines – yet what a relief, what a joy! – after the artificial gardens of approval and self-approval and sex and status and even the complacencies of a piety that imagines it is sufficient for God’s purposes. We do not, I think, become ourselves, here on earth, in any real sense, until we begin to enter into the atmosphere of the Passion from which the meaning of life and death is conveyed to us. Lucky indeed – that what is so often despair for the pagan, to lose the gifts of youth – is only for us the beginning of our homecoming by way of the diminishments of age!

It is not the young person we should envy, in good health and spirits and perhaps with physical beauty, occupied about their proper occasions of work or play or courtship – though we should certainly love them and be glad to see them so occupied – but we should rather have a holy envy of the ageing person whose gifts are apparently all being stripped away, because he or she is moving nearer to God, nearer to the atmosphere of the Passion. And in that page 454 atmosphere all the signs are changed, so that pain is joy, and loss is gain, and death itself is everlasting life. We should envy those to whom God has begun to give himself by means of the Cross.

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