Anam Cara

So there is a negative side to old age, but that has to do with the externality. It has to do with the body, and my understanding of old age and aging is that as the body diminishes, the soul gets richer. In old age, one of the things you have, whatever way you want to construct it, is time. When you have time, your soul begins to decipher things more and more. Camus said that after one day in the world, we could live the rest of our life in solitary confinement, because so much happens to us in one day. If you look at that from the perspective of all of one’s life, there are thousands of years of experience packed into sixty or seventy years of human life, because the amazing thing about the human mind is it is never neutral. The amazing thing about the human soul and the human spirit is it is never in a state of non-experience. There is something going on all the time. Even when you are sleeping. There are rivers of dream-thought flowing through the earth of your body, bringing up all types of mythic, archetypal stuff, some of which belongs to you, a lot of which belongs to the clay and a lot of which belongs to the race. A human being is an endless, epic theater of activity. So in old age, time slows a bit, the outer draw to activity recedes, and you have time for the more contemplative side of things. One enters the contemplative side of one’s own life, and you have a chance then to decipher what has happened to you, to see the hidden depths of experiences that have occurred in your life. You really have a chance to weave a new shelter for yourself. I love the image of the Carthusian monks, the contemplatives, who wear this habit with a cowl on it, and that then is sewn up when they die and becomes the shroud in which they are laid out. I would look at old age in a positive way, as a time of weaving the eternal shroud, the things that you take with you into the eternal world.

I remember one time in Moycullen giving a sermon about how we shouldn’t get waylaid; our journeys shouldn’t get falsified, trying to carry the world on our shoulders, because we can take nothing with us when we die. I was up in the local shop afterwards, and one of the neighbors said to me that he liked the sermon and he said, “Do you know the way we say that around here? You’d never see a trailer after a hearse!” You can take nothing with you but the interior things, which have reached a level of refinement that there is no barrier that they have to pass through. In that sense, aging is the ultimate refinement and ultimate harvest.

Our culture has gone so much into falsity that we don’t acknowledge that at all. It is very interesting, if you look at the anthropology of tribal cultures, that the elders were always the people of wisdom. Nowadays, we put them away in old people’s homes. Sometimes people have to be put into old people’s homes when they can’t be managed, but some of the loneliest places I’ve ever been are old people’s homes. I remember one particular place I used to visit. When you went in, twenty little worn, winnowed faces with hungry eyes would look up at you as if you might be the visitor that they’ve expected maybe for months, or maybe in some cases for years. It used to take me a couple of days to recover from it, because it is so lonesome. It’s lovely to have a friendship with an old person, because you learn so much from them. The Bible says that you should always ask for advice from a wise person. Old age and wisdom usually go together, because when you’ve been through the treadmill of experience you know what counts. You know the chaff from the real grain that brings nourishment. Old people have great wisdom and great light, and when they are not governed by fear there is incredible permission in them. You often get more encouragement in relation to your own wildness and sense of danger and carelessness from an old person than from anyone who is stuck in the middle of a system or a role or the kind of atrophied complacency that often passes for achievement and respectability.

THE GIFT OF MEMORY