In a moment of the Conversations with Eckerman, Goethe tells his interlocutor that there is always a particular arrogance to youth, and goes on to add that “indeed, everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake” [1]. In fact, the illusions clustered around the ideal of “Youth” promotes repeated recommencement, as if world historical progress would depend on the fictional origin of a segment of life in the promising rise of the youth. It does not come to surprise that in our times, the youth is elevated and cherished, while social relations undergo an accelerated path of constant rejuvenation and infantilization in clear hostilities with past generations and old age. In fact, in recent m attempts at providing the correct diagnosis of the crisis of West once and for all – and by doing that promoting the final and ultimate cures – we have seen political theorists insisting on gerontocracy as the root of economic inequity , as well as a necessary coming of internal civil war or class struggle between generations. These arguments, along with the new technologies that delegate the sensible dimension of the event of language, are obviously working on the denigrating premise well understood by Goethe; mainly, that starting from scratch must commence from the glorious defense of the youth. In its radically voluntarist assumptions, this defense of the youth adopts the futurist aspiration of the old romantic revolutionaries, for whom all that smelled of the past was understood to be already within enemy lines.
It does not take too much to understand that the defense of the youth as a beacon of the “new” – as the origin of generations that will “bring about a new world” – is very much in the spirit of an epoch that eternally dwells in the present without any relation with the past. In this sense, the metonymic attack on “gerontocracy” (that puts the blame on older generations by taking specific figures of governing political elites) is only a ruse that works in tandem with the ongoing techno-economic anxieties about the necessity at all costs to overcome stagnation and the end of growth. Old Age can easily be just disposed and discarded in our societies, because what is “old” brings about the possibility of a human destiny that can contemplate itself as a form of life that ceases to be functional to the regime of production. This is why, as Goethe suspected, the beginning is not to be found in Youth but only at the end of life, where character is gathered in destiny in a sort of appropriation of a life’s temporality.
This is why in his extraordinary essay on artists and old age, Gottfried Benn could write that “Face to face with the Western world, I did my work; I lived as if the day had come — my own day. I was the man that I shall be. And so at the end I take my stand on all the church fathers, all those ancient men with centuries behind them: non eonfundar in detention — I too shall not be condemned eternally.” [2]. Or when Elias Canetti in a gloss in The secret heart of the clock (1985) writes daftly: “Finally I have become what I have always been, an authentic old man”. Canetti does not mean that he finally reached the end of his life and thus he is ready to die; rather, he hints at the fact that in coming of old age, he is able to discern the authentic figure of what constitutes the bond between your life and the world, something like his true harmony where he can be at peace. It is only in old age, once our eyes are almost closed and seemingly unattentive and astray, that we can truly “see” the inner figure of life. This is what Plato understood so well in a moment of The Laws: “Yes, when we’re young, we’re pretty blind to them [ideas]; old age is the best time to see them clearly” [3].
And of course, to see is to contemplate the movement of thought as it is taking place, beyond the partitions and separations imposed by “generational breaks” and their embedded hostilities. But what is this figure of thought that is finally contemplated and discerned with such clarity? Cowper Powys will also insist on the realization of proportion that is only grasped in Old Age: “Well, then, where in heaven’s name lies the grand advantage of old age? To be near extinction, near what may easily prove everlasting extinction? What advantage is that? I will answer you in one world and that word is proportion. We get for the first time in life when we grow a sense of proportion” [4]. Old Age is the beginning of a sense of proportion not because a “new” historical epoch can recommence from its ‘origin’, but rather because in its nearness to death, staged in the time of irreversible stagnation, it can contemplate what it has loved and overcome in order to be of a certain way.
Nowhere is this more beautifully thematized as in Titian’s “The Three Ages of Man” (1512), where Old Age seated on the grass of an uninhabited meadow medidates not such on his personal death and immortality, but on the proportion of love as symbolized by the two skulls that he holds in each hand. If old age is the keeper of proportionality, this is due to the fact that it can finally contemplate the events that have been absorbed in life. The idea of proportion is nothing else but the invisible weavers of a destiny that transports us to the secret love of youth, which in Titian’s picture is represented by a single lover that holds two flutes at once. A clear parallelism that reveals ultimately the belated sense of proportion: the supreme eros is ultimately can put in tonal communication youth and old age, carrying the embodied memory of the two, whether these are the two skulls or the flutes once enjoyed at each other’s company.
It is only in old age where proximity becomes proportional to what has transformed the texture of life, because all predicates are a truth of being. In the summa of the emblematic tradition, as Panofsky once observed, old age is represented as a “Wise Council” that conquers haste; it is founded on industrious nocturnal study, and it must be directed towards Prudence” [5]. An Old Age is wise not because of rigorous knowledge or expertise, but because it can now realize the authentic study of its own figure beyond any heroism. The vigorous, and at times overwhelming and presentist depreciation of Old Age, facing the social question of the “aging population” endures the mutilation between the ‘ages of men’, instead of listening to the music that animates the living. Now human experience is left with the impoverished chatter of private and arbitrary necessities among distinct and fragmented generations that no longer have anything to communicate or remember to each other.
.
.
Notes
1. Johann Peter Eckermann. Conversations of Goethe (Capo Press, 1998), 333.
2. Gottfried Benn. Artists and Old Age: An Essay on the Creative Personality, The Atlantic, March 1957: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/03/artists-and-old-age-an-essay-on-the-creative-personality/642213/
3. Plato. The Laws, ed. T. J. Saunders (Penguin Books, 2004), 715e, 128.
4. John Cowper Powys. The Art of Growing Old (Jonathan Cape, 1944), 206.
5. Erwin Panofsky. Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic (New York University Press, 1969), 107.
