Alan Hollinghurst recently said that,
“…novels are really about young people; they are about how people find themselves and become
themselves”
I don’t believe this, but there is some truth in it and it got me
thinking that perhaps this is why so many people I know have disengaged with
fiction and story as they’ve gotten older. If the narratives that are being
focused on are those of young people, why would they (the oldsters) be interested?. Also, is it true that being older means
being in a static, stationary position of having ‘found’ and ‘become’ yourself.
Surely this isn’t true. And yet it does feel true to say that the narratives/images
that might be meaningful for a young person would be different to those that
would be significant for an old person.
Does Joseph Campbell’s or Dan Harmon’s
Hero’s Journey still apply at 50? I remember the painter Ken Kiff saying that
as he got older he became more interested in the images of the desert fathers,
the hermits and saints who took themselves into isolation. They seemed to him
like a reversed,mirror image of the young Hero leaving home at the start of
his/her adventure. If this image is resonant for older people, does it mean
that old age is, in a sense, a withdrawal from the world? A disengagement? If
so, what stories and images cluster around this? I think it has to do with a
kind of bereavement. A bereavement for one’s own death. If being young is about
finding and becoming yourself, is being old about dissolving, becoming un-whole?
No, that can’t be it. When I was young,
I thought about death a lot (I’ve always been a fun guy). It was something that
was going to happen to me. As an old person, I think about death just as much,
but differently. As something which is happening to me. The process is
happening. Of course, this isn’t exactly true, but that’s how I feel. I think
it’s to do with this sense of coming to terms with one’s own death. Like
bereaving before someone has died. Do you remember when the the 75 year old
broadcaster David Dimbleby got a tattoo? I remember seeing that and thinking,
That’s a tattoo on a corpse. Ofcourse, Dimbleby is just as alive as myself, but
it was an action that was a distinct missing-the-point. Like all those bucket
lists that old codgers tick off ( I speak as an old codger myself). I’ve met
plenty of old people who delight in saying that they’re going to grow old
disgracefully and there always seems to be something slightly hysterical in
their attitude. However I can see that they’re rejecting the image of the wise
old person. That’s not fruitful. Stasis and stability is not fruitful. Crazy
old codgers are better. But there should be something grave and somber about
growing old, shouldn’t there? Look, I don’t want to be on a moral high horse, I
think that distraction is a fine technique, and as good a way of dealing with
death as any other. But the bucket list model of ageing is different to Yeats’
“Old men should be explorers.” The Desert Fathers were explorers.
