Several Greek philosophers referenced aging only in a peripheral manner. There are examples galore both in English poetry and fiction where we find that old age is treated in the most denigrating ways. All their plans have either been carried out or abandoned, and their life has closed about itself nothing requires their presence they no longer have anything whatsoever to do. In Beauvoir’s words, older people in Western cultures have:Ī limited future and a frozen past: such is the situation that the elderly have to face up to. In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir spoke passionately about the stigma of old age, about the loss of a valued identity, the self-older people once knew is gone, and it is replaced by what she called “a loathsome stranger” that they can’t recognize. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats describes an old man as “a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick…” who has nothing to contribute ~ someone who is waiting to die. Eliot provides a vivid account of both medical and psychological conditions associated with old age such as physical frailty, cognitive decline, sensory impairment, bitterness and the emotional stress of having to face old age and trying to make meaning of one’s life. For Arnold, old folks are trapped in their bodies like a prison, feeling as if they were never young.Īrnold believes that by the end of life an old person will come to hate his own body and will blame his advanced age for the loss of spirit, strength, and emotion. In his well-known poem “Growing Old,” he laments the loss of physical beauty and physical strength. Matthew Arnold’s perspective of growing old doesn’t shine a positive light on old age either. Then there is La Rochefoucauld, who viewed most old people as making a mess of their age and wasting their time, or letting time waste them. Take, for example, the doleful Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, who paints old age in a negative light when he declares that the final and most dismal age is that of ‘second childhood and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
In Western cultures, which are obsessed with what is new, novel, innovative, and futuristic, being old is often perceived as a shortcoming, and the elderly in such cultures are often shown as irascible, depressed, decrepit, senile people who have lost their joie de vivre.Įnglish literature is replete with negative images of old age.
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