A certain self-selection of course takes place in who shows up for the monthly Men’s Breakfast at the senior center, for instance—I sat with an ex-harbormaster and ferryman and a crane operator—or college reunion s. Welfare clients aren’t as likely as pensioners to come, and loners stay away, or the more deeply discouraged and unmoored. Among the Ivies, high-flying alumni who can talk about which prep school their children got into and about financial derivatives sit together, not with their classmates bemoaning the inequities of health and luck. Veterans who 50 years ago decided not to use the GI Bill to earn a college degree wound up with solid businesses and nest eggs, too, if they wished for that and followed through. But following through does not determine contentment if they also wanted beer chums or love liaisons that might derail their concentration yet engrave those smile lines people wear when reclining on their final gurney. Sly pleasures will do it, as well as the daily straight and narrow and a life of kids dashing around on summer evenings.
Integrity is rarer and doesn’t tell on the face as clearly because, unlike pleasure, integrity involves cost-consciousness, even for the honest soul whose ultimate choice will never be in doubt. Stubborn sacrifice is demanded, which can mark their expression_rs somewhat in the way attention-seeking eccentricity might. People possessing less will brand it as a quirk. Contentment at the end of life isn’t a kind of be-all, however. Orwell’s criterion didn’t specify what we should deserve. Discontent may be as admirable—although not self-contempt. What has surprised me is the widespread repose I’ve sensed in rubbing shoulders recently with old people, as one of them. In my ’50s college generation, existential pessimism, counterposed to postwar prosperity, was all the rage. Yet I was a dissenter, skeptical of the skeptics because, believing in an immanent divinity, I thought life could be radiant, especially if you got outdoors. Most people aren’t pantheists, though, and, accepting the cranky clichés about geezerdom, I expected they would be unhappier in old age than they’ve turned out. Settling for less than some of their dreams hasn’t seemed such a compromise because the satisfactions from unpredicted quarters have ripened so fully, whether familial—the prodigal grandma—or just waking up each morning with no tasks to trek to.
I’d realized World War II had validated Kafka and Camus as my classmates’ heartthrobs, but was instead a Whitman fan during the 1950s and ever after, loving every metropolis I encountered as well as the thunderous surf, the rolling landscape. Children are born with bursting buoyancy. Give them a few yards and they will start to play. But I didn’t guess that, 70 years on, that artesian buoyancy in subdued form would remain a force. Call it cosmic gaiety, planetary photosynthesis, the Big Bang, or the green thrust. Life is thrust.
Edward Hoagland is the author of 20 books, the most recent of which is Early in the Season. He is a contributing editor of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.
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