The Final Elegy: the Consolation of the Classics in Old Age

Richard Oliver Brooks

Description

Old age is a time of losses- permanent, cumulative and irreversible. These losses include our loss of work in retirement, the eclipse of our past, our biological decline, dependency resulting from such decline, the foreshortening of our future, the abandonment of belief in our own improvement and our society’s progress, and, of course, our death.
This book views these losses as part of an elegy of old age. Elegy is a poetic or prose mourning of loss. Sadness and other emotions result. With elegiac understanding we detach ourselves from these losses to seek and find consolation. This book is concerned with achieving intellectual detachment through meditative reflection with the help of reading and appreciating the classics. The final stage of the old age elegy- consolation can be found, at least in part, within the classics-“the garlands of repose”.
The classics are broadly defined by Matthew Arnold as:
“the best that [has} been thought and said: { or found in the fine arts}. To benefit from the classis requires a life-long liberal education. This education begins with an introduction to the classics in youth, makes use of them during our adult lives, and supplies their conclusion for old age meditation. Such significant works enable us to place the losses we suffer within an intellectual framework of perennial ideas.
It is by means of such an intellectual framework that we secure consolation in old age. Classic works familiarize us deeply with the losses and emotions we endure-suggest substitutes for the goods of the life we have lost in old age, offer opportunities of catharsis for the sadness we experience and help us transform ourselves in old age. Classics help us see old age and its losses as part of a complete life which hold a unique value of its own, while remaining part of larger nature processes, history and intellectual traditions.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 01 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669840442
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Final Elegy: The Consolation of the Classics in Old Age
 
 
 
 
Richard Oliver Brooks
 
Copyright © 2022 by Richard Oliver Brooks.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-4045-9

eBook
978-1-6698-4044-2

 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Rev. date: 08/01/2022
 
 
Xlibris
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www.Xlibris.com
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CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
THE COMPONENTS OF OLD AGE ELEGY
Chapter I: The Reluctant Acceptance of Old-Age Loss
Chapter II: Emotions of Old Age Loss:
Chapter III: Detachment: The Power of Distance
Chapter IV: Avenues of Solace: The Consolation of the Classics
EMEMIES OF OLD AGE ELEGY
Chapter V: Religion’s Denial of Old Age
Chapter VI: The Dream of the Fountain of Youth
Chapter VII: The Mirage of Old Age Delight
Chapter VIII: Pragmatism’s Folly
LIBERAL EDUCATION’S PATH TO THE CLASSICS
Chapter IX: The Tradition Of The Classics
Chapter X: The Beginnings of a Liberal Education
Chapter XI: Integrating Liberal Education Into Adult Lives
Chapter XII: Reflective Meditation on the Classics in Old Age
SPECIFIC OLD AGE LOSSES AND THEIR CONSOLATION
Chapter XIII: Accepting and Compensating for the Withering of Life
Chapter XIV: Retirement, Classical Leisure, and Solitude
Chapter XV: Recovering and Recreating the Vanished Past
Chapter XVI: Diminished Future: The Autumn of Possibility
Chapter XVII: Dependency and Dignity
Chapter XVIII: The Abandonment of Faith in Progress
Chapter XIX: Death in Old Age
CONCLUSION
Chapter XX: Conclusion: Old Age, Loss, and the Rest of Life
Appendix A: Old Age in the Classics
Appendix B: Selected Recent Works on Old Age
PREFACE
“Go, little book… but kiss the steps where pass though ages spacious Vergil and Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius” - Chaucer
In this book, I am talking to three audiences. The first audience is composed of those who share with me the delights and burdens of age or who anticipate experiencing them in the near future. Although the entire book is addressed to the elderly reader, Part IV of this book, in which I discuss each of the seven losses which old age encounters may be of special interest to them. This discussion seeks to illustrate the thesis that the classic works can provide an understanding of specific losses in old age, offer expressions of the mourning that results from these losses, help us to detach ourselves from these losses and find some consolations. The “classic works” are that collection of great works, great books, works of fine art, and great practical accomplishments or their accounts.
Another audience of this work are those who are seriously interested in liberal education. Since I suggest that the classics can be helpful in understanding old age, I recognize that the reader must gain access to these works. This access requires a liberal education which teaches the classics and the skills for interpreting them. Contemporary proponents of liberal education view the reading or beholding of these classics as a vehicle to cultivate basic general capabilities for effective citizenship and to prepare the youth for a more specialized education to follow. To those proponents of liberal education, I suggest a third purpose: to provide the means for a continuing consolation for the losses of age. We old persons may view the classics in a unique way – through the lens of old age after having experienced an almost complete life. We bring a unique vantage point along with the experience of old age losses and the consequent emotions to an appreciation of the classic works. In so doing, we can test the classic against the reality of our own lives to make sense of both.
To make sense of our lives, we look for permanent truths in the classics. This search for permanent truths contrasts with the quest of many modern proponents of liberal arts who are content to appeal to the classics as simply part of a valuable tradition of thought, “cultural knowledge,” or as the raw material for cultivating the arts of reading, discussing and listening to be used in the future lives of their students. We elderly look to the classics for something more. We seek the truth among the variety of competing truths to be found in these works. For us, facing old age and death, liberal education is more important; it is the pursuit of final and permanent truths.
The third audience for this book is not the elderly nor to those interested in the liberal arts, but to everyone who must anticipate or cope with fundamental losses during the span of their lives. At some stage of our lives, most of us encounter some of these losses, such as significant health problems, involuntary unemployment, unwelcome dependency, loss of hope, or the death of a loved one. These losses are not unique to the elderly, although they are more certain to occur in the later stages of life. The final chapter in the book seeks to draw some general conclusions about losses and consolation at any stage of life testing the general conclusions set forth in the earlier chapters with the author’s personal experience. In sum this book supplies an understanding of old age, a rethinking of liberal education, and a consolation for losses in life for the old and ot hers.
When I reflected upon the three audiences I had “chosen,” I came to realize that I, myself, was an upstanding member of all three audiences! I was old and beginning to encounter old age losses. I had undertaken to write this book in old age because I was looking for an excuse – a project – which would enable me to do what I wanted to do anyway – read and appreciate the classic works I had been introduced to in my early liberal education and I have continued to think about their implication for old age and its losses. This realization led to the conclusion that, like Montaigne’s Essays , I was writing this book for me – an audience of one. Therefore, I preface each chapter with a brief relevant autobiographical account pertaining to the subject discussed in the chapter, while setting forth more general, dare I say, universal, observations in the body of the chapter itself. Whether the audience of this book reaches beyond myself as an audience depends upon how much my thoughts and feelings successfully mirror those of the three audiences I have identified and whether I communicate effectively to myself and them.
INTRODUCTION
The Final Elegy: The Consolations of the Classics in Old Age
An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence
And therefore I have sailed the sea and come
To the holy city of Byzantium – Yeats
This book is a report on my “sailing the sea” to the holy city of old age, to study the “monuments of un-aging intellect”. For the past t6 years, beginning at age 72 when I retired, I have undertaken an old age experiment in which I sought to embrace old age and its losses by consulting the classics, hoping to find within them a detachment and consolation I believed would be necessary in this period of life. Unlike those who glorify old age as “the best is yet to be” nor those who believe with Matthew Arnold that “in last stage of all…we are frozen up within”, I hypothesize that old age would be a time of losses and emotions which follow close upon these losses, but which, with reflective meditation, I could find avenues of so lace.
There are several premises to my old age venture. I assume that old age is a distinct stage of life dominated by loss and the emotions of sadness, regret, nostalgia and alienation; that these losses may be understood through the components of the literary form of elegy, (loss, sadness, detachment, consolation;) these elegiac components are explored through meditative reflection, which enables detachment and consolation from old age loss and emotion; that such reflection is assisted by a consultation with the classics, especially when these losses are placed within the old age vision of one’s completed life.
In this Introduction, to guide the reader, I shall explain briefly these premises, although they will receive more extended treatment in the chapters of the book. After this introductory explanation, I shall set forth the order of the book and acknowledge those who have helped me in this venture.
The Prem ises • Old Age - a Distinct Stage of Life
Old age is a period of our lives in which we encounter serious losses and the prospect of death. On the other hand, if we are fortunate, we are granted a period of leisure when we can reflect upon these losses in the context of our entire life and its meaning. The old age losses are obvious. Physical losses may include the thinning of bones and joint diseases, the advent of heart disease, arthritis, and hypertension, increased dental problems, digestive disorders, tremors, impaired eyesight, changes in gait, thinner hair, diminished hearing, hardening arteries, less efficient immunity, diminished lung capacity, impairment of mobility, decre