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A review by blackoxford
Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively
5.0
Grey Power
Our idea of a ‘person’ derives from the ancient Greek conceept of the ‘prosopon,’ the mask worn by actors in the theatres of Attica. The Romans, litigious folk that they were, put this idea to work in law. ‘Persona’ for them was a legal designation of an entity with status to appear on his (sic) behalf in legal proceedings. There were only two such persons in Roman law - the Emperor and the paterfamilias, head of the family. A person, therefore, was a highly constrained and tightly defined and controlled role, a social mask, with a range of fixed obligations and duties. In brief, a person was a slave to society, a productive, conventional, recognized cog in the cultural wheel. And so it has remained.*
Penelope Lively’s wonderfully rambling meditation on old age makes a profoundly important point: Old age, quite apart from its aches, pains, and progressive organ failures, is a liberation from that social peonage of personhood. Advanced age more than compensates for its inconveniences by eliminating this stigma. Because the old are hardly noticed in a culture of youth, we are able to drop our pretenses about who we are and how we fit in. We fly under the radar of society. Because we have lost our vigour, we are no longer expected to have ambitions or to visibly contribute to the well-being of the world. So we are left alone to do the things we’ve wanted to do all along. In more advanced societies, we are condescended to as at least slightly debilitated which entitles us to special privileges, putting us in ‘exempt’ categories - for things from theatre tickets, to bus passes, to television licenses, to prescriptions - which we exploit to the hilt.
That is, the old enter into the glorious status of non-person. This gives us power that the young can’t even imagine. “I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity.. We are not exactly invisible, but we are not noticed,” says Lively. Oh, blessed impersonal existence! One becomes almost spiritualized: “The point here is that age may sideline, but it also confers a sort of neutrality; you are no longer out there in the thick of things, but able to stand back, observe, consider.” To be a judge, and not be judged. This is indeed power.
The power is also psychological. Experience is not simply and accumulation of memories, it is also a successive construction of personalities. As Lively knows, “This old-age self is just a top dressing, it seems; early selves are still mutinously present, getting a word in now and then... I never imagined that old age would be quite like this – possibly because, like most, I never much bothered to imagine it.” Perhaps this is the real breakthrough of old age, to arrive at the realization that whatever we are, its not what we’ve thought much less what anyone else has thought. We have depth. We exude ambivalence. We are permanently mysterious. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Yes we contradict ourselves; we are manifold. And that is our secret power as human beings, a sort of senescent magic that dissolves personhood.
Of course, while we have individually become non-persons, we have also assumed a collective political personality. This has always been a latent unrecognised consequence of democracy. Since we all expect to become part of the constituency of the aged, the old have always held the upper hand. It is not falling fertility rates but greater longevity that has turned the electoral minds of all but the very young to the economics of living in the end times. Lively summarizes the situation laconically, “The poor have always been with us, and now the old are too.” That presence is sociological as well as demographic, a hidden power shepherding in the fellow-travelers of the old despite any resentful resistance.
So as Lively says, “A positive attitude is not going to cure the arthritis or the macular degeneration or whatever but a bit of bravado makes endurance more possible.” But that bravado is certainly not without foundation. And as things about power go, the power of the old is just about as egalitarian as it gets since we all get to share in it eventually.
Not recommended for readers under 70 years of age. You just won’t get it behind the mask. Besides, we don’t want the secret to get out.
*I should add for the sake of completeness that the idea of person which we inherited has been profoundly affected by Christian theology of the Middle Ages in which each of the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity are defined solely in terms of their relationships to each other. Thus ‘person’ came to be associated with a complete lack, paradoxically, of personal substance, that is, a cipher except in its social context. The question, it seems to me, is ‘Who would aspire to such a constrained and vacuous status?’
Postscript 16Jan18: Another GR reader sent me this apt piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/nyregion/these-4-new-yorkers-are-experts-in-living-what-do-they-know-that-we-dont.html
Our idea of a ‘person’ derives from the ancient Greek conceept of the ‘prosopon,’ the mask worn by actors in the theatres of Attica. The Romans, litigious folk that they were, put this idea to work in law. ‘Persona’ for them was a legal designation of an entity with status to appear on his (sic) behalf in legal proceedings. There were only two such persons in Roman law - the Emperor and the paterfamilias, head of the family. A person, therefore, was a highly constrained and tightly defined and controlled role, a social mask, with a range of fixed obligations and duties. In brief, a person was a slave to society, a productive, conventional, recognized cog in the cultural wheel. And so it has remained.*
Penelope Lively’s wonderfully rambling meditation on old age makes a profoundly important point: Old age, quite apart from its aches, pains, and progressive organ failures, is a liberation from that social peonage of personhood. Advanced age more than compensates for its inconveniences by eliminating this stigma. Because the old are hardly noticed in a culture of youth, we are able to drop our pretenses about who we are and how we fit in. We fly under the radar of society. Because we have lost our vigour, we are no longer expected to have ambitions or to visibly contribute to the well-being of the world. So we are left alone to do the things we’ve wanted to do all along. In more advanced societies, we are condescended to as at least slightly debilitated which entitles us to special privileges, putting us in ‘exempt’ categories - for things from theatre tickets, to bus passes, to television licenses, to prescriptions - which we exploit to the hilt.
That is, the old enter into the glorious status of non-person. This gives us power that the young can’t even imagine. “I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity.. We are not exactly invisible, but we are not noticed,” says Lively. Oh, blessed impersonal existence! One becomes almost spiritualized: “The point here is that age may sideline, but it also confers a sort of neutrality; you are no longer out there in the thick of things, but able to stand back, observe, consider.” To be a judge, and not be judged. This is indeed power.
The power is also psychological. Experience is not simply and accumulation of memories, it is also a successive construction of personalities. As Lively knows, “This old-age self is just a top dressing, it seems; early selves are still mutinously present, getting a word in now and then... I never imagined that old age would be quite like this – possibly because, like most, I never much bothered to imagine it.” Perhaps this is the real breakthrough of old age, to arrive at the realization that whatever we are, its not what we’ve thought much less what anyone else has thought. We have depth. We exude ambivalence. We are permanently mysterious. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Yes we contradict ourselves; we are manifold. And that is our secret power as human beings, a sort of senescent magic that dissolves personhood.
Of course, while we have individually become non-persons, we have also assumed a collective political personality. This has always been a latent unrecognised consequence of democracy. Since we all expect to become part of the constituency of the aged, the old have always held the upper hand. It is not falling fertility rates but greater longevity that has turned the electoral minds of all but the very young to the economics of living in the end times. Lively summarizes the situation laconically, “The poor have always been with us, and now the old are too.” That presence is sociological as well as demographic, a hidden power shepherding in the fellow-travelers of the old despite any resentful resistance.
So as Lively says, “A positive attitude is not going to cure the arthritis or the macular degeneration or whatever but a bit of bravado makes endurance more possible.” But that bravado is certainly not without foundation. And as things about power go, the power of the old is just about as egalitarian as it gets since we all get to share in it eventually.
Not recommended for readers under 70 years of age. You just won’t get it behind the mask. Besides, we don’t want the secret to get out.
*I should add for the sake of completeness that the idea of person which we inherited has been profoundly affected by Christian theology of the Middle Ages in which each of the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity are defined solely in terms of their relationships to each other. Thus ‘person’ came to be associated with a complete lack, paradoxically, of personal substance, that is, a cipher except in its social context. The question, it seems to me, is ‘Who would aspire to such a constrained and vacuous status?’
Postscript 16Jan18: Another GR reader sent me this apt piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/nyregion/these-4-new-yorkers-are-experts-in-living-what-do-they-know-that-we-dont.html