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\u201cLongevity is one of the greatest curses introduced by the scientists,\u201d wrote Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Harold Action in 1961, a few days after his 58th birthday. I read this a few days after I had given a talk on the pandemic of NCD (non-communicable disease) where I emphasised that the pandemic was the result of \u201csuccess\u201d in extending life expectancy. But could Waugh be right?<\/p>\n
Minutes after reading Waugh\u2019s statement I read Matthew Arnold\u2019s bleak poem on growing old, written in 1867, when he was 45.<\/p>\n
Growing Old<\/strong><\/p>\n What is it to grow old? Is it to feel our strength – Yes, this, and more! but not, ‘Tis not to see the world It is to spend long days It is to suffer this, It is -last stage of all – Why, I wonder, did Arnold have such a bleak view of old age at 45? But as a poet he\u2019s by no means alone in his view. Philip Larkin expresses similar thoughts in The Old Fools<\/em>, referring to old age as \u201cThe whole hideous inverted childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n What do they think has happened, the old fools, Larkin was 46 when he wrote that poem. Arnold died aged 66, Larkin at 63, and Waugh at 62. Waugh was a devout Catholic and may have been looking forward enthusiastically to the afterlife. In a letter written in 1962 he objects to a \u201cturncoat\u201d being elected to parliament and writes:\u00a0 \u201cIt shows there is no justice in this world and that one must look to a life beyond the grave to regulate the accounts.\u201d Lady Marchmain in Waugh\u2019s Brideshead Revisited<\/em> makes clear that what happens in this life matters little, it is the next life that matters.<\/p>\n
\nIs it to lose the glory of the form,
\nThe lustre of the eye?
\nIs it for beauty to forego her wreath?
\nYes, but not for this alone.<\/p>\n
\nNot our bloom only, but our strength -decay?
\nIs it to feel each limb
\nGrow stiffer, every function less exact,
\nEach nerve more weakly strung?<\/p>\n
\nAh, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ‘twould be!
\n‘Tis not to have our life
\nMellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
\nA golden day’s decline!<\/p>\n
\nAs from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
\nAnd heart profoundly stirred;
\nAnd weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
\nThe years that are no more!<\/p>\n
\nAnd not once feel that we were ever young.
\nIt is to add, immured
\nIn the hot prison of the present, month
\nTo month with weary pain.<\/p>\n
\nAnd feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
\nDeep in our hidden heart
\nFesters the dull remembrance of a change,
\nBut no emotion -none.<\/p>\n
\nWhen we are frozen up within, and quite
\nThe phantom of ourselves,
\nTo hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
\nWhich blamed the living man.<\/p>\n
\nTo make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
\nIt’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
\nAnd you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
\nWho called this morning?<\/p>\n