Displacement of old age
Old age is not a joy
Kirill Kobrin, <url>
“Help the aged,
one time they were just like you,
drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue”.
Pulp
In one of the later (and not the most successful) stories about Sherlock Holmes, there is a sixty-year-old professor tormented by a passion for rejuvenation. It so happened that he fell in love with the young daughter of his colleague; seeing age as the main obstacle to marriage (don't think bad! We are talking about Victorian times), he decided to resort to the help of a certain half-learned, half-charlatan from Prague, whose surname remotely resonates with the name of the famous Rabbi Levet, the creator of the Golem. Visiting Bohemia, the professor was transformed; more precisely, he had two phases of existence. In one, he remained his typical self, lectured, studied science, and led a normal lifestyle. Another phase turned him into a natural monster, if not into Mr. Hyde, then into some kind of monkey: the professor grimaced, teased his own beloved dog, and even ran on all fours and climbed trees and drainpipes with incredible dexterity. The changes took place regularly, so it was not difficult for the astute Holmes to figure out the reason for the strange behavior of the respected scientist, and the one who supplied – through a Bohemian dealer (yes, this is the word that is present there, while still in an innocent connotation, dealer) - to the old man a strange potion obtained from monkey bodies (I'm sure that Bulgakov carefully read this story in the Soviet twenties). Everything ended well: the wolfhound that broke loose from the chain almost killed the crazy owner, but he did not, the riddle was solved, the suggestion was made to the professor, his own daughter can now safely marry his secretary. One thing is unknown – what happened to the matrimonial plans of the poorest scientist.
Today there is such a problem in front of a 61-year-old man (note, I did not use the word "old man"!) wouldn't get up. Six decades of rewound years are in no way an obstacle to marriage with a charming (or not so) young creature, and not only for marriage, but so. Even the definition of "dirty old man" is gradually receding into the past; who can you call today without insulting – and not with an adjective, but with a noun? An "old man" today is someone who can no longer be "obscene", "dirty", for physiological reasons and simply already beyond age. All the other middle–aged individuals are just people who have lived, who still have a lot ahead of them.
In the British "Observer" there was an interview with a wonderful musician, the founder of the Kinks group, one of the best, sorry for the expression, "songwriters" Ray Davis. Davis, who will be 67 years old this year, has been married three times (and divorced), has many children from different marriages and now regrets that he could not live a normal family life. When asked by the interviewer if he has a permanent girlfriend today, Davis said a wonderful phrase: "Now I am in a situation of an inter-girlfriend." But in the days of Sherlock Holmes, our musician would no longer need Bohemian drugs.
(I cite as examples exclusively male beings not at all from masculine chauvinism – it just happens. It is difficult to find Victorian examples of how an aunt at 61 climbs trees after swallowing a concoction of monkey organs. But with regard to the topic "women and age", the trend, as we understand it, is the same. I will not remember the late Elizabeth Taylor and her trucker, I will just point out the expression "16-61" that is popular in the modern English-speaking world. I mean women who can be mistaken for a teenager from behind – and only at a frontal meeting do you realize that they are the same age as the Conandoyl professor. Fitness is clearly ahead of cosmetic surgery so far. Or – alternatively – after all, a human face is a better sign of his age than an ass).
Aging and old age – together with the fear of pain and death – are the main objects of repression in the modern Western world. Which, in turn, is constantly subjected to crushing criticism and merciless ridicule, most often from people who regularly attend gyms, spend a lot of money on cosmetics and prefer not to go to funerals even of the closest people. In fact, before us is the most important phenomenon of the current public consciousness, which largely determines not only the way of life of people, but also the economy, politics, culture. The "displacement of old age" should not be ridiculed, but analyzed – especially since we live in a rapidly aging world (at different speeds in different parts of it, but still). And we ourselves, in all honesty, have to admit that none of us is getting any younger, no one.
There are many attempts to understand the phenomenon of "old age displacement", but only a few reach the analysis. Sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, ardent publicists, poisonous essayists, plump novelists work in this fat field. Alas, to a lesser extent – biologists, doctors, experts in nature (and the body as part of nature). Just published in the publishing house “Faber & Faber" Lewis Wolpert's book "You're Looking Very Well" ("You look Great") just about that. A short, well–organized narrative about how aging brings destruction to the human body - and how it inexorably destroys the habitual social context of the individual. It is known that among the manifestations of discrimination, such as "racism" or "sexism", there is also ageism.
Disregard for those who have passed a certain age, although weakening, still exists in Western Europe and the United States; but in the so–called "developing world" it is not just one of the long–standing social diseases, no, here - from Russia to Brazil - it is a way of life. Wolpert gives illustrative examples of how elderly people are secretly discriminated against in hospitals and public institutions; if he knew how it is openly and completely at ease outside the world that he knows well… Nevertheless, the trend, although expressed in different ways, is the same. In a rapidly aging world, aging people are treated badly, sometimes even extremely badly.
And here is one of the reasons that people try not to get old. Or at least not look aging (not to mention "old"). All efforts are reduced to stretching the gray zone between the end of the so-called "youth" and the beginning of "old age". This problem, from a historical point of view, is recent – in some four hundred years, the average life expectancy in the same Western Europe has doubled. In the Middle Ages, everything was clear – the one who did not die young was almost an old man. Now, when young people in the West are slowly getting an education – and in general, they just hang around the world for years, indulging in stormy idleness – until they are thirty-thirty-five years old, and then they sit down in offices and begin to take loans, give birth, divorce, give birth again, take loans again, a state of "unsettled", "unrooted" (and, therefore, "youth") it lasts up to forty years, if not more.
British writer Will Self, in a review of Wolpert's book, tells how he once spoke at Brunel University at a seminar on "aging and literature." The audience was appropriate - as was the co-presenter of the seminar, eighty-year-old writer Faye Weldon. When Self declared that he was 49 years old and that he was now in "middle age", the audience shushed. "Forty–nine is not the average age, hell, even fifty-nine is unlikely!"… I must say, in the place where I was born and grew up, thirty years ago (the author of these lines is two years younger than Self, and, frankly, he still can't decide at what age he is) fifty-year-olds (those who lived to fifty) were already considered "old" – not least because in the foundry of GAZ, the retirement age for men was just half a century. Vodka completed everything else.
Today, if we talk about the West, we need to work until about 65. While you're working, you're not an old man with an old woman. But when you retire, too. After all, it's so insulting to be chained to capitalist galleys all your life, and then, after being released, immediately cultivate a garden and knit scarves for your grandchildren? No, the pipes. It is necessary to take from life everything that has not been done before! A year passes, two, three, five. When then does "old age" begin, the modern "old age"? At seventy? Seventy-five? Eighty? In the end, there is a chance that "old age" will disappear altogether – given the widespread plans to push even further the sweet moment of retirement. And then we will remember about old age only from books – and even pop songs of that era when it was not shameful to pronounce the words "help the old man" (help the aged).