CHAPTER VII. Report on Questionnaire Returns

REPORT ON QUESTIONNAIRE RETURNS

Their value suggestive but only for a class--(1) Effects of the first realization of the approach of old age--(2) To what do you ascribe your long life?--(3) How do you keep well?--(4) Are you troubled by regrets?--(5) What temptations do you feel--old or new?--(6) What duties do you feel you still owe to others or to self?--(7) Is interest in public affairs for the far future and past, as compared with what is closer at hand, greater or less?--(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?--(9) Do you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of your own age, more or less than formerly?--(10) Would you live your life over again?--(11) Did you experience an “Indian summer” of renewed vigor before the winter of age began?--(12) Do you rely more or less upon doctors than formerly?--(13) Do you get more or less from the clergy and the church than formerly?--(14) Do you think more or less of dying and the Hereafter?--A few individual returns from eminent people.

Perhaps no one but a genetic psychologist can realize how very widely the successive stages of life in man differ from each other. Underneath the tenuous memory continuum that is the chief basis of all feeling of identity between our present and former selves, deeper even than every unity of life plan and persistence of disposition, are the great changes the years bring. These are, indeed, so great that although they very commonly modulate, each into the next stage of the series by almost imperceptible gradations, we all really live not one but a succession of lives. Further than this, just as in dementia præcox the normal development of the psyche is permanently arrested in a juvenile stage, so, but far more commonly, the normal progress from maturity to senectitude is arrested; and in the decades of involution, which is just as progressive and interesting as evolution, the old cling to or leave with great reluctance their mature stage and so never achieve true senectitude. Just as the precocious dement balks in adolescence at the growing complexity and arduousness of the problems of adulthood and so fails to mature because he lacks the energy or hereditary momentum to do so, so the old very often find themselves inadequate to the new tasks involved in beating the great retreat. They cannot break from the things that are behind and reach forward to those that are before and they cling with a tenacity that is purely arrestive to a stage of life that has passed. They refuse to accept old age and to make the most and best of it, to face its tasks and to improve all its opportunities. If they do not paint, dye, pad, or affect the fashions and manners of the young (for old age may show traits of narcissism), when the call comes to move on to a new phase of life, their mentality defaults. This type of mental defect has never so far been adequately characterized but it is probably far more common than what is usually called senile dementia, of which it is almost the diametrical opposite, although because of its prevalence it has a better claim to this designation.

Believing profoundly that involution is just as interesting a phase of life as evolution and not being satisfied with the poems, essays, and meditations of literary men and women who have addressed the public on the theme of senescence, which are, as we saw in a former chapter, often more or less hortatory, consolatory, or else were composed as exercises to hearten themselves against the great enemy, it seemed worth while to try to seek a new contact with the fresh spontaneous thoughts and feelings of normal old people concerning their estate.

Years ago I had visited homes for the aged, held converse with many inmates and officials, had given each inmate a tiny blue book and asked them to answer a few questions and add anything that occurred to them that they thought characteristic of their stage of life. The records thus secured, although voluminous enough, had very little value. Most who answered were uneducated and the data they supplied were usually trivial, tediously and irrelevantly reminiscent, or else descriptive of surroundings in earlier life, complaints, wishes, fears, etc., so that I realized that true old age as I had conceived it was not to be sought in such institutions. There was pathos and pessimism galore, while disciplined tranquillity and serenity were very rare. There is doubtless material enough in even the most inarticulate and insignificant life to repay the longest and most painstaking study. Perhaps, too, a psychotherapy may sometime be evolved that will launch such stranded and arrested lives out again into the current and give them full fruition of all the fruitage of life. But the world is as yet far from any such beneficent ministry.

Accordingly, I turned to another source and selected a few score of names of mostly eminent and some very distinguished old people, both acquaintances and strangers, and addressed to each a simple questionnaire, also inviting spontaneous impartations in addition to responses to the points suggested. Some of those who did me the honor of replying, and often with much detail, are people of national and international reputation and I wish I had not promised to withhold their names for this would have given greatly added interest to the following report. All are cultivated Americans and thus they represent a single class. Most are Anglo-Saxons and I have not been able to gather much material from Oriental or non-Christian sources, desirable and important as this would be. My data are, however, sufficiently copious to illustrate the chief types of attitudes within their class. To the returns from this source I have added data from less than a score of others of the same class with whom I have personal acquaintance and I have drawn but very little from the rich field of autobiography for my inductions. Such data can, of course, only yield results that are far more suggestive than conclusive, and so I forbear from all statistics because the number of my respondents is too small. But although what follows does not represent the great majority of old people it does have a psychological value that I deem as unique as it is pertinent to my theme. It is also perhaps significant that of those who wrote expressing interest and an intention to respond, not one has done so after an interval of several months. It should perhaps also be mentioned here that the suggestion of attempting this book came from nearly two-score letters from old people, which were addressed to me through the editor of the Atlantic Monthly and were evoked by an anonymous article I published on “Old Age” in the January, 1921, number of that magazine. I have endeavored to keep the following report of these somewhat heterogeneous data as objective as possible, although it would be absurd to claim that by such a method on such a theme I have entirely escaped subjective bias.

How and at what age did you first realize the approach of old age?

This realization not infrequently begins in the forties and increases thereafter, often intensively with the beginning of each new decade. The first sign of baldness, the first touch of fatigue at stated tasks, lapse of memory for names, waning potency in men; and the first gray hairs, wrinkles, fading of complexion, and change of figure, etc., in women are often specified in our returns. Such and many other signs usually gave the first sad recognition that the meridian of life was being crossed and that gradual declination was just ahead. In many a man and woman this is, as has been recognized, a dangerous age and it often comes in the middle and later thirties in women. The latter, realizing that their summer is ending, sometimes break away from old restraints and give themselves more liberties, not only social but moral. The first glimpse of the specter of senility ahead puts them in a now-or-never mood. Men ask themselves if they will be content to go on as they are so far heading, so that there will be nothing new to be written in the story of their life save only the date of their death. They wonder if the future is to be as the past and perhaps make an inventory of their unrealized ideals, hopes, and wishes, and cross many of them off their ledger as bad debts they owe themselves but can never collect. This crossing the line is for some so serious a matter that it may cause an abrupt turn in their life line, which starts off in a new direction, as is illustrated in a few conspicuous examples in