The age of active independence

20110109ianmcdonaldAs I grow older – 83 tomorrow – bloodied but not completely bowed, a passage from Shakespeare comes naturally but ominously to mind. It is the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech from As You Like It: “One man in his time plays many parts. His acts being seven ages.”

In which age, I wonder, do I now live? According to Shakespeare, it looks as if I should be slipping, after the hurly-burly, quietly into the sixth age – that of slippered pantaloon relaxing with spectacles on nose – which is unnervingly close to that last Shakespearean age of all, the one which ends this strange, eventful history in “mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Surely Shakespeare has got it wrong. I don’t feel all that like a slippered pantaloon. On the whole there seems a lot left to do. I still try to totter out into the unrelenting day.

Fortunately, I find that Shakespeare was substantially updated by Peter Laslett, a fellow of Trinity College in my old University, Cambridge. Peter Laslett redefined Shakespeare’s seven ages into four: childhood and schooling; work and raising the family; active independence; and, lastly, dependence with dignity. That sounds more like it to me. I like to feel I am still in the best age of all, the age of “active independence.”

Laslett defined this third age as beginning at retirement from full-time employment and as ending, for statistical tidiness, at 75. But I am thinking that I should be able to extend that by, say, 10 or 15 years, which will give me good time to deploy whatever talent, experience, enthusiasm and capacity for enjoying life I may still possess.

There are, of course, potential drawbacks. One is bound to be nervous about leaving the institutional cocoon and having no structured day. I have immensely enjoyed doing nothing so I always have to worry that I might get to enjoy too much doing not as much as before. Another danger to avoid like the plague is to get to thinking that the wisdom and judgement one has supposedly gathered over the years entitles one to go around telling people “Listen to me, I’ve been around and this is how it should be done.” A fatal mistake, as even a fleeting glimpse of what the last fifty years of independent wisdom and experience has done to Guyana should conclusively prove. Let a new generation apply its new solutions I have to keep reminding myself.

So how should one put to use this precious time, this third age of “active independence” as Peter Laslett puts it.

I remember an old friend of my father’s, Frankie Warnford, Director of Agriculture in Antigua, who on the morning of his fiftieth birthday, the first possible date of his pension entitlement, claimed early retirement and for the next 35 years cultivated his garden, collected books, entertained his friends and in his beautiful home, Yeptons, overlooking the ever-changing Antiguan sea, lived in placid contemplation of life and literature to the end of his days. So many countless, quiet days, happy in himself, he saw:

“the match of the first star

through the door of sunset always left ajar.”

And turned the pages of his latest treasured book and found contentment.

A seductive option. But not, I think, for me. I so far feel more active than that. At the least I want to write books, not just read them – though, I have to admit, there is more than enough lovely reading left to last a hundred lifetimes, much less through the third and fourth ages of just one life.

On the other hand, I don’t want to become hyper-active and deeply involved in new commitments filling the days just as the old days were filled to overflowing for so long. After all, this should be a new sort of life, not the same as before in a different form. At a minimum I want time to think seriously and write seriously – if I have, which is very doubtful, the real staying power for the demanding, lonely business which serious writing is. The age of active independence is an interesting time. The challenge is to make the best use of it.

In the great Oxford English Dictionary there is a word – Torschlusspanik – from the German meaning “Panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life’s opportunities has shut.” It is what too many people feel late in life. More appropriate, I like to think, is its very opposite, though I haven’t been able to find the word for it in the OED: “Satisfaction at the thought that other doors between oneself and life’s opportunities are just opening.”