OLD AGE
Old age is a mixed blessing. To live
a long life is the earnest wish of almost everybody. There are very few people
who hate this world to such an extent that they would like to die young. In
fact, most of us are afraid of death because we cannot know what happens to us
when we are withdrawn from this world to which we get attached in many ways.
Old people are free from many such weaknesses
as they had in their youth. Now there is no passion, no impatience, no
intolerance, no temptation, no bitterness, no sensuality, no lust, and no
hankering after fleeting pleasures of
the body. There is a greater closeness with God. In fact, old people direct their attention to
holy books, chant the name of their Creator as frequently as possible. When the night comes and sleep seems to be
delaying itself. they recite some short or long prayer to induce sleep to come
urgently and relieve them from the torture of insomnia.
The days and the nights of old
people are uncomfortable, if they are afflicted with any disease for which they
depend upon multiple medications.
Another curse for some old people is their loneliness. If they are
spouseless and have been left alone by their offspring, time becomes very heavy.
Yet, old age can be maintained as a
blessing if one does not sit idle. Action rather than contemplation is the
secret of happiness in old age. Old people must keep themselves busy with some
sort of work or hobby or social service, even if it is monetarily expensive and
totally unprofitable.
Given below
are the views of the two old heroes Ulysses and Rabbi Ben Ezra who appreciate
old age enthusiastically and make it enjoyable for others.
Ulysses is the Latin name of Odysseus, the mythological King
of Ithaca, and the hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey written in the 8th
century B.C. The word odyssey now stands for a journey of epic proportions.
The words that follow are from Alfred
Tennyson’ poem ‘Ulysses’:
“I cannot
rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees….How dull it is to pause, to
make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! Life piled upon life
were all too little, and of one to me little remains: but every hour is saved from
that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were
for
some three
years to store and hoard myself, and this grey spirit yearning in desire to
follow knowledge, like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human
thought. ….Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; death closes all; but
something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming
men that strove with Gods. “
Rabbi Ben Ezra is the
hero of Robert Browning’s monologue of that name. The Rabbi in his poem is modelled
on an actual figure, Abraham Ibn Ezra, a twelfth-century Neo-Platonist.
Browning was an
optimist. He celebrated life. While he
loved the physical delights of life, he entertained none of the fears about
growing old which we find in the poems of other poets. For him old age
represented the culmination of a full, rich life. This is how the Rabbi begins
his monologue:
Grow
old along with me!
The
best is yet to be.
The
last of life, for which the first was made:
Our
times are in His hand
Who
saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half: trust God:
see all, nor be afraid1”
Somewhere in the poem,
the Rabbi says: As the bird wings and sings, let us cry “All good things are
ours, nor soul helps flesh more now, than flesh helps soul!
These are in fact the words of
Browning himself In whose humanism nothing is more characteristic than the
importance he ascribes equally to the physical as well as the spiritual aspects
of man’s twofold nature. The first one belongs to youth and the second to old age.
15th November 2019 --------G. R. KANWAL
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