Winter Light

Like the scent of ice at the end of fall, like the faint smell of green buds at winter’s end, old age begins subtly, unexpectedly, and takes us almost unawares. One day we notice that our bodies, our passions are shifting in ways that are unfamiliar, disconcerting, shaky. We feel ourselves falter. Something is falling away. We are caught in an undertow. The world, it seems, is becoming the possession of others. We cannot hold on. Our time here, we suddenly suspect, is passing. We might wish to prolong earlier states of certainty and well-being, but it seems this is not possible. Our body somehow seems less dense, less tractable. Sudden, bone-weary fatigue. The world begins to move away. Everything around us seems now more translucent, more flickering.

No one has any idea of what it will mean to be old. As a discovery, it is disorienting. It is not something we were aiming for. It is not part of our sense of trajectory. But now, slowly, many aspects of ourselves that we had taken for granted are no longer stable. Our situation in our body, in our social life, in our ways of thinking is being altered. It is all in some ways familiar, of course, but in other ways not. And being old and getting older, this is not something we simply get used to. We are in an unpredictable state of continuous change. Things shift slowly, then suddenly, in major ways. We must change the ways we live to accommodate unplanned, unimaginable, and unwanted alterations. Less and less can we take anything for granted.

For these reasons, old age is also a time when our experience becomes more intense. A feeling of uncertainty underlies everything. Each of us becomes isolated in this. We become more alone and more wary. This is not just a matter of looking more carefully at the sidewalk, at oncoming traffic, at things relating to safety. It carries over into how we are aware of friends and family and their lives. It somehow makes the sky more brilliant, and hot weather more hot. Everything is sharper emotionally. And then, there is this: My wife is sleeping and suddenly I am overwhelmed and about to burst into tears. I don’t know why. It is not a time, however, when we can hide much, particularly from ourselves.

As we are growing old, our body and world inexorably slip from our grasp and out of our control. Old age is marked by the most extreme losses, unknowns, the deepest and most intractable fears. Life is moving toward its end, even as the intensity of living continues. Being alive, living in this body and this world, walking home on a just too chilly early spring evening, this moment among so many others, has intense allure. We feel such a deep desire for it all, even if our desires do not take on quite the same form as earlier. Sexual desire, social and economic ambition do not vanish, they are just strangely altered, more tender, sad even. They are less at the forefront of a journey which is more and more taking us where it will. And we do not know where that is.

A very different space is opening before us. We are moving closer to dying. Subtly, obliquely, something alien is stirring in our body. We feel its slight advance even when, say, we are brushing our teeth. A sudden cramp in the hand. The brush falls into the sink. For a moment, there’s a break in the morning continuum. An instant when we lose possession of what we expect is a sharp hint at something more absolute. It’s a minute glimpse of larger loss. This does not displace our desires and longings; it places them in a different and more fragile context. So many momentary impulses, fears, yearnings have shaped us and are shaping us now. Now they flicker like constellations seen in the wide lightless depth of night. And we have a certain curiosity, a kind of unforced, unshaped appetite, binding us to these flickering patterns. Darkness and starlight intensify each other.

No one has any idea of what it will mean to be old. As a discovery, it is disorienting.

The revered Tibetan poet and yogi Milarepa made a song of it:

When old age descends upon you,
Your body, once straight, must bend down.
When you try to step forward firmly, you stagger.
Your hair turns white.
Your cheeks are pale.
Your eyes grow cloudy and dim.
Your hearing is muffled.
You shake and are dizzy.
Your blood dries up.
You cannot help stammering.

You are old and now death is approaching.
You are anguished and aware of how much you have depended on others.
Whatever wealth you accumulated, whatever friends you cultivated, whatever knowledge you picked up:
You cannot keep them: They cannot help, and they abandon you.
You try to ignore your suffering and pretend you can avoid your fate.
You follow doctors and people who say they can save you,
But your suffering increases.
Now when you tell people what you experience,
They do not want to know.
You are alone.

“The only real difference between people is their age,” said the painter Edward Avedisian over a glass of gin. And in old age, the truth of this is clearer. All human beings have the same, almost identical experiences while defecating, urinating, swallowing, coughing, vomiting, cleaning their nose, itching, scratching, feeling hot or cold, experiencing the pain associated with stomach, lung, intestine, ear, eyes, etc. Desire, anger, fear, and indifference are likewise, in their basic momentum, identical from one person to the next. But these sensations and impulses present themselves, are experienced and expressed differently according to one’s time of life.

Old age is, of course, a time of loss. There are, as everyone knows, the losses relating to our bodies, to our sense faculties, to our acuity. We do not feel or look the same. We become less appealing, even less lovable. For some of these, we can find compensations, for others there are no repairs. Seeing poorly, hearing poorly, not being able to walk far or run quickly, we find ourselves living with greater limitations in the world. The world itself becomes less accessible, and we are increasingly isolated within our body itself.

Indeed, deafness, tinnitus, macular degeneration, cataracts, and so forth become common with age. Hearing loss contracts ambient space. My sense of taste has changed rather than diminished. My sweet tooth remains, but my cooking of savory dishes is less sweet. I am now drawn to the range of tastes in sweet and hot peppers. Even though I stopped smoking only fifteen years ago, my sense of smell is acute, perhaps more to sour smells and slightly less to burnt ones. I am fortunate in that my eyesight is good. However, I notice that my sensitivity to yellow has decreased and to blue increased. The sensitivity of my night vision has declined, but darkness seems denser and somehow more textured. Hearing tests show a falling off in hearing upper frequencies, but I do not notice this in listening to, say, string quartets or singers. I am aware, however, of hearing bass registers with greater clarity. This inventory of changes can fill pages, but it is the impact of such difficulties that is of more significance.

Most studies into perception in the old focus on losses, deficits, and deviations from norms; there is less investigation of qualitative perceptual shifts. But these frequently occur. The great pianist Sviatoslav Richter said that in old age his pitch sensibility became a half to a whole tone sharper and that the same thing had affected his teacher, Heinrich Neuhaus, and Sergei Prokofiev as well. Mostly, of course, the changes in the registers of perception are not so extreme as to cause diminished functionality or can be accommodated in mechanical ways (hearing aids, glasses, changing the headlights on the car). But perceptual shifts change the world which we, the old, are seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting. We are not living in the same perceptual world as once we did.

Old, it now seems that the senses are less tied to the solidity of the world outside. But not uniformly so. Sometimes our sense of smell and taste are noticeably less vibrant, our eyesight and hearing weaker, and our sense of touch less sure in holding on to things. On other occasions, the scent of rhododendrons in spring, the sound of a clarinet next door, the taste of fresh figs, the sight of the slate blue sea just as the sun has set bring more intensity, as if life had just been born.

Sensations more often now bring with them resonances from the past. The early winter breeze brings back walking to school, winter by a river, skating on a frozen lake; the smell of lilacs on a warm breeze brings the thought of Walt Whitman, the yearning to fall in love, a sadness in spring; music faintly heard behind a closed door in a long musty corridor. No memory is a refuge; all are unresolved. On and on, in old age, our senses do not present us with one thing in one time, but many, resonating through time. The world is offering continuous and simultaneous perceptual pathways. And thus, we find ourselves in a deeper, less stable, less definable space.

My friend’s 93-year-old father sat in the backyard in midsummer. “I never knew there were so many kinds of green,” he smiled.

“Generally, as we age, the world shrinks,” said the famed director André Gregory.

Our creaky arthritic knees won’t carry us far. Our friends begin to pass on. . . . A shrinking world is slowly burying us. . . . But through painting . . . I am now living a second childhood. . . . Look. Trees are so much more than green—black, yellow, red, umber. Depending on the light, all colors exist in everything. “Color,” Paul Klee says, “links us with cosmic regions.” And shadows, shadows everywhere. Just look. And wonder. As I learn to look, the world appears richer, larger, more splendid. 

♦

From Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance by Douglas J. Penick. Excerpted with permission from Punctum Books.