You’re Looking Very Well

sleep. In The Old Curiosity Shop, little Nell’s grandfather is very kind, but gambles too much. Victor Hugo’s plays had many old characters with positive features. In Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘All Over’, an old man meets again a woman he loved, but is shocked by how she has aged—only her daughter resembles his early love.

Shangri La is a fictional place in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which may have been inspired by Hilton’s visit to the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan, where the inhabitants have been reported to live long and healthy lives. Exercise is an important part of their life, as the mountains are extremely rough terrain. They eat mainly fruit and wheat, barley and millet. They have been called by some researchers ‘The Happiest People on Earth’. The main characters in the novel are taken to a secluded monastery where the monks practice a combination of Christianity and Buddhism and where some are immortal.

The novel Memento Mori by Muriel Spark in 1958 marks the beginning of a sustained interest among novelists in what V. S. Pritchett called ‘the great suppressed and censored subject of contemporary society, the one we do not care to face, which we regard as indecent: old age.’ Earlier novels had often just included a mid-life decline. All the characters in Memento Mori are over 70, and most in their 80s, and are in a nursing home. The novel centres around the anonymous callers who phone and say, ‘Remember that you must die.’ Old age is presented as a confusing mix of feelings, memories and inabilities leading to death: ‘I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment—there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die.’

Since Memento Mori many novels have appeared with central figures over 70, but they deal almost exclusively with the isolation, impotence and decay which are regarded as intrinsic to the ageing process. The closing lines of the final story in John Updike’s last book, My Father’s Tears, describe a man in his late 70s raising the glass of water he uses to wash down his nightly medications—his cholesterol-lowering pill, the anti-inflammatory one, his sleeping pill, his calcium supplement—in a toast ‘to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned’.

W. B. Yeats was infuriated by old age, which he recognised as inescapable, but his famous poem is wonderful and encouraging:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding is pessimistic:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of bitter fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

A recent survey by Age Concern found that older people are often stereotyped as ‘warm and incompetent’, or ‘doddery but dear’, and younger people are stereotyped as relatively cold but competent. The rating of young people as more competent than older people can perhaps be explained by attributing memory failure to laziness in the young but incompetence in the old. A key finding from the survey was that older people themselves hold self- stereotypes and values which are likely to result in age-based prejudice. Specific findings supporting this view are that people over 65 are as likely as the rest of the population to hold the ‘warm but incompetent’ stereotype of the old, and those over 75 particularly are more likely to agree that competence declines with age. Those over 75 are the least likely to want to extend equal opportunities for older people. Results overall showed that many people did identify with, and felt a strong sense of pleasure in belonging to, their own old age group, but about a quarter did not. Even the elderly population has a tendency to stereotype their own age group. While older people were stereotyped as friendlier, more admirable and more moral than younger people, younger people were viewed as more capable. In general people held more positive views about their own age group and almost all had most friends of their own age.

People across all age groups tend to agree that older people are admirable to some extent, and friendly to a greater extent. Moreover, older people see themselves as more likely to be viewed as moral, intelligent and capable than younger groups. They also see themselves as less likely to be viewed as pitiable or disgusting. A widely held view is that people over 70 should be valued and cherished; there is almost universal agreement on this. Many feel that equal employment opportunities for older people have not gone far enough. While American children have a positive view of older adults in their own family, they may have a negative world view of ageing. One explanation is that the stories the youngest of children are introduced to often portray older people as wicked or weird, like the evil old witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the scheming Rumpelstiltskin. Overall, children do have positive perceptions of the old. Older men are generally perceived more positively than women.

Only a quarter of those asked in a survey on work thought people over 70 were at all likely to be viewed as capable of working competently, compared with nearly half who thought people under 30 were likely or extremely likely to be capable. Other research findings, however, indicate that younger workers are often no better at their jobs than older workers, despite the widespread perception that this is the case. It has been shown in experiments that there is no significant difference between the abilities of younger and older workers, with each group performing particularly well or poorly in different areas. It is suggested that less good performance by the old due to reduced cognitive processing is counter-balanced by increased ability because of previous relevant experience.

Most people would be more comfortable with a suitably qualified manager of over 70 than one of under 30. Almost half think that employers avoid having older people on their workforce because it spoils their image. It was generally accepted that a good way to reduce prejudice and discrimination between old and young groups is to foster close personal friendships between members of each age group. Good relationships between grandchildren and grandparents could certainly help.

Writing in the Sunday Times, the TV critic A. A. Gill offered a more forceful view, describing the old as ‘zombies at the end of our own home horror movies… Ageing is so frightening in part because we treat the old so badly, and we treat them badly because we are so frightened of them… This is the greatest shame and horror of our society and of our age.’

Germans tend to view ageing much more negatively than Americans, and Americans consider themselves to be ‘old’ at a much younger age than Germans. Yet elderly people in the United States today are not treated with the respect and reverence to which they were accustomed earlier in history. The gerontologist David Hackett Fischer notes that literature from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century colonial America stressed deference and respect for the elderly. He maintains that the elderly were viewed with a feeling of deep respect and reverence, with contrasts with more modern views. Today the elderly have become virtual outcasts of society, many living on the fringe, often in retirement communities or in nursing homes.