by Theodore Dalrymple (August 2026)
‘What is it to grow old?’ asked Matthew Arnold in the first line of his poem, Growing Old. Indeed, what is it?
Arnold wrote his poem, which I love, when he was about 44 years old: not, if I recall rightly, the age at which I asked the question. But in those days, of course, the 1860s, old age arrived much earlier than it does now. Old age keeps being put back, like the completion of a government building project. I remember looking at photographs taken in the late 1940s of prominent local citizens who were then in their fifties: they would pass for more than seventy now. When I qualified as a doctor, a geriatric patient was one who was over 65 years old, but nowadays geriatricians deal only with much older patients, and usually those with multiple pathologies.
Of course, the older you grow, the more multiple your pathologies tend to become, though there are some lucky people who are fit as fleas into their 80s or 90s (who are inclined with some, but not complete, veracity to attribute their health to their own efforts rather than to luck). Arnold in his poem provides not a catalogue of pathologies, but a few examples, when he replies to his own question with further questions:
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath?
Many of us had little glory of form to start with, but it is true that whatever little we had dissipates with age. We are prevented from noticing it when we look in the mirror only by the slowness of the loss and by the capacity of the eye to ameliorate what it sees there, a capacity to alter almost as great as that of Artificial Intelligence itself.
Arnold replies to his question:
Yes, but not this only…
which warns us that there is worse to come. It isn’t only our vanity that comes under attack from age. Not our bloom only, he says, but our strength decays, and every limb feels stiffer, every function is less exact, and every nerve is more loosely strung.
Even with the evidence of our own experience, we are reluctant to accept our decline. (When I say ‘we’, I really mean ‘I’, for I cannot claim to speak for everyone, though I should be surprised also if I spoke for no one else, or that my experience in this respect were unique to me.)
Nowadays, for example, when I walk in a city, more or less as fast as I can, I find that I am overtaken by young people, even women, who, without any appearance of hurry or special effort streak ahead of me. I used to walk fast, not because I was frantically busy, or because I had a rendezvous or train to catch, but from inclination, habit or temperament. Now, however, I find that I am a comparative dawdler. I tell myself two contradictory things: first that I could never catch up with those who pass me however hard I tried, and second that I could catch up with them but that just at the moment I happened to be too tired to do so. The first is true and the second is wishful thinking. Nietzsche would say that wishful thinking prevails over apprehension of the truth, but in my case (I think) it does so only fleetingly.
But perhaps the fleetingness of my wishful thinking is merely another instance of wishful thinking, which in this respect is rather like pride: that is to say, very difficult to escape altogether, for the man who says (or thinks) that he is not proud is proud of the fact that he is not proud and therefore is proud. A man who says (or thinks) that he is not prey to wishful thinking is prey to wishful thinking. In the same way, when we believe others, but not ourselves, to be influenceable by advertising or propaganda we are almost certainly deceiving ourselves.
As to the decayed strength mentioned by Arnold, the grip of my hands has undoubtedly been weakened by the deforming osteoarthritis of my fingers. Yet when I find it difficult or impossible to open a plastic screw-top bottle, I blame the design of the bottle rather than the weakness of my hands. Some benefactor of the ageing population has very cleverly designed an instrument precisely to assist such as I in opening bottles, but my pride precents me from resorting to it as soon as it would be rational to do so, preferring (for a time) to struggle like Laocoön with the sea serpents than to admit the weakness of my grip.
It so happens that I have read very recently research in medical journals that shows that both slowness of gait and weakness of grip are correlated in elderly people with lowered life expectancy. The statistical association is not particularly strong, and it is well to repeat the mantra that correlation is not the same as causation. For example, a decline in deaths on the roads in Britain has coincided with the rise of the consumption of avocado pears, but it would be a work of imagination to conceive of a causative relation between the two trends.
The strange fact is, however, that whenever I read of a statistical correlation in a medical journal, the finding of which correlations, no matter how arcane, seems to occupy more and more of their pages, I cannot help but think that the correlation is indicative of causation, however much I repeat the mantra that it is not, or not necessarily. It is almost as if the identity of correlation and causation were instinctive or hard-wired into the human brain. This suspicion is borne out by the fact that whenever researchers find a correlation (shall we say as a reductio as absurdum, of weekly consumption of bananas with the development of flat feet), they always, in their scientific publications, end by putting forward causative hypotheses which might explain the correlation.
Once one has read that slowness of gait and weakness of grip are statistically associated with reduced longevity, one begins to wonder whether increasing one’s walking speed or doing exercises to improve one’s grip will prolong one’s life. I persuade myself that, if so, the time spent—wasted—on improving performance in these respects would have to be deducted from any resultant increase in life expectancy.
In this connection, I remember the comparatively early death of a heart attack of Jimmy Fixx (now more than 40 years ago), who was aged 52 when he died of a heart attack while running. Fixx was the John the Baptist to jogging’s status as the messiah of health. He had a strong family history of heart disease, and he ran in part to counteract a genetic tendency to early death. If you deducted the time he expended on running from his age at death, his improvement on his father’s age at death (43) was considerably reduced: and even that improvement might only have been the reflection of the secular trend in the rate of death from heart attack, rather than the result of his running. Of course, if running so much was entirely pleasurable to him, a different complexion would be put on it.
But to return to Matthew Anrold. His view of growing old is entirely pessimistic and without explicit consolation. He tells us what growing old is not:
’Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,
A golden day’s decline.
On the contrary:
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young…
We are immured ‘in the hot prison of the present; in which there is, seemingly to the exclusion of all else, ‘weary pain.’
According to Arnold, our physical decline is paralleled by our emotional decline or desiccation: we ‘feel but half, and feebly what we feel’, precisely as our grip is enfeebled.
I am not sure that this is quite accurate: it assumes that strong feeling is always desirable, and this has not been my invariant experience of strong feeling, either in myself or from observation of it in others. I have known people who found the decline of violent feelings in age a relief rather than a loss; they do not want such feelings to return. There is much, after all, to be said for a calm sea.
Are there any other consolations of age? I do not think that any categorical answer can be given. It is not difficult to think of aged people whose lives have neither purpose nor pleasure in them, and who continue to live because they cannot die by simple effort of will. But there are likewise many for joie de vivre persists until the end. I know an eminent journalist, now quite old, who says that he does not want to die because he is so curious as to how everything will turn out in the end: which is, in effect, a wish for immortality, or at least as near to immortality as life on earth can offer, because, just as the past is a seamless robe, so the future is without end also, and thus there is no possibility of finding out all the consequences of current events, which stretch indefinitely into a future which will, in addition, have its own fascinating events with their own endless consequences.
My own wish for longevity is slightly more modest: I want to live long enough to be able to read (at long last) the multivolume histories that adorn my shelves, and reproach me for not having read them, among them George Grote’s twelve volume History of Greece, or Thomas Madiou’s eight volume History of Haiti, or Joseph Reinach’s six volume history of the Dreyfus Affair.
But to return again to Arnold. His last stanza is the bleakest, which is as one might have expected, and which is certainly saying something.
It [to grow old] is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blames the living man.
In other words, when people are nice to us when we are old, and praise our past life, whether our achievements or our character, it is really little more than a slightly premature obedience to the injunction to say nothing of the recently dead that is not good—we being, by then, all but dead. Once the recency, however defined, is over, we shall be fair game for denigration, the vultures of criticism will descend on the corpse of our reputation.
This is not a very cheerful thought, to say the least; and if it is a truth, one may wonder what the point is of expressing it in public. Where ignorance is bliss, after all, ’tis folly to be wise—and unkind to be made wise.
But pessimism well-expressed has a paradoxical effect. It does not depress the spirits but rather elevates them. (Perhaps I should speak for myself.) To take to heart the pessimistic lesson of Dr Johnson’s philosophical fable Rasselas, that there is no way of life for Man that is perfect for him because he is the kind of creature that he is, with contradictory and incompatible desires, we feel relief rather than despair because we are then more able to put our dissatisfactions into perspective and are undismayed by the fact that our lives are not perfect. Once we know that dissatisfaction is the permanent condition of mankind—know it not just intellectually but appreciate it in the fibre of our being—our own discontents seem less important, anomalous, unjust, and so forth. We compare our situation not with that of heaven but with the of hell, and we realise that there is far worse than our supposed miseries (I speak here of normal life, not of extreme situations such as jungle warfare or concentration camps).
When we read Growing Old, though we may already have grown old in chronological age, we are not already in the abyss: for if we were, we should be neither able nor inclined to read it. So long as it means something to us, therefore, or moves us, we have, paradoxically, something to live for. The woe Growing Old is life-enhancing.
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Theodore Dalrymple’s latest books are Neither Trumpets nor Violins (with Kenneth Francis and Samuel Hux) and Ramses: A Memoir from New English Review Press.
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