Our first and most arresting intimations of old age involve physical transformations, the sudden realization that you are no longer the same person. Movies like "The Fly" play off this primordial dread. When I was about 18, I bit down on something and a tiny piece of the top of one of my teeth broke off. I still remember the sinking sensation: I can't even count on you? And this opens onto a deeper dread -- the knowledge that not just our bodies, but our very identities, are not fixed. That we ourselves, our very beings, are mutable. If you've ever looked through a colonoscope and seen a tumor growing inside your intestines, you know the feeling. The mind-body problem is instantly solved: They're the same. And they're both going down.
But you get over it. This is the hand we've been dealt. In moments of vision, what we realize is that the truly destructive change, the only one that can really make us old, is when we stop changing.
For most of us, alas, stasis seems to be the default. The terrible line that opens T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," "Because I do not hope to turn again," is our motto. And making it worse is the obscure fact that it's self-defeating. Trying to find the river, we dry up. Trying to hold onto that part of us that once moved, we freeze. We grasp desperately at our past, searching like happiness junkies for lost days when we remember being alive.
But resisting old age makes you old. It makes your losses serious. When you accept those losses, on the other hand, they become comic. You defeat old age by making friends with it. By letting it win. And you might as well, because it's going to anyway.
By comedy, I don't mean simply cracking jokes about our impending decrepitude and doom -- although that's an excellent idea. Nor do I mean an approach to life that refuses to acknowledge tragedy. I mean a spirit of regeneration, one that paradoxically springs from an abandonment of illusions. The comedic attitude offers a kind of resignation, a calm surrender to the inevitable. And it's regenerative because it doesn't see change as the enemy. It's an invincible, self-fulfilling belief, one that bubbles up from somewhere unseen.
The comic state of mind is irrepressibly buoyant. Take away my knees, it says, and I've still got my feet. Take away my feet and I'll laugh at you all from my wheelchair. Take away my wheelchair and I'm still on the sunny side of the grave.
This may seem like a superficial way to live, all "positive thinking" and blind optimism. But it isn't. Comic laughter emerges from the darkness. It isn't naive. It coexists with tragedy, but it cannot be defeated by it. It gets, literally, the last laugh. The man of comedy has experienced the pain of life, been staggered by its strangeness. He turns his staggering into a self-mocking dance. His laughter does not deny his losses. It is built on them.
And it is open to the air. For the real virtue of the comedic spirit is not that it preserves you as you are, but that it lets you change.
"I was so much older then/ I'm younger than that now," the poet sings. It's a command. But to keep getting younger, you have to let go of the carapace of your identity and surrender to the unknown. To become who you are, as Nietzsche eloquently put it, you must have faith in the unknown. Because it is the unknown, the world, that sculpts us into the most beautiful shapes. Our own artistry in forming ourselves is nothing compared to the wind, the waves on the beach, the flames. These are the forces that shape children -- it's why their faces carry so much light.
And the faces of some older people have it, too, that inner glow. It doesn't come from collecting and piling up experiences and knowledge higher and higher until you are the top dog. It comes from something more humble. In Marcel Camus' 1958 film "Black Orpheus," when Orpheus is mourning the death of his beloved Eurydice, Orpheus' friend Hermes advises him to "Say a poor man's word, Orpheus: 'thank you.'" It comes from gratitude.
But gratitude doesn't mean forgetting, or not sometimes mourning the loss of what you had, or were.
In my youth, I played a lot of football. I played until 10 years or so ago. I could outrun 98 of 100 guys and fake out the other two. Then my knees, once the strongest part of my body, broke down. Now I can barely run at all, and even walking is often painful. Like everything that you lose, football now means more to me than it did at the time. Now it stands for a loss, and that blank spot keeps trying to turn into a symbol instead of just a place on my map. The same holds true for other things I've lost -- and some of the losses were a lot more important and painful than football. They're gone, and they're not coming back. And sometimes it hurts to remember.
But that's all too self-pitying, and self-mythologizing. I had my day, and I'll have other ones. We all have our losses -- and a lot of people's are infinitely bigger than mine. Yes, it's hard to look down from the top of the hill at the rest of your life -- no more illusions, this is it -- and realize how many things you aren't ever going to do. But there would be no possibility without impossibility. Besides, the view from up here is beautiful. It's like you can see forever.
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
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