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Definition
The literature of aging and old age differs from nonliterary accounts of the process in its emphasis on individual experience, describing what it is like for a particular person at a particular point in time. As a result, taken as a whole, it is filled with contradictions and paradoxes, which see age, on the one hand, as the culmination of a rich and rewarding life, and on the other, as deterioration and dependence. The dichotomy is well represented by two figures in Homer's The Iliad: Nestor, the aged Greek general, is renowned for his eloquence, wisdom, and sense of justice, all acquired in the experience of his long life. In contrast, Anchises, as a young man celebrated for his beauty, the lover of Aphrodite, now is weak, blind, having to be carried from the burning walls of Troy by his son, the Trojan hero Aeneas.Between the heroic (Nestor) and the pathetic (Anchises) views of age stands the tragic. And that is embodied with unparalleled power in Shakespeare's portrait of King Lear. As the play opens, Lear is every inch the king, an imperious old man habituated to a lifetime of power, now demanding protestations of love from his three daughters. Thwarted by his youngest daughter, Cordelia, who refuses to play a hypocritical game, he unleashes his pent-up fury in rash, angry words—invoking the gods in his denunciation of her candor. When he discovers the true nature of his other daughters, he begins to lose his identity. "Who is it who can tell me who I am?" That is a question he must answer for himself as he undergoes the painful lessons of one who "has ever but slenderly known himself." In the process he becomes a "poor, naked wretch," who achieves insight in madness. But his suffering and the wisdom derived from it are finally eclipsed by the unanswerable question he poses to the dead body of Cordelia. "Why should a horse, a dog, a rat have life and thou no life at all?" He dies having learned what it means to be human, having paid an awful price in the process.At the polar opposite of the view of age in King Lear is Robert Browning's depiction in Rabbi Ben Ezra:Grow old along with meThe best is yet to be The Rabbi urges us to use the limitations, the aches and pains of age, as spurs to participate in life, but always in the recognition that there is a divinity that shapes our ends.In the 20th century the religious coda is less in evidence as we are enjoined to experience life fiercely, in Dylan Thomas's words, to "not go gently into that good night." A memorable representative of this conviction is Zorba in Nikos Kasantzakis's Zorba the Greek (1946; tr. 1952), whose passionate commitment to life leaves him open to all experience, including death.A less romantic view of age—one closer to contemporary experience—is meticulously portrayed in the last two volumes of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit is Back (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), while the depiction of the protagonist of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004), a Protestant minister of a small congregation in Iowa, now in his seventies, suggests the continuing value of religious belief in imbuing the life of an aged person with a sense of the beauty of existence.
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