Florida Pier : writings and about       /       jmcvey.net

Florida Scott-Maxwell
We Are the Sum of Our Days
The Listener vol. 52, no. 1337 (October 14, 1954) : 627, 629
archive.org : link
evidently also in Harper’s Bazaar (October 1956)
 

We all know that the proportion of old people in the population is increasing, and will become even greater. So one wonders if the old can make themselves more welcome. How could we do this? One way might be to take on the task of finding out what we did to life, and what life did to us. For then we could hardly fail to see that we are both those things, and that they ought to become one. Such a balance is not an easy thing to achieve. If we take it on, out of necessity for ourselves, and out of mercy for others, too much must not be expected of us. We will never be sages or saints, but we will confer a real good on society if we become more mellow and more whole. Wholeness has great drawbacks, for it entails the acceptance of all that is most unacceptable in ourelves. This could be painful for us, but delightful for those near us, since we are then much less apt to leave out sins lying about for others to tidy up.

Final Creative Task
      In this search for insight, some of us need to be cautioned and some encouraged. Facing oneself does require much realism, a shimmer of irony perhaps, and proper modesty in the presence of good and evil. To sugest that we older people are capable of this noble accounting, and that it is our final creative task, is a grave statement. So one must quickly add that age cannot spend all its long days, and often wakeful nights, in seeing itself in the light of eternity. Old people may, at a deep level, be facing their inner judges and doing it so valiantly. At a more ordinary level they spend much of their time being astonished at their own unimportance. They feel so minute and ephemeral, that they doubt that their identity will last as long as it decently should. They are tired of themselves, and ready to relinquish the rags and tatters of themselves that still cling together.
      They are also constantly bedevilled by a question that they cannot get rid of, and that is ‘How long must we make ourselves last?’ For the haunting thought is always in our heads that perhaps we know nothing of age. It may all lie ahead, and can only be faced day by day to its unseeable end. Each hour nibbles at our solidity, and we relinquish something in every little humiliation. Trying twice before one’s knees get one upright. One’s own knees! Not seeing what others see, not hearing what they hear, missing the point, and so — pretending one was not interested. Often it was true: one was not interested. The emphasis, noise, and clamour of life seem out of proportion to sense. Something else is true, and must be admitted : dullness becomes very attractive. Sitting in a decent silence, enjoying presence of the you that does not talk, and liking even better the absence of the one that does. One’s mind open, in case there is any peace about; but turning away from the too personal, in search of the impersonal — we need a good deal of blankness for that.
      Yet is cold to be left out, and who wants to be treated like an effigy that no longer functions? So we may demand with energy ‘Who should be interested if not we? Who else started these lives and events?’ We have a great need to know certain things. We long to follow the logic in which we were a link, and — if we can — to catch a glimpse of the new thing that lies beyond us. We watch, all the time, to see where life fructifies, and where it lies dormant. If suffering comes to those we know well, we care above all that the suffering should be used to further life. Perhaps we have come to care more for the quality of life than we do for those who carry it; the old want to learn who among the young has the gift of learning. For the old can feel justified, or condemned, by all that they engendered.
      But all that is what we long for, fruitlessly, very often. What we get is an odd experience of anonymity, as though we moved along the cracks between the lives of other people. I know one woman who was once so lovely that as she walked all eyes were on her, and if she turned had turned to look at her. As she aged she noticed that everyone looked right through her, as though she were not there at all. It gave her a funny sense of freedom, but also a sense that she had become invisible. She felt she could go anywhere, into houses and out again. No one would stop her for no one would see her. She even wondered if she dared dance instead of just walking, but thought it more prudent not to try.
      It may be this experience of being invisible that makes so many old people give up wearing their social masks. No longer greatly impressed by humanity, no longer sure that they themselves exist, feeling it hardly matters if they do, they gain a new ease in remaining as uncovered and limpid as children. If to be tempered in the fires of insight is the task of age, perhaps this childlike naturalness is its reward. Old people do tend to enjoy indulging in mild eccentricity. This could be one aspect of our anonymity, combined with the fact that the old have so much life in them that cannot be lived; we dare to be natural at last, and really care little for the opinion of others. I have heard it said that the vigour and richness of character in a country is proved by the number of great eccentrics that it produces. So, let old people make their contribution here.
      There is another aspect of age somewhat akin to this, that is almost embarrassing to speak of because of its extreme improbability. One wants to shield it from younger ears. Yet it is innocent, and may be forgiven us. It is this — the old feel very young. At moments, that is. Though we are aching, inadequate wrecks, there are times when, in our hearts, we are incurably, deliciously young. I have no idea whether we should be or we should not be. Who is to say? Undoubtedly the quality of this strange youthfulness matters greatly. And observation tells us that it varies greatly. All that I am sure of is that an unexpected freshness comes to one when old. I have seen it rise in the lined face of a woman in her nineties, and it suffused her with a virginal lightness. And who has not been struck by the guileless purity in the eyes of many old men?
      This puzzling newness is so buoyant a thing it is a problem how to deal with it discreetly. Explain it as you will, it feels like happiness: but also like release and exemption. If taken in too literal a manner it may make you want to start again, and how can this be done? For the absurd fact is that an irrational and very high-spirited you is convinced that it now knows how to live. And could: there is the danger. For two pins it would try. In fancy, and very nearly in fact, it is ready to start out at once and see the world. It knows clearly that the necessary physical strength is lacking, as well as the robust purse, and that the perfect companion, who would like exactly what you like, has not been met in a lifetime of looking. Yet this unconquerable you, who might easily make a fool of you, must be honoured. It must be honoured greatly, for the leap of expectancy that rises in its heart is authentic, and I beg you to believe me when I say it is pristine in its freshness.

Gaiety in Age
      This gaiety in age is accompanied by, perhaps even partly caused by, the realisation that though our drama has been played, and that nothing much will now happen to us in the outside world, our battle too is over. And that fills us with a surge of triumph. It is like a great thrust of cognition, for we have lived our lives. We have been through that mystifying travail. We have worked, and suffered, and sinned and loved, and known happiness. We have done harm and done good. We have seen ugliness and beauty. We have been broken, and we have come through. So that some part of us is free: free of trying, free of any need of hope. And somewhere we are clear. A little clear: as though at the core there was an infinitesimal diamond, and there the conflict of living is stilled.
      If age is at all as I see it, then age is undeniably stormy. Stormy, but quiet; contradictory, in fact. Very well, that is what age can be. And how could it be anything less? If our true occupation is accounting for our lives, and relinquishing ourselves, no one can say that such a great matter could be accomplished easily. It is only after the combat that rest comes to the wrestler.
      Facing our own truth, giving ourselves up—think of these a moment longer. Even a hint of truth feels like a spear in the heart. And to [629] relinquish yourself? Who else have you? This question could be answered in two ways. Caution seemed to ask it, and caution should answer it. But so could abandon, and I feel that here abandon is the better guide. Let us say again: ‘If you relinquish yourself what have you?’ The answer comes with a rush of relief: ‘Everything that isn’t me’. And so we fall heir to a new richness, and marvel and meaning are clearer; and sometimes the candle of sentience which we each carry may burn with new brightness.
      It hardly needs saying that the old keep an eye on death, even trying to peer beyond death. We feel that we may indeed end there, as we have already diminished so much. But with equal strength we feel there is that within us which cannot be put out. Those who have experienced, in the recesses of the soul, that which feels immortal, rest content. And since even the poorest of us receive so much, is it not natural, at the end, to bid adieu to life in the words that Jacob spoke to the Angel: ‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me’. — Home Service
 

The broadcast (that would be reiterated in print, as above) merited a response, under the head “The Spoken Word / Good and Evil,” in The Listener (October 7, 1954)
archive.org : link

But the voice which pleased me most during the week came from a charming, thoughtful old lady, Mrs. Florida Scott-Maxwell, whose talk ‘So Near Mystery’, was re-broadcast on Monday and who gave us a new talk onSaturday called ‘We Are the Sum of our Days’.
      With that quiet philosophy which comes to the old, and ae so conspicuous in the autobiography of the American ‘Sunday painter’, Grandma Moses, Mrs. Scott-Maxwell showed how age induces mellowness and wholeness, while still requiring ‘a proper modesty in the presence of good and evil’. The aged, she feels, are often surprised at their own unimportance; the noise and clamour of life begins to seem out of proportion to sense. Yet an unexpected freshness comes with the realisation that the drama has been played, that the battle is over — and this brings a sense of triumph to those who have worked and suffered, sinned and loved, seen ugliness and beauty. Mrs. Scott-Maxwell conveyed to me some reassurance that the battle is worth while, and that we may glimpse the reality of Tennyson’s ‘somehow good’ before we go elsewhere.
Derek Hudson
 

25 July 2026