The Grenada gazette. (Grenada, Miss.) 1885-18??, 1885-09-05
OLD AGE.
Some Thoughts Concerning the Possib lity
and Probability of Centenarians.

Some Thoughts Concerning the Possib lity
and Probability of Centenarians.
Leaving out of consideration the old
famous species of longevity and all
doubtful modern instances of men and
women living to be a hundred years
old or more, there remain enough of
ce%ntenarians the date of whose birth is
recorded, and the fact of whose living
a century or more is beyond dispute.
Indeed, such eases seem to be growing
more and more common, and attract
no great attention. Yet there are
few spectacles more profoundly inter
esting than thai OF a life protracted be-
yond the ordinary limit of old age. To
have survived all or almost all of ones
generation, is itself a proof of some
sort of superiority of tissue or habit
environment. 1t is to have held
held out longest in the hopeless fight of
all things living against death, and per-
haps to have shown that most men die
before their time.
Let men affect what pretcnce of pes
simism and disgust with life, they will,
they can not help loving life and cling
ing to it. Religious enthusiasm may
regard it as but a passage the sooner
crossed the better to q higher form of
existence; and inability to perform its
duties or incapacity for its %enioyments
may lead unfortunate natures to throw
it blindly away; but to men of thor
oughly a n organization and
energies evenly developed, life is
something to be loved for itself,
and all means and instances of its pro-
longation are worthy to be stud ed.
Men whom lie disgusts or borcs are
deprived of the faculty of Judging it
properly. Life is not for them, but for
those who know how to Use it; and to
those who know, and are so fortunate
in mind and circumstance as to expand
and not contract their sympathies, it
must be as desirable, as interesting, as
well worth living at eighty or" ninety as
at twenty-five. Nor need the strength
of eve fivescore years be labor and
sorrow if the faculties be. as sometimes
they are, unlmpaircd.
1t is sometimes said that the men
who really live wear out early, and
that people live to be old by creeping
sluggishly along, burning LIES candle
to the socket by niggardly h~usbandry
of its light. But aside from the fact
that the names of some of the greatest
thinkers and scholars of the past are to
be found in the lists of the o~ctorcnari-
ans and nonagenarians, is it not true
that it is this intellectual slu~ggishncss,
this want of lexibility to meet the
changing conditions which the change
of years brings, this want of interest in
contemporary life, that prevents many
men from attaining to fortunate old
age? SO long as a man keeps his fac
uItics employed and interested, so long
as he is alert to all the movements of
the world about him, so long he
remains young, and so much the
greater are his chances of coming
to what is called old age. That torpid
and dark old age wherein the physical
powers have fcebly survived the decay
OF the intellectual is but death devoid
OF its peace and dignity; but what time
Of mans years is more splendid and
imposing than the tranquil old age ola
life which has widcned as it length
encd. the ma iestic age of Plato, Michael
Angelo and Gothic?
The ordinary life of nan seems to be
deprived and defrauded, compared with
these lives to which wisdom and length
OF days were given. The full century
Of existence which Sir Moses Monte
fore filled with beneficent activities is
not toe long to live. Indeed, instead
of regarding lives so long as something
abnormal and extraordinary, they
ought perhaps to be regarded as com
ing nearer to the full measure and best
rule Of existence. while the lives of
most men are shortened and cut off
before their real maturity. Old age
has been and is too much regarded as
but the lees of life. unIovablc, Squalid
and pitiablc. as the Greeks were always
bewaillng it to be. Men want to live
long, but hate old age. The grand
secular life which ended at Ramsgate
the other day, would serve to teach the
thoughtless and the foolish how noble
and desirable is an old age of activity
and wisdom. Men at the longest do
not get so much of life that they can
afford to neglect even the smallest part
of it.. And in view of such lives as that
Of the Hebrew philanthropist, a we'll
conditioned old age seems only a con-
and ripper youth.
The best is yet to be:
The last of life, for which the first was
made.
N. Y. Sun.