Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1885-09-03
CONCERNING OLD AGE,
Everybody Ought to Live a Century and
Enjoy 1t.


Enjoy 1t.
The skeptical views of such critics as
the late Sir G. c. Lewis and Mr.. w. j.
Thoms, SIS to the possibility and proba-
blllty of centenarians, have been pretty
thoroughly discredited by vital statis-
tics. Leaving out of consideration the
old famous specimens of longevity and
all doubtful modern instances of men
and women living to be 100 years old
or more, there remain enough of GEN.
tenarians the date of whose birth is re-
corded, and the fact of whose living
century or more is beyond dispute. In
deed, such cases seem to be growing
more and more common, and attract
no great attention. Yet there are few
spectacles more profoundly interesting
than that of a life protracted beyond
the ordinary limit of old age. To have
survived all, or almost all, of ones
generation, is in itself proof of some
sort OF superiority of tissue or habit or
environment. 1t is to have 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 pretense of pes
simism and disgust with life they will,
they cannot help loving life and cling
ing to it. Religious enthusiasm may
regard it as but a passage the sooner
crossed the better to higher form of
existence; and inability to perform its
duties or incapacity for its enjoyments
may lead weak unfortunate natures to
throw it blindly away; but to men
thoroughly sane, organization and ener-
gies evenly developed, life is something
to be loved for itself, and all means
and instances of its prolongation are
worthy to be studied. Men whom life
disgusts or bores 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 cir
cumstance as to expend and not con-
tract their sympathies, it must be as
desirable, as interesting, as we'll worth
living at so or 80 as at %. Nor need
the strength even of tVe-score years be
labor and sorrow if the faculties be, as
some times they are, unimpaired.
1t is sometimes said that the men
who really live wear out early, and that
people live to be old by creeping slug
gishly along, burning LIES candle to
the socket by niggardly husbandry 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 octogena-
rians and nonagenarians, is it not true
that it is this intellectual sluggishness,
this want of tleXibility 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
faculties employed and interested, so
long as he is alert to all the move
ments 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 feebly survived the decay
of the intellectual is but death devoid
of it's peace and dignity; but what time
of mans years is more splendid and
imposing than the tranquil old age of a
life which has widened as it lengthen-
ed, the majestic age of Plato, Michael
Angelo, and Goethe?
The ordinary life of man seems to be
deprived and defrauded, compared with
these lives to which wisdom and length
of days were given. The full century
of existence witch Sir Moses Monte
fore filled with benefcent activities is
not too 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 be-
fore their real maturity. Old age has
been, and is too much regarded as but
the lees of life unlovable, squalid, and
pitiable, as the Greeks were always be-
Wailing it to be. Men want to live
long, but hate old age. The grand
secular life which ended at Ramsgate
the other day should 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
aforementioned old age seems only
continuing and ripper youth.
The best is yet to be:
The last of life, for which the first was made.
n. g.,