IF YOU HATE GROWING OLDER

Northern Advocate, 19 June 1926, Page 10

IF YOU HATE GROWING OLDER

“What rubbish it is!” so I hoard a , more than ordinarily intelligent man Isay the other day, “to speak as if | there were anything beautiful about j old age. There is no beauty in old 1 age, only decay.” I The woman to whom ho was speaking | was younger than himself, yet was in j her late rather than early youth. Her j beautiful eyes grew more and more I solemn as she listened, for growing old comes harder to a woman than it does . to a man. “Well, well,” said he, “we must , just make, the best of it, and keep as cheerful as we can.” She agreed, , looking anything but cheerful. They paid me the silent tribute of considering me too sensible to differ from , them. [ But I did differ from them. Not, of course, about the sadness that there is . in the decay of bodily beauty. The . passing of beauty is almost unbearab- , ly sad, but wo should not know beauty to be beauty if we had not minds that j could perceive it. The more experi- | onced the mind, the more perceptive !it is, and the more susceptible to . beauty. | A day or two before I happened to I hear this dismal little conversation — for if there is anything more dismal j than pumped-mp “cheerfulness” 1 j have yet to meet it —I had been lisj tening to a speech by a man of fiftyj something and of genius. The speech | was interesting, stimulating, suited j to the occasion, but of no great importj ance. It was the man hmself who was j important. His extremely attractive i face had the fifty-something look as I well as tho look of genius. To imagine j that he had been more attractive ten or twenty years ago was an impdssii bility. j Like all people possessed of any j sort of greatness, he had, during the j passing years, unknowingingly inten.ri- > fied the appeal that ho has for hTs fcTj low human. When we think of the ! passing of youth we should nerve our- j j selves with the thought of this inner ! j beauty, which, in great measure is j | created by the pasing years which we i jso much hate. A genius is ,of -i ourse, ' I an exceptional person, but those of us j who have sufficient intelligence to love J beauty of any kind have enough of it j to steel ourselves against the thought j of old age—which is a dfferent thing ( altogether from deciding to make ! the best of a bad job.