Suddenly Old, Suddenly the Other: On the Unfamiliar World of Aging

All at once and much to my surprise, I am old. I did not expect it, and it is not what I expected. The world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did even ten years ago. Abruptly, I’m one in a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.

From the point of view of children, adolescents, and adults in general, I am no longer completely part of the world on the go. I am no longer a part of social groups in which I had a place. People dear to me decline precipitously and die. Familiar coffee shops, stores, parks, landmarks are gone.

We now know we are subjects completely of time and change. Customs, fashions, beliefs, truths, even the future, all these have changed. It becomes clear in old age that we will not be establishing a stable way of existing in space or time. Navigating this altered world requires circumspection. By aging, it seems, we become exiles.

And this is not simply an outer experience. I now find myself estranged from the person I was accustomed to being. My body and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. My world is marked by loss and uncertainty.

My thinking, feeling, responding, imagining seem somehow unfamiliar. This is not how I thought of myself or my future. Things are no longer in my control. My life has become strangely unrecognizable. My world, my self are less stable, less secure. I have, even to myself, become somewhat “other.”

Everything is more intensely transitory. But as the world becomes more distant and out of control, I begin to see patterns I had never imagined or only dimly sensed. Situations, objects, places, people become, moment by moment, very deeply to be cherished, valued; loved, not in spite of being impermanent, but because we are only together for this moment.

It is like watching clouds move across the sky. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells more intense, sudden sounds abrupt. Temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. Other worlds, it seems, are waiting to show themselves.

*

My long-suffering piano teacher, Mr. Klaus Goetze, would sometimes play for his students, and one afternoon he performed Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat, No. 31, Op. 110. I was 17 and had already heard many of Beethoven’s more popular sonatas in concert and on recordings, but nothing prepared me for what I heard him play. It changed my life in a subtle way, and now, some sixty years later, it has returned to inspire how I think about growing older.

Beethoven wrote this music when he was fifty years old; he was completely deaf, often very sick, and would die five years later. The order by which the sonata progressed was familiar, but its inner impulse was strangely austere, full of unfamiliar longing, searching, finding unsuspected ways forward, touching on new and unique kinds of resolution.

Emotional changes and shifts of keys moved in ways both surprising and deeply moving. In the third and final movement, the grammar contained elements one could never have anticipated (a single note repeated eighteen times, a chord repeated ten times); the sorrow and resolution seemed to emanate from a vast and unfamiliar expanse on the edge of silence.

It was not just the notes, but the space from which they emerged, where they reverberated and in which finally they ended that was transformative. Nothing has ever erased the shock of being drawn into a terrain of such intensity, depth, possibility, and loss. Looking at Beethoven’s life when he wrote this may provide some context for the piece but does not explain how he achieved this.

Beethoven was an almost unbearable person: willful, extravagantly self-absorbed, angry, inconsiderate, demanding, harsh, often close to feral. As Lewis Lockwood has put it: “Two elements of Beethoven’s domestic life run through his last ten years like persistent motives from one of his major works: isolation and obsessiveness.”

Even in the “fallow period” between 1812 and 1817, “personal complications contributed to slowing Beethoven’s creative work, but his drastically changing artistic outlook contributed even more.” He looked to the past, to the counterpoint of Bach and Handel in order to “open up and deepen new perspectives on his own development.”

His hearing had deteriorated almost completely. Deafness constricts our sense of ambient space; putting one’s fingers in one’s ears makes this loss evident. Space behind and to the sides pulls in. This creates a compressed dimension of inner space and could only have intensified Beethoven’s retreat into himself and the inwardness of his music. Lockwood writes:

The further decline in Beethoven’s health moved in tandem with his increasing psychological withdrawal and deepening anxiety. Here the emotional and intellectual demands that he made on himself expanded and deepened as he composed the last piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last quartets.

Throughout the 1820s, Beethoven’s health became even more unstable. He was afflicted by rheumatic fever, bowel complaints, jaundice, and inflammations in his eyes. Newspapers reported that his closest friends were concerned for his survival. There were times when he was barely recognizable.

In early 1820, at the same time when he was composing Piano Sonata, Op. 110, he went for a long walk along a canal towpath outside of Vienna and made his way to a canal basin at Ungerthor. He had eaten nothing, was exhausted, confused, and disoriented; he began to look through the windows of houses near the path.

He was so erratic and so shabbily dressed that the residents became alarmed and called the police. He proclaimed loudly to the officers that he was Beethoven, but he looked so much more like a beggar that he was not believed.

They locked him up and held him until a nearby music teacher named Herzog, hearing about the unfortunate prisoner, came to look. He told the officers that this was indeed the famous composer. They gave him some clean clothing, food and ordered a cab to take him home.

In that period, Gioachino Rossini, an equally famous composer who in old age also radically altered the style and aims of his work, came to call on Beethoven. In his brief account of the visit, he was clearly appalled by the malodorous squalor in which the great man lived, his lack of personal hygiene, and most of all his complete deafness.

He did not stay long. “When I descended those dilapidated stairs, I retained of my visit to this great man an impression so painful—thinking of this destitution and shabbiness—that I could not repress my tears,” he remembered. On September 10, 1821, Beethoven wrote to his friend, Tobias Hanslinger:

When I was in my carriage yesterday on the way to Vienna, sleep overpowered me, the more so as I had scarcely ever had a good night’s sleep […]. Now, as I was slumbering, I dreamed that I was traveling far away, to Arabia too, and at last I came even to Jerusalem. The Holy City reminded me of the Holy Scriptures; no wonder then that I thought of the man Tobias too….

Now during my dream journey the following canon occurred to me…to the following words: “O Tobias. O Tobias, Hoo! O! O Tobias.” Yet I had hardly awoken when the tune and its canon was gone, and I could not recall a single note or word of it.

However, when on the next day I returned here in the same carriage (that of a poor Austrian musician) and continued my dream journey, though now awake, lo and behold, in accord with the law of association of ideas, the same canon occurred to me; now, waking I held it fast, as once Menelaus held Proteus, and only granted it one last favor, that of allowing it to transform itself into three voices.

Thus, trapped in silence, amid an instability intensified by personal losses, court cases, endless sickness, and occasional mental breakdown, Beethoven heard new music within the extremes of a life moving to its end.

As his outer and inner world became increasingly unfamiliar, increasingly “other,” he found himself looking beyond conventional boundaries and expectations. His music drew on further reserves of inwardness, entering ever deeper currents of grief, frustration, longing, and resolution.

The music of this late period was, and has remained, profoundly mysterious, profoundly challenging, and an inexplicable wonder. It seems Beethoven’s music then was not invented or created, but discovered waiting in some deep, uncompromising expanse of spirit. He never heard it in the world outside himself.

*

Now I am seventy-nine years old. In the unfamiliar spaces revealed by different kinds of loss, chance patterns emerge and resonate momentarily. And, with whatever apprehension and sadness this evokes, new perspectives, new kinds of beauty, new subtleties present themselves unsought.

Old is, I have come to see, a time of life that is uniquely and profoundly revealing. This, then, has led to one aspect of this book: the world of what is often called an artist’s “late period,” a time of artistic transformation that unfolds as the end of life nears.

My new book, Winter Light, explores inner discoveries that emerge in old age and decline. The book focuses on artists, composers, architects, and writers, who have, in their last years, found a very different way of exploring their worlds and of conveying what they found. For some, it was a completely new discovery, for others it was something they had glimpsed much earlier but only found the means to realize as their life neared its end.

Fredric Jameson’s comments on Van Gogh’s famous painting of peasant shoes (1886), illuminate in a general way how their art revealed domains of unsuspected possibility within painful and degraded circumstances. As he says, “the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses.”

Here, within the inescapable brutality of our living and dying, art can reveal realms of inherent possibility, luminosity, and vision. Thus, in their old age, because they did not turn away from decay, desolation, and loss, the artists discussed later were able to uncover expanses of undreamt-of realities and new ways of sharing them.

To become old is to become “other” to oneself, “other” to one’s friends and family, to one’s world. Losses have broken up familiar boundaries, violated definitions, revealed unsuspected landscapes, opened ways of thinking and feeling previously unimagined.

The onslaught of chaos has exposed new visual patterns, new associations in memory, new shapes and colors in the skies, unsuspected conceptual links, depths of yearning in the dark of night. This is the mystery which many artists in their old age found ways to explore.

It is hoped that as we grow old, experiencing ever more completely the unfamiliarity of ourselves and our world, we will discover new pathways and new dimensions to share with those of every age.

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Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance by Douglas J. Penick is available via Punctum Books.