The beauty of life through the hourglass of age

At what age does one become “old”?

The received wisdom has it that we become old when, say, we can’t saw, split and chop wood anymore, or perhaps when we discover that our steps are getting shorter, our knees weaker and our chores longer. But what that putative wisdom fails to reckon with is that often when your body determines that, yes, indeed, it has grown too old, your mind determines in turn that this is a date it refuses to keep.

Oh, getting old.

He made it to 82, but before he died in 1910, Leo Tolstoy wrote: “The biggest surprise in life is old age”. Clearly, the renowned Russian writer did not mean that old age is a great surprise in the sense that it is unexpected, but rather that experiencing it often turns out to be strikingly different from what we had imagined it to be.

I turned 84 last week. Was I elated? Despondent? Or perhaps indifferent? None of the above. I was, in echo of Tolstoy’s notion, rather confounded by the challenge I faced, namely confronting the plus-minus dichotomy between my body and my mind, where the one is slow of gait and the other is quick of trick. A mighty challenge indeed, for as Bette Davies once tartly put it: “Old age ain’t for sissies”.

To the elderly, perhaps to them more than to others, silence is temptation. But if you’re a Palestinian — as I, by a trick of fate, happen to be — who is the product of the Nakba, a historical trauma whose meaning at once surpasses and enfolds your individual own, silence is betrayal of your past. And the past, of any people, does not trail behind us like the wake of a ship that eventually disappears. That past continues to speak to us, about us and from us at every moment and place of immediacy in our quotidian lives.

That is why, in your writing as a columnist, even at your age, you continue to speak back, opting not for silence but for echo of that past. To be sure, political commentary is not literature — not by a stretch — for when, say, Othello reminds us of the rust of dew on the bright blade (“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them”), we experience more of “sensual, transient reality in which our lives must pass” (in the words of literary critic George Steiner) than it is the business, let alone the ambition of a columnist to impart.

Still, political commentary is a key component of news coverage and you are impertinent enough to think of yourself as a hack playing a vital role in shaping perceptions in the public discourse, distilling dense information, say about an Israeli air strike on a school in Gaza where refugees had found shelter, into a digestible 800-word word or so piece probing the act’s moral implications.

Your dateline is Washington, DC, a city — or more accurately a “district”, bounded by suburban Virginia and Maryland — notorious as a place where last week’s earth shaking events are readily forgotten, today’s famous figures are tomorrow’s infamous ones and scandals, all the way from Watergate 50 years ago to Pardongate several days ago, shoot on the scene as if propelled by a particle accelerator.

So you keep track of it all and the devil with your frail body. You let your mind do the talking, the walking and the probing. And if at unguarded moments you think you’re too old to still be rocking, well, just check with Mick Jagger.

In Eastern cultures, which include that of the Middle East, elderly folks are revered, associated as they are with wisdom. Conversely, Western culture, here mostly North America and some parts of Europe, where youth is worshipped, is widely known to scandalously undervalue and indeed often stereotype its adult population, deeming it unproductive, useless and a burden on both the state and the family, folks who end up being sent to “retirement homes” where they’re expected to stay till it’s time for them to, well, check out.

Take it from an old geezer like this columnist, old age should not be seen as lost youth but as another stage in one’s life where the longer one lives, the wiser one becomes and the more beautiful life appears.

And if you don’t trust old geezers, take it from Jean Paul Sartre (d. 1980), France’s pre-eminent philosopher, who poetically put this way: “The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it”.

So be it.

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile