Waiting for the Last Bus. Richard Holloway
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today. That means that the skeletons of 100 billion of us have faded into the earth. Occasionally we come across one that has been buried for thousands of years, and we wonder about the life it had, its joys, its sorrows and what it made of the world it found itself in.
I remember thinking about this when I first saw the famous photograph of human skulls at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. In 1994, a million Tutsis were massacred by the forces of the Hutu-led government of Rwanda. Taken in 2007, the photograph shows a tray of some of the human skulls recovered from the killing fields, relics of one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. It is the empty-yet-staring eye sockets that haunt the viewer. Vivid lives cut short; and the knowledge that, one way or another, we’ll all come to this. We’ll end as skeletons or as the ash of skeletons. ‘As I am today, you will be tomorrow.’
And the process starts well before we die. It wouldn’t be so wrenching if we never aged and didn’t see death coming for us, with or without a machete in its hand. We’d run and laugh and climb mountains and dive into the sea with undiminished energy our whole life long. Then, at an unexpected moment when we were in the middle of our song, we’d be taken by death in the glory of our being — and it would be over in a second. That is not how our dance towards death usually goes. If we live long enough, we become witnesses to our own slow dying and the revelation of the skull beneath the skin. Psalm 90 says:
The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years; yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away and we are gone.6
I have reached fourscore years, and though my life is not yet ‘but labour and sorrow’, I am aware that the shutting down of my body has begun. I am well into the last swing of the dance, and I can feel the beat quickening. That’s what has prompted these reflections on being old and facing death.
I remember when I noticed that coloured patches like stains on old stone had started to appear on my face and body. When you get old, the garbage-disposal mechanisms designed to clear out waste in your skin cells start to break down. Instead of clearing the rubbish away, like lazy bin men they leave it lying around in the street, your skin. And it clots into those yellow-brown patches called ‘lipofuscin’, better known as age spots. A few years ago at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the press team photographed the writers with a special camera that subjected their skin to a ruthless high-definition exposure of every flaw and wrinkle. When my picture went up in Charlotte Square a few days later, it revealed a face blotched and stained with patches of lipofuscin even I hadn’t noticed before. The bin men of my epidermis had obviously gone on permanent strike. That was when I realised that the wind-down of my body was well advanced and there would be more to come. Mind you, for me the process had started in my twenties, when I started going bald.
Baldness is not a terminal disease, of course, but it is a permanent condition. And I hated it when it started. I fought it in all the usual hopeless ways. I even bought pills advertised in a church magazine. The manufacturers probably thought the readers of Church Illustrated would have a stronger gift of faith than other baldies. Their pitch worked on me. I sent off for the pills. Nowadays the law would require an accurate description of the chemistry of the product that came through my letterbox a few days later, but none of that was required in 1958.
They looked like little brown Smarties. And like Smarties they were probably made of sugar. I started swallowing one a day. My hair continued to recede. Hopelessly, I flushed the remaining pills down the toilet and started combing what was left on top to the front, trying to look like Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in the movie Julius Caesar that was out at the time. It was a vain response to a disagreeable reality. It may delude the owner for a moment, but the comb-over is an embarrassment that takes no one in. Depressed yet defiant, one day I cropped the whole thing off and that’s what I’ve done ever since. It was an early lesson in accepting things about myself I did not like but could not change. I see now that losing my hair was a good preparation for ageing and death, the skeleton being the ultimate baldy. Maybe I’ve been lucky to have had an early rehearsal.
My unsuccessful struggle with baldness taught me something about the human condition. Humans are afflicted with a tragic self-consciousness that does not seem to bother the other animals. All animals feel pain, but the one pain that seems to be unique to humans is an awareness of our bodies that is so keen it can lure us into depression and self-hatred. We are not only aware of our own bodies; we are aware of others’ awareness of them. We are conscious of looking at others and being looked at by them. And we wonder what they make of what they see when they see us.
How did this obsession with our appearance start? Was it there before mirrors and cameras were invented? Would we be bothered by what we looked like if we couldn’t see ourselves as others see us? However it started, our self-image seems to have obsessed us for centuries. The first-century Roman poet Ovid adapted an old Greek myth to explore the subject. Narcissus, the son of a river god and a local nymph, was famous for his beauty. The blind seer Tiresias warned his mother that Narcissus would have a long and happy life only if he never saw himself. Unfortunately, he caught sight of his own reflection in the waters of a spring, fell in love with what he saw and died of unrequited love.
If an experience has been developed into a myth like that, it is because its theme is universal. It expresses a reality that troubles the human community. This one suggests that we’d be better blind than obsessed with how we look, because it’s a compulsion that can never be fully satisfied or appeased. Freud took the story further and coined the term narcissism for anyone suffering from an overpowering degree of self-esteem, a condition he diagnosed as a form of emotional immaturity. It is captured in the caricature of the egotist, usually a dominant male, who pauses in his narrative of self-glorification only long enough to say to his listener: ‘But enough from me; tell me how you rate my accomplishments?’ Narcissism in both its classic and Freudian forms has become a prevalent disease in late-modern societies obsessed with image and the screen technologies that promote it. It supplies the energy for one of the main enterprises of modern capitalism, the Anti-Ageing and Postponement of Death industry, what we might call the AAPD complex. We spend fortunes delaying death and the physical dissolution that precedes it.
And it starts early, with our revolt against the reality of the bodies we were born with. Had I been born sixty years later, would I have saved up for hair-transplant surgery rather than wasting my money on those wee sweeties advertised in Church Illustrated? And would I have missed learning one of the best lessons life teaches: that it is better to accept reality rather than deny it, including the reality of our own bodies and the death that is their only end? Throughout most of history, humans had no alternative but to accept these certainties. In our advanced technological society, that is no longer the case. We spend fortunes trying to refashion our bodies and postpone our deaths. And it is easy to understand why. Anguish is a hard thing to bear, even if it is only the anguish of not liking the way we look. The anguish of dying is harder still, especially if it comes before we are ready for it, and we feel cheated of the time we thought we had left.
But there is no escape from anguish. It comes with the human condition and the self-awareness that is its key component. The secret is to learn how to live with it. Accepting the reality of the way we look and the certainty of our death, maybe one day soon, won’t make us happy, but it might save us from the greater unhappiness of trying to ignore or hide from these realities. The fleeting pain of admitting our situation is preferable to the constant pain of denying it. It takes fortitude, the most useful of the old virtues. Fortitude is one of the most important lessons life teaches, and ageing may be our last chance to learn it. It is the ability to endure the reality of our condition without flinching. It was defined by the gay cowboy in the movie Brokeback Mountain: ‘If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.’ And there’s a lot you gotta stand when you get old.
Such as going deaf! It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it has to my wife. What distresses me is that I find it irritating. Much of the time I have to shout to be heard by her, a small price to pay for close contact with someone I love. Yet it constantly annoys me. That says something to me about larger society as well as my own impatience. If we are not careful, we can start resenting the presence of the elderly in our midst and the minor