Reflections on ageing

The challenge of ageing is a growing problem in almost all modern societies, Taiwan is no exception. Yet, while every nation must meet this problem in its own way, there is also an impact at the personal level: How does each individual face the prospect of having lengthier twilight years?

By Jerome F Keating
 

Thanks to modern medicine and personal lifestyle choices, people are now living longer. In a recent announcement, Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior (MOI) stated that life expectancy in Taiwan has risen to 80.2 years. That would certainly appear to be good news but it is also a two-edged sword.

On the surface, few would complain about having a longer life. What then are the drawbacks that arise? For starters, people are also now making different life choices. Alternative lifestyles are in. Thus more and more couples are marrying later and having fewer children. This in turn impacts the workforce. And since the retirement age has been holding steady between 65 and 67, the question arises: “Who will replace retiring workers in this ageing society?” 

Taiwan’s neighbour, Japan, leads the way in meeting this challenge. Japan has the highest ageing population in the world with one third of its population being over 65 years of age. Europe also faces a similar challenge; nine of the top ten ageing societies in the world are found there.

On Taiwan, the MOI is developing programmes to counter ageing as it seeks ways to promote and encourage citizens to marry and have more children.

The situation is complex, and we are not going to solve it here. Instead we invite you to take a journey through the thoughts and reflections that a host of poets and authors have expressed on the topic.

Rule number one: “Don’t complain.” Why? Cicero couldn’t have said it better when in 44 BC, he wrote his famous essay De Senectute (On Ageing), Cicero was 63 years old at the time, yet felt that he was not old enough to philosophize on the topic, so he wrote it under the pen name of Cato the Elder who (at age 84) stated: “No one can complain about something that happens to all men.” In other words, we can’t cry: “Why me?”.

Next, there is the age-old response of the Metaphysical poets with their carpe diem (Seize the Day) approach. Robert Herrick states in To the Virgins . . .”

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may

Old Time is still a-flying

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

Andrew Marvell echoes this in To His Coy Mistress.

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

That said, when we do make time, we have to decide what for? Building empires? The Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, warns against such vanity. In Ozimandias, he recounts how a traveller coming from an “antique land” found in the desert broken remnants illustrating how the efforts of Ramases II failed. All that remained were:

. . . Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

A kindred Romantic, John Keats who died young, pondered the fickleness of fame when his beautiful poetry seemed unrecognized and he so urged his friends to have this epitaph carved on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

An earlier Romantic, William Wordsworth, suggests in Ode on Immortality that since nothing lasts, memories are the better path to provide solace.

Though nothing can bring back the hour

of splendor in the grass,

Or glory in the flower;

we will grieve not, rather find

strength in what remains behind.”

In this, we should not think just of ourselves. George Eliot states a similar thought:

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”

Of course, one could go to extremes, and consider the big picture and how we are all part of the human race in our connections; This is much in line with John Donne’s lines in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

No man is an island

Entire of itself,

Each is a part of the continent

A part of the main.