Old Mr. Sacks

If Old Mrs. Grey, the aged peasant woman had the expressive ability of a Oliver Sacks, Virginia Woolf, her creator, wouldn't have wished her body to have un-pinioned itself from the "wire," as it were, of life.

Old Mrs. Grey, Woolf writes, has lived in the countryside for 92 years, surviving dead children. She had simply lived, seeing the world, "but without looking [...]She had never used her eyes on anything minute and difficult; merely upon faces, and dishes and fields." 

Because old Mrs. Grey lives sans mental acuity, Woolf sees her as good as dead.

Everytime I read Old Mrs. Grey, I feel sorry for the nonagenarian and hate Woolf's cruelty toward her. 

Is old age nothing more than a battered body, half blind, half deaf and half mute, pinned like a rook on a barn door, living, "even with a nail through it?"

Is old age the mere sum and substance of an imminent wreckage?

Not so, says Oliver Sacks, who penned, what could be described, as a sober paean to old age. Having turned 80, the famous neurology professor and writer, sees old age richly, through celebratory, rather than the usual eyes of anxiety, fear and lament:

My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

This is radical in the sense that everything we do to devalue old age as a negative phase in our lives, is turned on its head.