BOOKBROODER

The study of aging and old age has become a new specialization in the academic curriculum. It is being taught in universities and colleges. You might have come across the word ‘social gerontology’. Gerontology is the study of biological, social, or psychological features of aging. Some studies say that the old people are more rigid, as old people accumulate experience in a certain role and they usually do not wish to deviate from it. The elderly have been reported to be more introverted and more concerned with physiological functioning than the young.

However, life is cyclic in nature and it does not give a damn to what we think of it. It keeps going on, in its own way, and brings back, the man in old age back to the point in a circle, where the man meets the child within him again. The body decays but the mind grows. As C. S. Lewis said that someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. Books and literature can be the most adored activity in old age. The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies advises the book readers that a truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.

Aldous Huxley gives the secret of genius, and that is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the key. Robert Browning even invites to go with him on this journey. He says, ‘grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who saith, ‘A whole I planned, youth shows but half.’ T.S. Eliot sings in one of the love songs “I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

How fun is life with these books, with these stories with these songs, Isn’t it? Let’s enjoy our old age with these famous W. B. Yeats lines too.

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

― W.B. Yeats

A fast-paced and moving tale!

There is a white man Tuan and there is one Malay named Arasat. Both had befriended in the time of trouble and danger. The story is from Indonesian rain forests. One day Tuan steers the paddle into the stream to pass the night in the Arasat’s clearing, at a place in the forest, into a wide sweep of a stagnant lagoon. Tuan finds a woman stretched on her back under a broadsheet of red cotton. She lay still as if dead, her big eyes wide open, glittered in the gloom.

“Has she been long ill?” asked the white man.

“I have not slept for 5 nights.” Answered Malay.

They sat in silence before the fire and the Arasat in a mournful composure decides to narrate his story and the story of his dying lover.

“Therefore I shall speak to you of love. Speak in the night. Speak before both night and love are gone- and the eye of the day looks upon my sorrow and my shame; upon my blackened face; upon my burned heart.”

Arasat tells his story of how he kidnapped his lover Diamelen and fled in a boat. Diamelen worked for King’s wife. His brother helped them run away and fought against the king’s men. In this tale, the narrator (Arasat) wanted to be with his lover in a country where,

“Death is forgotten- where death is unknown!”

But inevitable was something else.

This tale leaves behind a pain of atonement and a thought of futility. This is a short story by Conrad, and it was published in 1897. This was my first story of Conrad and I could get easily that it was a symbolic story. It has a moving narration and there is an immediate outgrowth in the pattern of symbolism. What bothered me was that the author constantly kept writing “a white man” for Tuan, though he had introduced his name Tuan in the beginning. What may be the reason??? I need to explore. I am yet to read anything from this author. I am an alien to the themes and contexts of his writing so far. For now, as long as, just this tale is concerned, I can say that I loved and loathed this story simultaneously.

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.”

― Joseph Conrad

When you are old !

The Lagoon