Age Shall Not Weary Them...

Permission to get sombre requested.

This post begins, again, with a seminar. We're not doubling up, I assure you: this time the seminar will serve purely as point of departure. So, we depart. I went to a seminar/lecture/talk hybrid this afternoon as part of the 'Classics Speaker Series', a brand of events designed to get the old and distinguished hands of classical scholarship back on the lecture circuit. These venerable, late-career sages are brought in to impart their years of wisdom to the younger generations, reflecting on their time in academic (and other) life, while providing statuesque examples for the bright-eyed kids to themselves aspire to. At least I think that's the ethos, having only been to one of them. At any rate, that was certainly the gist of the day.

The speaker was old-school as they come: he'd trained under some star dons whose flower of youth arrived late in the 19th century. His sheer scholarly lifespan meant that he'd brushed pencils with another age, with an altogether different cast of heroes. This was the card he (as he always inevitably would have) played in titling his talk 'Then and Now (and Some of the Bits Between)'. Then, and Now. The big contrast. In my day, we didn't have playful titles for lectures. Nor brackets in titles. And I absolutely refuse to insert cola and subtitles. So I went in anticipating the thread: a quaint anachronism of a man making a few modest observations on time and change.

I wasn't disappointed at the first visuals. Grey hair, spectacles struggling to contain licentious eyebrows, tweed jacket, vest and tie. The code for geriatric professor was still intact, I was relieved to discover. When he started speaking, things proceeded quite as expected: first, a diverting account of what it was like to learn Latin and Greek at school in the thirties. Then, some of the things he'd picked up from his esteemed teachers in his early days at Cambridge. So far, so standard. But then the opinions began to get a little controversial. The 'Now' bit morphed into the oft-told tale of change and decline. The life story paused as diatribe took the reins: no one learns Latin and Greek properly any more, literary theory is the devil's encroachment which divides men from their texts. Secondary literature piles on secondary literature to become tertiary literature. The good old texts lie abject and invisible at the bottom of the pile. For those who don't know the plot, this is a much-repeated argument at the heart of classics at the moment, in both educational and research forums. But the funny thing is that this kind of 'no one makes classics like they used to' sentiment is more often tied to the Oxford camp in the Oxford/Cambridge classical conflict (over-simplistic, but active nevertheless). This daring old gent was performing a bit of theory-bashing not just anywhere, but at one of the world centres for new theoretical approaches to the classics. The wind had changed since the glory days, when this guy was calling the professorial shots from his heavy chair; and he played to this change. Hats off, Gramps.

What depressed me was not the conservatism during the talk, but the interchange in 'question time' afterwards. The old Don had audaciously thrown his cards on the table, and he wanted to get a rise in return. In the customary silence that follows after the floor has been opened up to questions, as audience members tentatively think about their first move, he explicitly said: 'Come on, someone destroy me.' It was clear that this octogenarian still had a healthy appetite for debate, and he wanted a feed. But no one gave him anything. No one seized on his points with any of the ardour for contradiction and challenge I'd seen directed at middle-age scholars in the 'normal' seminar so far. No one engaged. There seemed general agreement in the room that he had passed beyond the point of force to be reckoned with. Go easy, spoke the silence: he's a relic from a forgotten time. Gloves on, this one's particularly delicate. People opted for safety over controversy: tell us about the time you went to Mt. Athos in 1951, tell us about your trip to post-war Yugoslavia, tell us about your school days. It smacked of policy of appeasement. A friend once pointed out to me that our generation always wants to ask their grandparents about the war. I too have unexceptionally asked my Grandpa about the war, but I remember the sad process of pity that went through my mind before I did it: I was asking not because I wanted to hear all that much, but because I thought he wanted to tell me. That's what it felt like today. Younguns and middle-agers condescendingly giving Grandpa the floor while they think about dinner.

Slightly more depressing, however, was what came out in response to these anodyne questions. Reading an essay, he had managed fine; but improvising, the old-man speak could no longer be concealed. The digressions ranged far and wide, all expanded into the most tedious detail. I can't remember the intricate sequence leading up to it, but he somehow arrived at the topic of the changes in the girls' uniform while he was at school. He quite literally delivered a five minute excursus on the subject. When talking of an ancient trip to Greece, he recalled the finer points of border diplomacy, such as the distinctive way the passport was stamped. I was reminded how long any story, even the shortest, can be. I was reminded of my Grandma's injunction to my Grandpa when he starts spontaneously launching into war talk: 'Make it short.' I was reminded, above all, of The Simpsons, when Grandpa Abe recounts a day in his younger life with infuriating specifity (paraphrase): 'On that morning, I got up, and made myself a piece of toast. I set the toaster to three: medium-brown. Then I put an onion on my belt. Everyone was wearing an onion on their belt back then, which was the style at the time.' Thus spirals our nightmare of murky, formless, endless geriatric discourse: a labyrinth of dystopic repetitions from where, we fear, we may never escape.

Is it inevitable? Do you cross the checkpoints of seventy and eighty pre-marked to harp on, more and more, about decline outside, while your body accelerates its own inside decline? Does the ability to tell stories of socially acceptable length and form fade to black? I struggle to tell socially acceptable stories at twenty-three (a bad test-case): but what about the seasoned raconteur? Will you fall into a digressive mush without the consolation of even knowing you're there? Will the right-minded adults around keep you in the bubble, never pricking you out with a candid 'You're being boring and irrelevant'? The archetypal patterns of old-age suggest gloom. We get the verb 'Nestorise' (at least I've heard it used...) from the first old man in literature: King Nestor in the Iliad. He's the first man on record to say 'In the olden days...'. I'm all for limiting comparisons to the ancient world. But in this case, it's safe to say that the genre of grumpiness has evolved little in three thousand years.

Ageing per se doesn't bother me: but predestination does. The idea of slowly, obliviously sinking into a type, like slipping gradually into a bath prepared at birth and kept warm until you're ready - that, if anything, makes my skin crawl. I console myself by silent oaths: I will remember Nestor, I will remember the professor of the bushy brow. But I won't. Memories will stop effacing age, and begin to create it. In Nestor's place will be remembered the sharp, context-less vision of an onion on a belt or a stamp on a passport. Soon after the fragments themselves will fade...

...nor the years condemn...