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“Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life,” wrote Roger Angell in a New Yorker essay, written when he was 94. (He lived to be 101.) Angell, a longtime editor and baseball writer at the New Yorker, speaks with more authority on this subject than I, a mere stripling of 76. Still, I know from my own experience exactly what he’s talking about. The fact that old age can catch you by surprise may in itself be surprising to those who have not yet landed in this far country. After all, we have all known since childhood that we would arrive here, assuming adverse circumstances didn’t intervene. We could mark it off on our calendars, and see the mounting evidence staring back at us in the mirror: the receding hairline, the crow’s feet around the eyes, the wrinkles, the jowls, the double chin. Not to mention the aches and pains, the pills and the myriad small indignities.
Still, we may feel old age has sneaked up on us. There are more-or-less clearly agreed-upon markers for the beginning of adulthood, whether it is graduating from high school or college, exercising the right to vote or buying a drink in a bar. The boundaries of old age are less clearly delineated. Do you go by such traditional markers as retirement or eligibility for Social Security and Medicare? If 60 is the new 40, as the saying goes, then when are we certifiably old? The fact is some of my peers are still out hiking in mountainous terrain at age 75, while others are dead — the latter including all three of my college roommates. In the end, I suspect the moment of realization is not too different from an alcoholic who can finally bring himself or herself to get up at an AA meeting and announce, “I am an alcoholic.” You admit to yourself, “I am old,” because you feel it in your bones — in my case, quite literally.
You may feel it in your bones, but otherwise you’re the same person you always were; hence the unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love, as Angell notes. All of which contributes to the sense that old age arrives when you aren’t looking. Add to that the normal dislocations of time, caused by the gap between time as we conceive it and time as we actually experience it. Time as we conceive it is continuous, something we can calibrate with great precision and mark off on a calendar. Time as we actually experience it is entirely subjective. It speeds up or slows down, depending on whether we are happily engaged in what we are doing or are bored stiff. At best, it is episodic, and there are huge gaps, particularly as we grow older and memories fade.
We do not appreciate the extent to which time — by which I mean duration — is really a function of memory. What happens to our sense of time when memory is taken away? My mother suffered from vascular dementia — a first cousin to Alzheimer’s disease — which gradually robbed her of her past, starting with her most recent memories and working backward. Toward the end of her life, we would occasionally take her out to eat and then go for a drive. But we had to stop doing this, because my mother found these excursions too disorienting. Five minutes into the trip she would want to turn around and go back, thinking we had been gone for a long time. She had no way of telling whether it had been five minutes or five hours. My mother was no longer able to anchor her experience in memory and had effectively become unstuck in time. I learned from her that when the past has disappeared, time itself comes to a standstill.
What about those of us who can still remember the past? Yes, we have memories to mark past events that give us a sense of duration. We can safely embark on a five-minute or five-hour journey without becoming unstuck in time. But what about a journey of, say, 76 years? We may be able to remember events that happened a long time ago, but our memories of the past are not continuous — indeed, if they were, we wouldn’t be able to function.* It would take us as long to remember every last detail of our past as it took to experience it in the first place.
“Our sense of time passing comes from being able to remember what happened before now but then of forgetting the details and allowing events to recede into the past. This may account for the foreshortening of time as we grow older and accumulate more experience. Time seems to speed up, and distant events appear closer than they actually are — a psychological phenomenon called “telescopy,” like objects seen through a telescope.
Of course, time doesn’t actually have a spatial dimension, so you can’t really call a past event “distant.” If you retrace a journey of 76 miles, there is no getting around the distance you would have to travel. But if you retrace a journey of 76 years, you would find you have forgotten most of it. Perhaps this why we think old age has crept up on us. We find ourselves asking, in the words of Dr. Seuss, “How did it get so late so soon?”
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*There is a name for this phenomenon. Is is a rare condition known as “hypernesia” in which individuals are unable to forget anything that happens to them, down to the smallest detail. Like dementia or retrograde amnesia, it can effectively bring time to a standstill for those who are afflicted by it.
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