Opinion | The 80s Referred to as. They’re on Their Approach for You, Mr. President

To your eyes solely, I’ve ready a scouting report on situations you can see once you cross over the mystic border of 80, into severe previous age. Your timing, I need to say, may very well be higher. I notice that you’ll flip 80 simply 12 days after November’s midterm elections. Neither the landmark birthday nor the election outcomes, I predict, will put your celebration in a temper to have a good time.

You’ll have noticed that previous age is a surreal phenomenon, and that point passes with accelerating pace. A 12 months is compressed to a month. Demise turns into Zeno’s paradox. The Finish is at all times there, simply up forward within the mist and darkish, although you have no idea precisely when or the way it will encounter you. You not luxuriate within the youthful sense (it was the official American factor) that, as

Thomas E. Dewey

instructed voters within the presidential marketing campaign of 1948, “The long run lies earlier than us!” No matter lies earlier than the particular person in his 80s, it’s not precisely the long run. Typically what unfolds earlier than him is exactly the reverse: the previous, that fascinating nation, wealthy in its treasures and entertainments and regrets. Outdated age naturally prefers the previous; it feels safer there.

Medical terrors lie in wait. When you’ve got gotten this far, you understand about these. The 80s don’t child round. Your calendar will probably be overwhelmed by physician appointments; the primary half hour of dinner with buddies will probably be spent in medical updates. You’ll purchase skilled jargon—studying, for instance, concerning the Gleason Rating for the prostate.

Consider previous age by way of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” When

John Bunyan

wrote his great allegory within the late seventeenth century, his full title was “The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered Beneath the Similitude of a Dream.” That’s not a nasty description of life in a single’s ninth decade, which at occasions appears to transpire “beneath the similitude of a dream” and most actually appears like one’s gateway to the world which is to come back. The doddering Pilgrim will wallow within the Slough of Despond, louse up his blood sugar whereas lunching in Vainness Truthful, gasp up the Hills of Issue, undergo via the Valley of Humiliation, dream of the Delectable Mountains. Outdated age is like life, however extra intense—and made bizarre by debilities.

Sleep acquires a metaphysical significance; in the event you can’t sleep (I by no means can between 2 and 4 a.m.), you discover methods: pray, learn, suppose (however not, please, concerning the evils or about what ought to have been; such ideas come unbidden anyway).

However you aren’t an aged monk like me. You’re president of the USA.

Teddy Roosevelt

set an alarming customary for the workplace when he praised “the person who is definitely within the enviornment, whose face is marred by mud and sweat and blood.” You continue to up for that?

It’s effectively to keep in mind that TR died at 60, totally worn out. His cousin Franklin died at 63—wasted, spent.

Lyndon B. Johnson,

FDR’s onetime protégé, expired, exhausted, at 64. I keep in mind that when

Dwight Eisenhower,

age 70, left the White Home in 1961—using down snowy Pennsylvania Avenue beside his successor, 43-year-old

John F. Kennedy

—he appeared the oldest man on this planet. However after all we have been all younger that winter.

That second, when energy handed from Eisenhower to Kennedy and the Nineteen Fifties yielded to the Nineteen Sixties, marked the empowerment of a fallacy that’s nonetheless at work in American tradition—an existential error

Bob Dylan,

now 81, summed up in his 1973 anthem, “Endlessly Younger.”

That was the germ of the deadly nationwide neoteny—a phrase outlined because the retention of juvenile options in an grownup animal. Outdated age grew to become yucky—an perspective that, many years later, appeared hilarious because it was found, the onerous means, that nobody could be (or needs to be) eternally younger. In truth, life has about it a seemly, inevitable circulation, a development from delivery to childhood to youth to maturity to center age to previous age, and eventually to demise, with guidelines and roles acceptable to every stage. It’s good to be previous. It’s good to be younger. It’s proper to be a baby and proper, when the time comes, to be a mom or father, and proper, additional down the highway, to be a grandfather and, by and by, a corpse. To every thing there’s a season, and a time to each function beneath heaven. Let’s depart it at that.

Little question you, the octogenarian incumbent, being cunning, have your causes for insisting you propose to run for re-election. But when I have been you, mon vieux, I wouldn’t.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow on the Ethics and Public Coverage Heart. His newest e-book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Cash.”