Free Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein

hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past. This, again, is the cause of their loquacity; they are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering it.”
    To say the least, this is not a rousing recommendation to follow the autobiographical urge.
    Bertrand Russell takes up Aristotle’s argument more tellingly. Russell, a precocious forever youngster who lived to the age of ninety-eight (he attributed his longevity to having chosen his ancestors carefully), wrote in his 1975 essay “How to Grow Old”: “Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age. One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead. One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done.”
    And in the poem “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?” William Butler Yeats describes what he saw as the inevitable product of dwelling on the past—a personal docudrama of failed expectations:
    Why should not old men be mad?
    Some have known a likely lad
    That had a sound fly fisher’s wrist
    Turn to a drunken journalist;
    A girl that knew all Dante once
    Live to bear children to a dunce;
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    No single story would they find
    Of an unbroken happy mind,
    A finish worthy of the start.
    Young men know nothing of this sort,
    Observant old men know it well;
    And when they know what old books tell
    And that no better can be had,
    Know why an old man should be mad.
    But I find myself more persuaded by the psychologist and existentialist philosopher Erik Erikson, who was convinced that memories laced with regret and despair are not our only option. On the contrary, Erikson says, mature and wise ways of reminiscing are precisely what we need in an authentic old age.
    ON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL IMPERATIVE
    One of Erikson’s most highly regarded contributions to modern psychology was his formulation of stages of personal evolution that go beyond the traditional Freudian stages of early childhood development to include all of life, including old age. This last, he encouragingly called “maturity.”
    In each stage, Erikson posited a polar tension that needs to be resolved to get successfully through it. For example, in young adulthood the primary tension is between intimacy and isolation. A successful resolution follows from forming loving relationships with others, while an unsuccessful outcome is loneliness and alienation. In maturity Erikson sees the tension between what he calls “ego integrity” and despair. The fundamental task of this stage is
to reflect back on one’s life.
    For Erikson, a successful resolution of the tension between ego integrity and despair is a wise and considered sense of ful­fillment, a philosophical acceptance of oneself in spite of serious mistakes and stumbles along the way. Erickson believed that a philosophical acceptance of one’s life in old age stemmed directly from a matured capacity for love. He wrote that the key personal relationship in a successful navigation through old age is with, of all people, mankind—which he dubs “my kind”—the ultimate family relationship. An unsuccessful outcome of reflecting back on one’s life is unmitigated regret and bitterness.
    So in Erikson’s philosophy it turns out that this old-age impulse to find a narrative thread to our lives is more than just an indulgence in ruefulness or idle daydreaming—it is critical stuff. This is what Svendsen is suggesting when he writes that “accumulated experience” is the opposite of, and quite possibly the best relief from, the boredom of living one isolated and unconnected experience after another. Tying our experiences together in a personal