‘Age appears to be best in four things: old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read’
Evolution cares not for the old once they no longer contribute to reproduction or the care of those who can reproduce. And while love for children is universal and genetically determined, since reproduction is what life is for, attitudes towards the old are not. How the old are treated can vary in different cultures; even within a single society people do not look upon the aged as belonging to one clearly defined category, and attitudes are diverse.
Largely as a result of increases in retirement age, and of people living and working longer, attitudes to ageing and being old have changed, and nobody really knows what ‘old’ is any more. A recent UK survey found that, on average, the public believed that ‘youth’ generally ends at 45 years of age, and that ‘old age’ starts at 63 years of age. Older respondents considered that youth continues longer and old age starts later than did younger respondents. The oldest age group of those in the survey thought that old age started at just over 70, whereas the youngest group estimated old age started at around 55. In terms of the end of youth, the oldest estimated age for this was 57, whereas the youngest was 37. Categorisation of ‘old’ and ‘young’ is so variable that an older person assumes someone is still in their youth at 57, whereas a younger person assumes that by this age they are already old. Ageing now happens more slowly, and people get ‘old’ later. This post-modern attitude to ageing reflects a feeling that while ageing comes to everyone, how you deal with it by keeping active, both physically and mentally, can put off ‘getting older’. But there are many views that make those who are ageing, and particularly women, refuse to tell even friends their true age.
‘Implicit ageism’ is the term used to refer to the unconscious negative thoughts, feelings and behaviour relating to older people. Becca Levy, whose research explores psychosocial influences on ageing, focuses on how psychological factors, particularly older individuals’ perceptions of ageing, affect cognition and health in old age, and reports that they ‘tend to be mostly negative’. One can compare these attitudes with those of the Nambikwara Indians, who live in the south-western part of the Brazilian Amazon, and who have only one word for young and beautiful, and another for old and ugly. The old are on the whole viewed as physically unattractive. This makes sense, as since the old no longer reproduce, from an evolutionary point of view they have lost all beauty; but they can help children and younger people, which does not require attractiveness.
It is far from clear whether views of the old in ancient times have affected modern views. In ancient Greece, Sophocles, Euripides and Plato lived productively into their 70s, and the views they espoused of the elderly were positive and respectful. But we should remember that there were only a few old in those times, with life expectancy being around 30, and half of those born not passing the age of 10. The chief killers were infectious diseases such as typhoid, smallpox, cholera or malaria. So to reach the age of 80 was exceptional. Many Greeks thought physical decay with age a curse worse than death itself.
Plato and many of the Ancients had a positive view of old age: ‘Old age has a great sense of peace and freedom. When the passions have lost their hold, you have escaped, as Sophocles says, not only from one mad master, but from many!’ Plato also wrote that ‘As age blunts one’s enjoyment of physical pleasures, one’s desires for the things of the intelligence and one’s delight in them increase accordingly.’ He emphasised the respect with which children should treat their parents, and both he and Socrates pointed out that one could learn much in the company of the elderly. In Sparta the old were protected and venerated, and government policy was made by a council of twenty-eight elders over the age of 60, elected for life. But there were other views.
Aristotle praised youth and his views of the old were quite the opposite to those of Plato: ‘Because they have lived many years, because they have often been deceived, because they have made mistakes, and because human activities are usually bad, they have confidence in nothing and all their efforts are quite obviously far beneath what they ought to be.’ For Aristotle, man only advanced until the age of 50, and when older became garrulous and kept on going over the past. A distaste and disgust for old age was openly expressed in Greek culture. Many believed that the gods took those they loved at a young age, leaving the unwanted to experience old age. Yet several Greek laws were passed requiring children to provide for their parents, and there were severe penalties—including, in Athens, the loss of civic office—for those found guilty of maltreating their parents.
In Ancient Greece, Aristophanes was among the first to mock the old in his plays as being feeble. Euripides also had a negative view of old age; in his play Alcestis, Admetus says ‘Old people always say they long for death—their age crushes them—they have lived too long. All words! As soon as death comes near, not a single one wants to go, and age stops being a burden.’ Nor was Aeschylus in the Agamemnon any more positive:
The riddle of the Sphinx who guarded the entrance to Thebes is well known: what, she asked, has one voice and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed, and goes slowest when it has the most feet? Oedipus, passing by, answered: it is a human being that starts on all fours, is mature on two feet, and then when old has three, as there is also a cane. The Sphinx killed herself when, on this occasion, her riddle was answered correctly.
The philosopher Cicero, who introduced the Romans to Greek thought, was positive about ageing, celebrating the delights of intellectual activities in old age such as civic service, writing, learning a language, and the study of philosophy. But he also listed the difficulties:
As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age: first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.
The Roman poet Ovid was also unenthusiastic: ‘Farewell to laughing, happy love and easy sleep’, and ‘Time, oh great destroyer, and envious of old age, together you bring all things to ruin.’ It has been estimated that about 20 per cent of the senators in Rome at any one time would have been 60 years of age or older. Both Cicero and Plutarch, in their own old age, felt that their years did not earn them the respect they merited. The Roman playwright Plautus created sympathetic old male characters, and in one play points out that an old man should be careful to avoid prating about public affairs, or slipping a hand under the dress of a woman whom he does not know. It has been suggested that from Ancient Egypt to the Renaissance the theme of old age was handled by writers in a stereotyped manner, with similar comparisons being made and little attempt to really look at old age deeply.
Respect for the old was an important principle in Judaism. The Old Testament says that we must cherish parents in their old age: ‘Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God’ (Leviticus 19:32). This has been taken to mean that when an old man or woman passes by, you should stand up as a token of respect. Old age may be one reward of those who honour their parents: ‘Honour your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee’ (Exodus 20:12). The Koran takes a similar view: ‘Be good to parents, whether one or both of them attains old age with thee… neither chide them, but speak unto them words respectful.’ To Buddha, born in 565 BC, old age was a spectacle of misery and sorrow which needed to be eliminated. Against this, the Upanishads, the sacred texts of Hinduism, speak of active and joyful ageing.
Since Jesus was young, this could have made youth more important than old age for early Christians, and early Christianity did little for the old, though the building of hospitals and asylums may have helped them. In the Middle Ages the young ruled the world; even the Popes were mainly young. There were exceptions: Charlemagne ruled until he was 72, and Enrico Dandolo, the twelfth-century Doge of Venice, is infamous for his role in the Fourth Crusade at the age of 90. But in 1380, when Charles V of France, died aged 42, he was regarded as already old.
Eastern civilisations in old times showed respect to the old. The high position of the old in China is due to Confucius (551–479 BC), who gave superiority to the elderly; for him the whole household owed obedience to the oldest man, who had the right of life and death over his children. On his 70th birthday Confucius said: ‘I could follow the dictates of my heart without disobeying the moral law.’ Confucius stated that filial piety ‘… is the root of all virtue, and the stem out of which grows all moral teaching.’ The Chinese wanted to grow old, or at least to appear old, because of the privileges enjoyed by older people. When two people of different ages were together, the elder spoke freely and the younger listened respectfully, so the younger man wished to grow older so that he might talk more and listen less. In family life, age brought authority. The young saw the advantage of honouring and obeying their parents; even the middle-aged could profit by the wisdom of the old and feel repaid for supporting them. Several Chinese proverbs illustrate this view: ‘If you wish to succeed, consult three old people’; ‘He who will not accept an old man’s advice will some day be a beggar’; ‘If a family has an old person in it, it possesses a jewel.’ As a result, a man’s 50th birthday in China was marked with reverence. Fathers had the right of life and death over their children.
The old are rarely seen in Western literature in the Middle Ages, though La Morte D’Arthur has the king aged over a hundred and Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, makes an old man’s sexual activity revolting. Most seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers are said to have viewed old age as a time of physical decline, and thought that old people were peevish, garrulous and forgetful. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) is one of the earliest novels in which a woman’s life is followed until she reaches seventy, and which shows the strength of her character. Moll’s lifestyle was lurid, but her closing words are that she and her husband had determined ‘to spend the rest of our lives in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived’. For Moll, age was a time of cheer and good humour, where one can make up for the failings of a lifetime. Goethe, who wrote Faust at the age of 65, also took a positive line:
Charles Dickens objected to the comparision of old age to childhood, reckoning it as similar as death is to sleep. In The Old Curiosity Shop, little Nell’s grandfather is very kind, but gambles too much. Victor Hugo’s plays had many old characters with positive features. In Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘All Over’, an old man meets again a woman he loved, but is shocked by how she has aged—only her daughter resembles his early love.
Shangri La is a fictional place in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which may have been inspired by Hilton’s visit to the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan, where the inhabitants have been reported to live long and healthy lives. Exercise is an important part of their life, as the mountains are extremely rough terrain. They eat mainly fruit and wheat, barley and millet. They have been called by some researchers ‘The Happiest People on Earth’. The main characters in the novel are taken to a secluded monastery where the monks practice a combination of Christianity and Buddhism and where some are immortal.
The novel Memento Mori by Muriel Spark in 1958 marks the beginning of a sustained interest among novelists in what V. S. Pritchett called ‘the great suppressed and censored subject of contemporary society, the one we do not care to face, which we regard as indecent: old age.’ Earlier novels had often just included a mid-life decline. All the characters in Memento Mori are over 70, and most in their 80s, and are in a nursing home. The novel centres around the anonymous callers who phone and say, ‘Remember that you must die.’ Old age is presented as a confusing mix of feelings, memories and inabilities leading to death: ‘I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment—there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die.’
Since Memento Mori many novels have appeared with central figures over 70, but they deal almost exclusively with the isolation, impotence and decay which are regarded as intrinsic to the ageing process. The closing lines of the final story in John Updike’s last book, My Father’s Tears, describe a man in his late 70s raising the glass of water he uses to wash down his nightly medications—his cholesterol-lowering pill, the anti-inflammatory one, his sleeping pill, his calcium supplement—in a toast ‘to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned’.
W. B. Yeats was infuriated by old age, which he recognised as inescapable, but his famous poem is wonderful and encouraging:
T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding is pessimistic:
A recent survey by Age Concern found that older people are often stereotyped as ‘warm and incompetent’, or ‘doddery but dear’, and younger people are stereotyped as relatively cold but competent. The rating of young people as more competent than older people can perhaps be explained by attributing memory failure to laziness in the young but incompetence in the old. A key finding from the survey was that older people themselves hold self-stereotypes and values which are likely to result in age-based prejudice. Specific findings supporting this view are that people over 65 are as likely as the rest of the population to hold the ‘warm but incompetent’ stereotype of the old, and those over 75 particularly are more likely to agree that competence declines with age. Those over 75 are the least likely to want to extend equal opportunities for older people. Results overall showed that many people did identify with, and felt a strong sense of pleasure in belonging to, their own old age group, but about a quarter did not. Even the elderly population has a tendency to stereotype their own age group. While older people were stereotyped as friendlier, more admirable and more moral than younger people, younger people were viewed as more capable. In general people held more positive views about their own age group and almost all had most friends of their own age.
People across all age groups tend to agree that older people are admirable to some extent, and friendly to a greater extent. Moreover, older people see themselves as more likely to be viewed as moral, intelligent and capable than younger groups. They also see themselves as less likely to be viewed as pitiable or disgusting. A widely held view is that people over 70 should be valued and cherished; there is almost universal agreement on this. Many feel that equal employment opportunities for older people have not gone far enough. While American children have a positive view of older adults in their own family, they may have a negative world view of ageing. One explanation is that the stories the youngest of children are introduced to often portray older people as wicked or weird, like the evil old witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the scheming Rumpelstiltskin. Overall, children do have positive perceptions of the old. Older men are generally perceived more positively than women.
Only a quarter of those asked in a survey on work thought people over 70 were at all likely to be viewed as capable of working competently, compared with nearly half who thought people under 30 were likely or extremely likely to be capable. Other research findings, however, indicate that younger workers are often no better at their jobs than older workers, despite the widespread perception that this is the case. It has been shown in experiments that there is no significant difference between the abilities of younger and older workers, with each group performing particularly well or poorly in different areas. It is suggested that less good performance by the old due to reduced cognitive processing is counter-balanced by increased ability because of previous relevant experience.
Most people would be more comfortable with a suitably qualified manager of over 70 than one of under 30. Almost half think that employers avoid having older people on their workforce because it spoils their image. It was generally accepted that a good way to reduce prejudice and discrimination between old and young groups is to foster close personal friendships between members of each age group. Good relationships between grandchildren and grandparents could certainly help.
Writing in the Sunday Times, the TV critic A. A. Gill offered a more forceful view, describing the old as ‘zombies at the end of our own home horror movies… Ageing is so frightening in part because we treat the old so badly, and we treat them badly because we are so frightened of them… This is the greatest shame and horror of our society and of our age.’
Germans tend to view ageing much more negatively than Americans, and Americans consider themselves to be ‘old’ at a much younger age than Germans. Yet elderly people in the United States today are not treated with the respect and reverence to which they were accustomed earlier in history. The gerontologist David Hackett Fischer notes that literature from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century colonial America stressed deference and respect for the elderly. He maintains that the elderly were viewed with a feeling of deep respect and reverence, with contrasts with more modern views. Today the elderly have become virtual outcasts of society, many living on the fringe, often in retirement communities or in nursing homes.
In modern industrial societies emphasis and value are placed on youth, with advertising geared towards and glamorising the young. To the extent that advertising acknowledges the elderly individual at all, it attempts to make him or her appear younger. The elderly are victims of mistaken beliefs and irrational attitudes promoted largely through the various mass media. It has been claimed that the most flattering thing you can say to an older American is that he ‘doesn’t look his age’ and ‘doesn’t act his age’—as if it were the most damning thing in the world to look old. But at least many of we oldies are looking very well, as we are repeatedly told.
Many negative but influential views about ageing continue to derive from the media, including films and TV as well as books. Simone de Beauvoir, in an important book on ageing, wrote:
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time… I have never come across one single woman, either in life or in books, who has looked upon her own old age cheerfully.
She uses the example of Leon Trotsky to show that even the body’s signals can be ambiguous, and there is a temptation to confuse some curable diseases with irreversible old age. Trotsky dreaded growing old and he was filled with anxiety when he remembered Turgenev’s remark, one that Lenin often quoted: ‘Do you know the worst of all vices? It is being over 55.’ In 1933, when he was exactly 55 himself, he wrote a letter to his wife complaining of tiredness, lack of sleep, a failing memory; it seemed to him that his strength was going, and it worried him. ‘Can this be age that has come for good, or is it no more than a temporary, though sudden, decline that I shall recover from? We shall see.’ Sadly he called the past to mind: ‘I have a painful longing for your old photograph, the picture that shows us both when we were so young.’ He did get better, and he took up all his activities again.
John Updike, in Self-Consciousness, wrote:
As I age, I feel my head to be full of holes where once there was electricity and matter, and I wonder if, when my head is all hole, I will feel any more pain or loss than I do now. What we don’t know, we don’t know: the Stoics are right at least about this. Ignorance is a kind of bliss, and senility, like drunkenness, bothers beholders more than the bearer.
In Ageing and Society (2000) Elizabeth Markson and Carol Taylor found 3,038 American films made between 1929 and 1995 which featured male actors over 60 years of age who had been nominated at least once for an Oscar. (We are used to seeing well-known older male actors wooing women stars half their age; it’s less common—if not unknown—the other way round.) But a random sample of these films showed that whereas older men were portrayed as ‘vigorous, employed and involved in same-gender friendships and adventure whether as hero or villain’, women remained ‘peripheral to the action or were portrayed as rich dowagers, wives/mothers or lonely spinsters’. They concluded that film roles have remained remarkably static in age and gender stereotyping despite changes in society.
Well-known films featuring older heroes include Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which makes use of reminiscence to explore the disillusionment of an elderly physician as he reflects on his life and his mortality. Driving Miss Daisy won Jessica Tandy an Oscar at the age of 80 for her portrayal of a testy Southern Jewish woman’s relationship with her chauffeur. On Golden Pond featured the veteran actors Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an elderly couple sorting out their relationship with an estranged child. More recently there have been films which have picked up on the theme of Alzheimer’s, notably Iris, based on the life of the writer Iris Murdoch, and Away From Her, in which Julie Christie plays a sufferer who insists on entering a rest home, which greatly upsets her husband as he cannot communicate with her or visit her for a long period of time. And most unexpectedly, a 78-year-old man, a bit grumpy but tough and kind, is the hero of the 2009 Walt Disney animated film Up. He sets out to fulfil his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America but he isn’t alone on his journey, since an 8-year-old boy, a wilderness explorer who is trying to get a badge for assisting the elderly, has become a stowaway on the trip. They have amazing and amusing adventures, and encounter talking dogs, an evil villain and a rare bird. The boy gets his reward.
Research in the US has found that during prime-time television shows, only 3 per cent of the characters are aged 65 or older, while this age group actually accounts for 9 per cent of the American population. Older people portrayed on television are often marginalised, comical, or based on stereotypes. Fewer elderly women were shown, although the number of older women outnumbers that of older men. Television has featured the situation of older people in series such as the American The Golden Girls, which featured four older women sharing a home and earned multiple Emmy Awards, and the British series As Time Goes By, with Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer as a couple who meet again after a gap of 38 years. And of course there is the redoubtable figure of Agatha Christie’s sharp-witted detective Miss Marple to remind us that not all old people need be peripheral to the action. In the long-running BBC radio serial The Archers, June Spencer, at the age of 90 still playing matriarch Peggy Woolley, was involved in a storyline about the dementia of her fictional husband which echoed her own experiences with her real-life husband; and Betty Driver was at 90 still paying a role in Coronation Street. The BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave was so popular that its main character, Victor Meldrew, has become shorthand for a constantly bitter and complaining elderly man.
In politics, the standing of the old varies widely between different societies. Governments based on rule by the elderly—gerontocracy—have been common in Communist states, in which the length of one’s service to the Party was held to be the main qualification for leadership. In the time of the Eight Immortals of the Communist Party of China, who held much power in the 1980s, it was quipped that ‘the 80-year-olds are calling meetings of 70-year-olds to decide which 60-year-olds should retire’. For instance, Party leader Mao Zedong was 82 when he died, while Deng Xiaoping retained a powerful influence until he was nearly 90. In the Soviet Union, gerontocracy became increasingly entrenched from the1970s, at least until March 1985, when a young, ambitious government headed by Mikhail Gorbachev took power.
The public may not always be keen on old politicians. Sir Menzies Campbell was 64 when he was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2006. Cartoons in the newspapers made him old, bald, derelict, and looking 150. The media went for his age, which made him, it was claimed, unacceptable and not suitable for the job; the Financial Times said leaders had to be young. He was repeatedly asked whether he was just too old for the job. He vigorously defended the advantages of aged people and argued that their experience was very valuable, but he was forced out of office. Similarly, at 72 John McCain was regarded by many as too old to be the next US president—far too long in the tooth. Had McCain succeeded in his 2008 campaign he would, at 73, have been the oldest President in American history. Discussions about his age dogged McCain during his failed run, and people recalled that Ronald Reagan showed early signs of Alzheimer’s in his late 70s. Yet the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, at the age of 81, has been in power for 28 years. The economist J. K. Galbraith, at 87, was irritated by ageist remarks like a ‘Are you still working?’ And ‘Are you taking exercise?’ To those who asked such questions he wanted to reply with ‘I see that you are still rather immature.’
The young, not the old, benefited in the 60s from postwar affluence in the West. Youth began to develop its own culture and the young of the 1960s did not want to lose the benefits. Cosmetic sales to hide ageing in the USA went up some tenfold in this period. Fitness became popular and women began to refuse to accept their old-age stereotype. Advertising focused attention on the third age, and there were magazines directed to older customers, but the old were dismissed from most of public life. Roger Daltrey in the 1960s sang ‘I want to die before I get old’, and Timothy Leary advised those on the campus to ignore anyone over 30. Many of us, when looking at the old when we were young, did not believe that it would happen to us.
One attempt to produce an antidote to youth culture is The Oldie, a monthly magazine launched in 1992 by Richard Ingrams, who for 23 years was the editor of Private Eye. It carries general interest articles, humour and cartoons and is sometimes regarded as a haven for ‘grumpy old men and women’—an image it has played up to over the years with such slogans as ‘The Oldie: Buy it before you snuff it’ and its lampooning of ‘yoof culture’ and the absurdities of modern life.
It is encouraging for those who fear ageing that nearly half of Americans aged 65 and older, when questioned, described the present as ‘the best years of my life’. But at the same time many of the comments made by the elderly about themselves do not stray far from the stereotypes: ‘My body’s ugly obstinacy in keeping on living strikes me as admirable’; ‘What do I want? Money and a younger woman’; ‘In myself I observe the very traits that used to irritate me in men of late middle age whom I have known: a forgetfulness, a repetitiveness, a fussiness with parcels and strings, a doddery deliberation of movement with patches of inattention… I feel also an innocent self-absorption, a ruminativeness that makes me blind and deaf and indifferent to the contemporary trends and fads that are so crucial to the young’; ‘Every attempt to be specific about the afterlife, to conceive of it in even the most general detail, appalls us.’
Not atypical current attitudes to getting old come from a recent article by Tim Lott, who is in his 50s, in the London Evening Standard. He points out that the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, now 65, thinks writers are over the hill when past their 30s, and that a woman of 34 feels she is already old. Lott recognises that many great writers flowered in later life but says:
There are disadvantages to growing old—you smell, your teeth crumble and the bad habits that you once thought you could rid of by sheer force of willpower you now realise are as inescapable as your rumpled skin. But the great consolation is that all your contemporaries are crumbling in much the same way. Even people who were once rock stars can now be joyfully observed on TV resembling balding retired pork-pie tasters.
In another piece, he says the advantage of being older is that at last you know who you are. If you are then ugly, so are all your contemporaries. You also probably have more money.
The charity WRVS, which supports volunteers working for the elderly, found that 40 per cent of the public don’t feel that they do enough to support older people, 65 per cent of people feel that older people make a positive contribution to society, and 76 per cent of people feel that older people are not treated with respect; they claim that the elderly are perceived as unhelpful and rude. ‘Silly old goats growing old disgracefully’ is how the elderly were labelled in a newspaper article describing their activities at a party. Another similar recent anti-age remark can be found in the list of the world’s most livable cities: Vienna comes top of the list, but a negative comment is that it is full of grumpy old fur-coated ladies.
‘You cannot teach an old dog new tricks’ is but one of many proverbs about the old. In spite of the numerous tales and proverbs celebrating the wisdom of old people and promoting their care, folklore is replete with reflections of a basic distrust of age. The fear of the old is further reflected in the fairy tales of many countries in which old women, even those who at first appear to be helpful and kindly, frequently turn out to be sinister witches. Various demonic personages, notably changelings and the devil himself, can be rendered powerless by tricking them into revealing their age. Parents cannot necessarily expect the same care in their old age that they earlier tendered to their children. As the proverb has it ‘One father can better nourish ten children than ten children can nourish one father.’
In an Irish folktale a man has a father who has grown too old to do anything but eat and smoke, so the man decides to send him away with nothing but a blanket. ‘Just give him half a blanket,’ says the man’s son from his cradle, ‘then I’ll have half to give you when you grow old and I send you away.’ Upon hearing this, the man quickly reconsiders and allows his old father to remain after all, saying: ‘Good deeds are wasted on old men and on rogues.’ Another man in the prime of life abuses his ageing father; he strikes him and drags him out of the house by his hair. When he too becomes old his son treats him the same way. One day the son drags him out the door and on to the street. ‘You go too far!’ cries the old man. ‘I never dragged my old father beyond the gate.’
Many attitudes towards the old are deeply ingrained, recurring from one generation to the next. How they effect the practical ways in which the old are treated and cared for will be discussed next.