Summary

The article reflects on the harsh realities of aging and mortality as experienced in one's fifties, a decade described as deceptively challenging.

Abstract

The essay "The Fifties are the Cruellest Decade" delves into the author's personal confrontation with the stark reminders of aging during a Christmas charity auction. The author observes the visible signs of aging and the specter of death among friends and acquaintances, noting the sudden realization of the passage of time. The fifties are depicted as a pivotal period, full of contradictions—where one feels confident and healthy yet is increasingly aware of life's fragility. The author grapples with the inevitability of aging, despite attempts to maintain youth and vitality, and acknowledges the duality of the decade as both a time of peak and a prelude to decline. The essay suggests that creating art and maintaining physical strength are ways to combat the sense of decay and to leave a lasting legacy.

Opinions

The author views the fifties as a decade of life that is particularly cruel, as it deceives with a sense of well-being while aging creeps in unnoticed.
The essay conveys a sense of betrayal by one's own body and the bodies of peers, as they visibly age and succumb to illness and death.
There is a palpable tension between the desire to remain youthful and the relentless march of time, exemplified by the author's own efforts to stay active and fit.
The author believes that society's view of aging is skewed, with politicians and athletes either too old or too young, highlighting a disconnect with the reality of middle age.
The article suggests that art and physical exercise are practical means of defying aging and asserting one's vitality.
There is a reflective tone on the inevitability of aging, with the author acknowledging that their current perspective might be seen as naive in future years.

Essay

The Fifties are the Cruellest Decade

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace

Wings to fly. Photo, author’s own. Nudged by GE McKerrihan, I am trying to use more of my own photos.

Perhaps it’s the dark nights, the short days, the cold wind, the bare branches, the dead stems, rooms filled with greying light, stillness, and a bend to hibernation. Where once thoughts turned to festivities and parties, thoughts now turn to age, to mortality, to death.

I was at a Christmas charity auction on Saturday night. An event I have been involved in for many years. This year was different.

I saw the ghosts of past acquaintances. Jim and David serving at the makeshift bar, behind the wine glasses, joking, their spectacles gleaming, pulling corks and wiping spills; one now dead, one now with Alzheimers.

Christine on her heels, deft and sharp, rushing, rushing, amid the tables, keeping up with the auctioneer’s hammer, dropping lot numbers into bidders’ laps; her home is now boarded, builders remodelling, a new family waiting.

Ann sitting on the stage, her top-drawer English mimicking the auctioneer’s calls—a ringer for Her Majesty—sits now at home in her armchair, dozing, head on chest.

Age has come in a sudden rush. People who once looked as they always did now look old. A giant mole on a man’s cheek. He leans on a cane, the handle a hook. A woman limps, her spine curved. Puffed yellow hemispheres beneath eyes, swelling abdomens, hollowing thighs.

The evening passes as if I am behind a screen watching, and the silhouettes are macabre. It is an accusation, as if they aged themselves deliberately to hurt my eyes, to sting me, to baffle me, to worry me. I put it down to being in my fifties.

Politicians are impossibly old (I hear my mother exclaiming at the television) or impossibly young. And since when did they allow ten-year-olds to play in the World Cup?

The fifties are a cruel decade. Flattering to deceive. Age, what’s age? Pah! That old thing you are always going on about.

And then swiftly, slyly, maliciously, the veil drops. Oh, I see, this aging thing… this dusty death…

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace

To hear this at fifteen is a mere dent, a shadow feeling, a mild piercing of the carapace of youth. This is all there is. Make it worthwhile, Shakespeare whispers. Age lies within, confident, assured, waiting, biding its time, a crouching monster, a spring tightly packed.

The fifties are the hinge of life’s travel. All before is blithe, endless, insouciant youth; all after is realisation, recognition, and if we are fortunate, no remorse. Lighting is everything. Mirrors throw back loveliness; Mirrors are hateful, malicious liars.

Remorse is the enemy.

Out running, the wind blueing the tips of my ears, burrowing into their marrow, I pass my neighbour. Does she inwardly smile, shake her head? There goes Michelle, thinking to outrun age, thinking to out-eat age.

Do you think you will live forever?

says a colleague in the staffroom.

What to do with this ageing thing, that comes in your fifties, that sneaks up while you are dazzled by the decade, a decade where you are so confident, so at ease, so healthy of limb, so bright of eye?

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. — William Butler Yeats

If only one could grow wings and flee to the land of immortality, of sylvan groves and ferns and brooks and silver laughter and golden apples.

In the fifties, when age taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘You’re coming with me,’ there are, I believe, only two solutions, two pragmatics to help:

It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living― V.S. Pritchett

Write, create, write more. Leave trace in words. Throw down your print, your mark, your voice. It was not in vain; it was with hope, with vigour, with wonder, I did live this festival we call life.
Let not baths bully you into agedness. Do pull-ups and pull downs and bent-over rows, and show the bath you will not be defeated, cast iron though it may be, deep and filled with water though it is, you will haul yourself up and out on arms still strong, with a back still straight; you will give up baths on your terms, when you are ready.

But perhaps these calls are the naïveté of the fifties. Perhaps I have far yet to travel and in my eighties I shall look back at my words and laugh at the folly of my fifties.