 My Elephants |
I have known some people who have aged really badly, in an uneasy way.
They have a crude unhappiness in their souls. They are getting old, but they are not getting wisdom. Their skin, their handwriting and their gestures have been covered by grudge. They have turned into sour critics of the world. As a matter of fact, instead of being critics, they have plotted criticism with no sweetness on their words. They have become bitter, with bitterness in their eyes.
However, some of them would have all reasons to be the exact opposite: they seem to have been successful at their activities, even more successful than they would deserve.
Therefore, we can ask: what they want? Why are they so bitter at the phone or taverns? Why are they mumbling at the corners? Why are they so sarcastic, pretending to be funny?
This is wrong. It is wrong, not because it is simply wrong, but because it shouldn't be like this. These people have lived in an abstruse unhappiness. By the way, people should get old softly, never jerky. Never jolting their way and that. Never like someone falling the precipice down while grasping branches and stones, looking panicked at the bottom. Never like someone drowning, choking or dying at a gas chamber.
Aging should be like flying. It should be like no suffering (that much) with unavoidable arguments. As a spacecraft leaving the atmosphere abrasion, it's going to another level. It's going silent and spending a little fuel. It's floating like a caravel over the sea or like a vessel in the cosmos.
Elephants, for instance, are used to aging quite well and that's a huge task. They neither complain of years' weight nor the time's wrinkles. When they realize that it's time to die, they are used to walking quietly to the same and right place -- the elephants' cemetery -- and there they are used to dying with complete existential splendor, which is allowed only to the wises.
Wines are used to aging even better. They are there, in the boundary of their bottles, in the thickness of their flavor, in the cellar of their pleasure. They are getting old and gaining life; getting old and being beloved since the older they are, the more they are desired. Wines are used to aging dense and pleasant.
The old age issues also happen with some instruments. I'm not talking about those that are rusting at the corners, but those which are aging active like a knife. Daily use is chafing the knife but also making it sharper. It's always keen, fitting into the cook's hands like none other new one.
Maybe Mother Nature should have done people age in a different way. Like knives, we can say, by wear and tear but never becoming frayed. It would be a soft solution. We should have been worn down until disappearing without pain, like walking up the wind and evaporating all of a sudden. So, people would ask: "Where is John Doe?" and someone would answer: "Became worn out. He has lived and ended up with no moan, no lament."