智 课 网 雅 思 备 考 资 料
写作素材：老龄人口增加对社会的影响
美国学者《the American Scholar》文章
这个文章我选来，是因为雅思作文中有关于老年人口比例增加对社会影响的题目
A Country for Old Men
Having reached the shores of seniority himself, the authorfinds a surprising contentment in the eyes of his fellow retirees
接近老年 reach the shores of seniority
发现。。。认为。。。find...in the eyes of ...
退休的人retirees
作者 ：By Edward Hoagland
More and more I’ve been concluding that by middle agemost people in this country have sculpted their lives so they’llland about where they aimed to.
(在这个国家)很多人在中年的时候就已经把自己的生命雕刻成形，所以他们很快到达自己既定的目的地。
注意本句子中by...后面主句是将来时间，完成状态
The few who genuinely aspired to be rich or famous willprobably become so for a spell, and those who wished forcomfortable stability will find themselves with tradecraftcompetence, a web of friendships, grandchildren.
少数真正梦想发财成名的人会成功一阵子，而那些希望过着安逸稳定生活的人就会发现自己子孙满堂，(无所事事，就上网，于是就)具备侦探一样的技术能力，(用这种技术能力)有一堆网友。
括号内的增添内容，是我根据原文增补的，这样似乎更容易理解。The pleasures of versatility are their own reward for
“well-rounded ” folk, much like committing a couple of decadesto the responsibilities of raising kids.
花上几十年养儿育女
versatility 灵活多样
well-rounded folk 多样的民族
You acquire traction and smile lines, with perhaps a
well-grooved marital banter.
这个句子的翻译我没有谱。不好理解well-grooved marital
banter是什么意思，不熟悉语言的文化场景)
Two by two, Noah’s Ark is said to have been
boarded —pairings being the easiest equation for many of us tohandle, after all.
And in an era of chaotic governance and commonplacemendacity and meltdown, the ambition to excel seems a bitstunted. Hoe your own row is more the message than grabbingfor a brass ring, though self-expression_r can become as
crosswise as the old children’s game of pick-up sticks. Whilethe country splits, compounding its fractures left to right, weaccommodate ourselves to zany loads of debt, outlandish
overcrowding —trading trains for planes, for example, till bothare drastically less fun and the roads alternatively an anthill, asblue-collar as well as white-collar families look for a hideaway, asecond home.
In pick-up sticks the player plucks colored sticks singly froma pile of 40 dropped helter-skelter on the table, down to the last,but without ever displacing any he isn’t immediately after; if hedoes, the other player takes over, himself attempting to score. Itresembles negotiating traffic, or the ballet of the sidewalk,threading throngs. Pedestrians finesse potential collisions byswinging slightly sideways, smiling distantly, parting the phalanxby body-language adjustments. There’s nature; and then forphenomena like crowds, our second nature.
Homey imperatives such as steering kids through school,
wage haggling, and good-neighborliness keep us from obsessingabout what may be unraveling elsewhere: that plus our widenedsense of travel—Florida, Calabria, Patagonia, Indonesia. Therecan be a knockabout anomie to shuttling around, and the density
of our egos remains a problem, the clamoring holler to buildMcMansions. People wished to flaunt their first million, nibblingholes in any town, and our tribalism historically has wanted theother guy clamped underneath a heel, not just to stay in his ownvalley. Though tribalism lies in shards in this global epoch, theshards are still sharp, when you consider that nearly 3,000 NewYorkers, dying in an act of war earlier in this decade, received athousand times as much attention as the five million or so killedin Congo’s wars.
A cross-stitch of mercenary and sexual greed has marked theopening of the new century, plus a flight toward cyber-reality,which is to say the notion that I think, therefore I am. Such anidea has seemed absurd to me since I was in college, taking afirst philosophy course but spending part of each day outdoors,where the seethe of life still swamped merely thinking about it. Itcontinues to, or every library or movie or chatroom screen. Weare dragging our anchors, whatever they happen to
be —landscape or literary, folklore or ethical. Dick Tracy, NatalieWood, and Babe Ruth morph into Sweeney Todd, Britney Spears,and Barry Bonds. The new fluidity, air-conditioned, unhingedfrom nature, cracks open opportunities for entrepreneurial
idealism as well as greed, perhaps, in response to rolling famines,flood zones, mud zones, and the scalped forests and subsidingaquifers. Youngish activism rather than rootless self-exploration.The dwindling contexts that we operate in—whether it’s watertables, tree cover, religious deference, historical reference, familycontinuity —makes for a kind of Queen of Hearts croquet, wherethe wickets, balls, and mallets all dash around in goofy,
friendly-fire exchange. When Biology eventually has her say itmay no longer simply be something, like cancer, we fight against;there may be hell to pay; the gamble is how much we candestroy without triggering an abyss of consequences.
Extinctions —do they matter more than aesthetically? A warmingclimate? We truly don’t know what’s about to become thebottom line of that. And will the damage remain as constrainedas along an avalanche track, or be multiplex? You might as wellask Thomas Jefferson or Johnny Appleseed, outdoorsmen both.If they thereupon sniffed the wind and looked for birds—What happened? Is no space left?—and you showed them instead themarvels inside a digital box, would they feel reassured thatdemocracy had worked?
It has in the sense that I don’t know a lot of older
Americans who didn’t get just about what they genuinelysought. Most of course set the bar pretty low—from modesty,timidity, inconsistency, indifference—or else were pursuingnormalcies like love and family, children, friends and sports,which good humor can obtain without one doing too well onexams or achieving the stratospheric business success that risks aHumpty Dumpty fall. Life is going to go okay when rapportserves as well as sleepless ambition and if the person can
weather the occasional divorce or job loss. Indeed, we seem tobe engineered for it, and our setting the bar customarily lowexplains why human nature, human history, don’t significantlyimprove. Yet by not expecting much, most of us age withconsiderable contentment—I’ve been noticing lately at
senior-center lunches and church suppers—and even die with abit of a smile, as I remember was often the case during a year Iworked in a morgue in my 20s. In that era I might hitchhike
across the country with a $20 bill for emergencies tucked into myshoe, whereas half a century later, when in reality I go almostnowhere, I carry at least a thousand in cash in my wallet aboutthis small town where I live.
Why? To bribe the Grim Reaper or maybe merely an EMT asa cushion against indignity? In theory it could purchase the
freedom to flag down a taxi and hire a ride of a thousand miles,or enable me to give away tons of money impulsively (not thatthat’s in the cards either). As your legs lose their spring, moneybecomes mobility, whether locally or to change the climate for aseason. Money can lend woof to life’s warp if the weeks growmonochromatic —greenbacks are “salad ” once you have filledthe freezer and the furnace or looked for tolerable old-age
accommodations. Women with their own careers can move outcomfortably on an exasperating husband, like men seeking anautumnal bachelorhood. Nearly any mother’s son descends intoa constricted level of activity before buying the farm, as thesaying goes. However, people don’t need to join the faithfulminority who acknowledge a spiritual presence in their dailyrounds to make life work for them. The sunrise blazes as
trumpet-colored for the doubters, and nothing prevents themfrom swinging their young sons and daughters up to straddletheir shoulders for the morning strut to school. They can smileup their sleeves at the absurdities of the workplace, as much asany churchgoer, and wind up rather like that particular
grandparent one is especially fond of.
We’ve got the option of duplicating qualities we admiredgrowing up, like the generosity of a certain teacher, the loyal,lifelong craftsmanship or professional affiliations of another.Balance tends toward moorage in a safe harbor—and perhapsthat smile in old age on a gurney. I’ve seen famine in Africa,Asian poverty, deaths in my own family, but never regarded lifeas not worth living for mine or other species. In hardship we
squint a while, but green and cerulean are the colors of the worldand lift our spirits by and by, with energy the syrup of life—which is why I’ve loved cities so much, Cairo and Calcutta as well asParis and New York. Once we’ve abandoned the notion of
channeling Elvis or Einstein to whittle a stance for ourselves, our
quotient of contentment is likely to rise. I have public benches onMain Street to sit on or can walk around to the library, not tomention the county courthouse, where I sometimes rubberneckon trial days, observing the sorrowful mishaps individualsblunder into, imagining that maybe a lady wishes to see theirprivate parts or that shoplifting wouldn’t piss off a storekeeper.The parade-ground regimentation of the legal system after anarrest is dwarfed by the byzantine tangle of rituals regarding sexand property it regulates.
I was too afraid of women as a youngster to bumble intotrouble by crossing forbidden boundaries. Before then, scaredenough by the Sunday school story of the boy Benjamin, in
Genesis, chapter 44, ensnared because a “stolen ” silver cup hasbeen deliberately planted in his belongings, that I never
committed the petty thefts of candy or whatnot my classmatesdid. But coveting was not a major problem for me. Nor did I laterwant a jumbo car or house. Cultivating anonymity was better fora writer whose bread and butter was asking questions andwatching others inconspicuously. With a few exceptions themasterpieces I admired had not been written by authors ofpeacock fame. Publishing what I wrote and keeping it in printwas my aim, which over the decades I managed to do—as, without feeling like a Pollyanna, I’m inclined to think that
others, in different avenues, often parallel. Not so many put all oftheir eggs in one basket, but that quotient rivals mine. I rarelymeet somebody over about 30 who has set his sights upon a
goal so front and center that he might irreversibly fail. Instead weretool, “reinvent, ” ourselves. Like a bird twitching its wings or afish its tail, we switch directions in order to upgrade our
prospects. Engineers describe becoming marketing executives,science teachers turn to employment as corporate chemists (orvice versa), a backhoe operator is licensed for real estate
appraisals, a truck driver puts on a trooper’s uniform, an officemanager launches a business of her own, pumping out
proposals. My father recalibrated his legal career after beingrefused a partnership at the firm where he had worked his first10 years; and in my 30s I realized my aptitudes were better suitedto essay writing, after publishing three early novels. Flexibility isthe stuff of life. Life is an arc.
At those senior lunches, church suppers, midmorning dinerconfabs, I hear retirees chatting about the trajectory of their lives,deepening the smile lines they already have. Hindsight logicseems half the fun. Who would have guessed you’d end upselling clothes, or as a custom carpenter or court clerk? There’sno exaggerating the role patience may play in living well, or
wearing a coat of the proverbial many colors—bold caution andhumorous solemnity. You’ve talked to children and to themilitary, yet sometimes held your tongue, except about
McCarthyism and Guantanamo. Balderdash still wins votes forpopinjays, but the lag period when an environmental rescueeffort, for example, can be mounted has shrunk alarmingly,voiding the chances for a new president to put the glaciers andrain forests back together or reduce sea flooding, restore thevanished galaxies of species. We prefer a president who mirrorsus —a lowbrow braggart when we’re in that mood, or a gallantand humane man for World War II and the Marshall Plan. Ourframe of mind does need repair, but that’s been true for athousand years.
Pudgy, we sit in the senior center occasionally recounting thedeaths
of our spouses, round robin, for solace. How one was tryingto lift his legs off the bed when the embolism took him—or awoman’s heart failure, starting on the toilet, that crumpled herat the sink—and my mother, a long-term stroke victim trying to
speak, whose eyes seemed to beg for death, after she could nolonger swallow without choking. But was she possibly askingsomething else?—she wasn’t able to write. Agewise, we may allbe in the same boat, and yet a healthy sprinkling of us havewrinkle lines denoting repose: not chewing over grievances orkicking ass, even our own. Instead, we enjoyed a good run andnow could be an advertisement for life’s beneficence, if theword doesn’t mean you can’t also die of thirst in the desert.You might, but we exerted ourselves not to.
Doing what comes naturally should prevent your childrenfrom feeling estranged even if at some point you did get
divorced; and keep you from beaching broke on the shoals of oldage, unless you never shed a dice-or-drink addiction; anddissolve some of your midlife mortgage anxiety. Paying outmostly balances out, and the kids who ought to land in collegeeventually make it there. I believed in theory that character is fatebut have been surprised a bit, firsthand. Not to find that hustlersbeat nice guys, but that it doesn’t matter; they come a cropper,as you can read like newsprint in their faces; the length of lifeunstrings them. I can go to an Ivy League alumni reunion andmeet posh fund managers who either wish they had pursued adegree in ornithology instead of finance or are fretting about atax shelter gone gravely awry, not to mention a painful
mismarriage. An auditor disqualified the shelter and a judge isdivvying up their assets as if to provide for their stepchildren aswell as the wife: is that fair? Although grads at the Ivy gatheringgot a head start over nine-tenths of the folks at the senior-centerlunch, long before their seventh decade the effects of early
privilege had petered out, at least according to the emanationsof contentment versus discontent at each location. George
Orwell’s last notebook jotting observed that “at 50, everyonehas the face he deserves.” (Sadly, he didn’t make it to that
age.) And I tend to agree, especially if you advance the criterionto the white-hair phase, when a thousand accumulatingdecisions at first defined and then achieved our goals. Ifsubliminally we wanted to be couch potatoes, we are—or exercised a real green thumb, cooked delicious pasta, andmastered the organ in the corner church. Perhaps there was amountain in the Adirondacks whose profile stirred us to drive theAlaska Highway, and later we threw lire into the Trevi Fountain,raised Belgian shepherds, adopted a three-month-old child toenlarge our family, worked in wholesale. Whatever the
destination, it turned out not to be Phil Rizzuto’s or Phil
Donahue’s or whoever we idealized originally. Life’s gaugewas broader than we anticipated. Not in the sense that we battedin Yankee Stadium or chatted up celebs like Montgomery Clift;but our aims multiplied and vicarious satisfactions punctuatedour days. A snatch of Scott Joplin on the radio (we don’t needto have composed to exult); a daughter on a winning basketballteam; a seagull, surplice-white but primeval in posture, that landson the lawn to grab food left for the dog.
A certain self-selection of course takes place in who showsup for the monthly Men’s Breakfast at the senior center, forinstance —I sat with an ex-harbormaster and ferryman and acrane operator—or college reunions. Welfare clients aren’t aslikely as pensioners to come, and loners stay away, or the moredeeply discouraged and unmoored. Among the Ivies, high-flyingalumni who can talk about which prep school their children gotinto and about financial derivatives sit together, not with theirclassmates bemoaning the inequities of health and luck. Veteranswho 50 years ago decided not to use the GI Bill to earn a collegedegree wound up with solid businesses and nest eggs, too, ifthey wished for that and followed through. But following
through does not determine contentment if they also wanted
beer chums or love liaisons that might derail their concentrationyet engrave those smile lines people wear when reclining ontheir final gurney. Sly pleasures will do it, as well as the daily
straight and narrow and a life of kids dashing around on summerevenings.
Integrity is rarer and doesn’t tell on the face as clearlybecause, unlike pleasure, integrity involves cost-consciousness,even for the honest soul whose ultimate choice will never be indoubt. Stubborn sacrifice is demanded, which can mark their
expression_rs somewhat in the way attention-seeking eccentricitymight. People possessing less will brand it as a quirk.
Contentment at the end of life isn’t a kind of be-all, however.Orwell’s criterion didn’t specify what we should deserve.Discontent may be as admirable—although not self-contempt.What has surprised me is the widespread repose I’ve sensed inrubbing shoulders recently with old people, as one of them. Inmy ’50s college generation, existential pessimism,
counterposed to postwar prosperity, was all the rage. Yet I was adissenter, skeptical of the skeptics because, believing in animmanent divinity, I thought life could be radiant, especially ifyou got outdoors. Most people aren’t pantheists, though, and,accepting the cranky clichés about geezerdom, I expected theywould be unhappier in old age than they’ve turned out. Settlingfor less than some of their dreams hasn’t seemed such a
compromise because the satisfactions from unpredicted quartershave ripened so fully, whether familial—the prodigal
grandma —or just waking up each morning with no tasks to trekto.
I’d realized World War II had validated Kafka and Camus asmy classmates’ heartthrobs, but was instead a Whitman fanduring the 1950s and ever after, loving every metropolis Iencountered as well as the thunderous surf, the rolling
landscape. Children are born with bursting buoyancy. Give thema few yards and they will start to play. But I didn’t guess that, 70years on, that artesian buoyancy in subdued form would remaina force. Call it cosmic gaiety, planetary photosynthesis, the BigBang, or the green thrust. Life is thrust.
Edward Hoagland is the author of 20 books, the most recentof which is Early in the Season. He is a contributing editor of THEAMERICANSCHOLAR.
本文为新东方庄子老师文章
智 课 网 雅 思 备 考 资 料
写作素材：老龄人口增加对社会的影响
美国学者《the American Scholar》文章
这个文章我选来，是因为雅思作文中有关于老年人口比例增加对社会影响的题目
A Country for Old Men
Having reached the shores of seniority himself, the authorfinds a surprising contentment in the eyes of his fellow retirees
接近老年 reach the shores of seniority
发现。。。认为。。。find...in the eyes of ...
退休的人retirees
作者 ：By Edward Hoagland
More and more I’ve been concluding that by middle agemost people in this country have sculpted their lives so they’llland about where they aimed to.
(在这个国家)很多人在中年的时候就已经把自己的生命雕刻成形，所以他们很快到达自己既定的目的地。
注意本句子中by...后面主句是将来时间，完成状态
The few who genuinely aspired to be rich or famous willprobably become so for a spell, and those who wished forcomfortable stability will find themselves with tradecraftcompetence, a web of friendships, grandchildren.
少数真正梦想发财成名的人会成功一阵子，而那些希望过着安逸稳定生活的人就会发现自己子孙满堂，(无所事事，就上网，于是就)具备侦探一样的技术能力，(用这种技术能力)有一堆网友。
括号内的增添内容，是我根据原文增补的，这样似乎更容易理解。The pleasures of versatility are their own reward for
“well-rounded ” folk, much like committing a couple of decadesto the responsibilities of raising kids.
花上几十年养儿育女
versatility 灵活多样
well-rounded folk 多样的民族
You acquire traction and smile lines, with perhaps a
well-grooved marital banter.
这个句子的翻译我没有谱。不好理解well-grooved marital
banter是什么意思，不熟悉语言的文化场景)
Two by two, Noah’s Ark is said to have been
boarded —pairings being the easiest equation for many of us tohandle, after all.
And in an era of chaotic governance and commonplacemendacity and meltdown, the ambition to excel seems a bitstunted. Hoe your own row is more the message than grabbingfor a brass ring, though self-expression_r can become as
crosswise as the old children’s game of pick-up sticks. Whilethe country splits, compounding its fractures left to right, weaccommodate ourselves to zany loads of debt, outlandish
overcrowding —trading trains for planes, for example, till bothare drastically less fun and the roads alternatively an anthill, asblue-collar as well as white-collar families look for a hideaway, asecond home.
In pick-up sticks the player plucks colored sticks singly froma pile of 40 dropped helter-skelter on the table, down to the last,but without ever displacing any he isn’t immediately after; if hedoes, the other player takes over, himself attempting to score. Itresembles negotiating traffic, or the ballet of the sidewalk,threading throngs. Pedestrians finesse potential collisions byswinging slightly sideways, smiling distantly, parting the phalanxby body-language adjustments. There’s nature; and then forphenomena like crowds, our second nature.
Homey imperatives such as steering kids through school,
wage haggling, and good-neighborliness keep us from obsessingabout what may be unraveling elsewhere: that plus our widenedsense of travel—Florida, Calabria, Patagonia, Indonesia. Therecan be a knockabout anomie to shuttling around, and the density
of our egos remains a problem, the clamoring holler to buildMcMansions. People wished to flaunt their first million, nibblingholes in any town, and our tribalism historically has wanted theother guy clamped underneath a heel, not just to stay in his ownvalley. Though tribalism lies in shards in this global epoch, theshards are still sharp, when you consider that nearly 3,000 NewYorkers, dying in an act of war earlier in this decade, received athousand times as much attention as the five million or so killedin Congo’s wars.
A cross-stitch of mercenary and sexual greed has marked theopening of the new century, plus a flight toward cyber-reality,which is to say the notion that I think, therefore I am. Such anidea has seemed absurd to me since I was in college, taking afirst philosophy course but spending part of each day outdoors,where the seethe of life still swamped merely thinking about it. Itcontinues to, or every library or movie or chatroom screen. Weare dragging our anchors, whatever they happen to
be —landscape or literary, folklore or ethical. Dick Tracy, NatalieWood, and Babe Ruth morph into Sweeney Todd, Britney Spears,and Barry Bonds. The new fluidity, air-conditioned, unhingedfrom nature, cracks open opportunities for entrepreneurial
idealism as well as greed, perhaps, in response to rolling famines,flood zones, mud zones, and the scalped forests and subsidingaquifers. Youngish activism rather than rootless self-exploration.The dwindling contexts that we operate in—whether it’s watertables, tree cover, religious deference, historical reference, familycontinuity —makes for a kind of Queen of Hearts croquet, wherethe wickets, balls, and mallets all dash around in goofy,
friendly-fire exchange. When Biology eventually has her say itmay no longer simply be something, like cancer, we fight against;there may be hell to pay; the gamble is how much we candestroy without triggering an abyss of consequences.
Extinctions —do they matter more than aesthetically? A warmingclimate? We truly don’t know what’s about to become thebottom line of that. And will the damage remain as constrainedas along an avalanche track, or be multiplex? You might as wellask Thomas Jefferson or Johnny Appleseed, outdoorsmen both.If they thereupon sniffed the wind and looked for birds—What happened? Is no space left?—and you showed them instead themarvels inside a digital box, would they feel reassured thatdemocracy had worked?
It has in the sense that I don’t know a lot of older
Americans who didn’t get just about what they genuinelysought. Most of course set the bar pretty low—from modesty,timidity, inconsistency, indifference—or else were pursuingnormalcies like love and family, children, friends and sports,which good humor can obtain without one doing too well onexams or achieving the stratospheric business success that risks aHumpty Dumpty fall. Life is going to go okay when rapportserves as well as sleepless ambition and if the person can
weather the occasional divorce or job loss. Indeed, we seem tobe engineered for it, and our setting the bar customarily lowexplains why human nature, human history, don’t significantlyimprove. Yet by not expecting much, most of us age withconsiderable contentment—I’ve been noticing lately at
senior-center lunches and church suppers—and even die with abit of a smile, as I remember was often the case during a year Iworked in a morgue in my 20s. In that era I might hitchhike
across the country with a $20 bill for emergencies tucked into myshoe, whereas half a century later, when in reality I go almostnowhere, I carry at least a thousand in cash in my wallet aboutthis small town where I live.
Why? To bribe the Grim Reaper or maybe merely an EMT asa cushion against indignity? In theory it could purchase the
freedom to flag down a taxi and hire a ride of a thousand miles,or enable me to give away tons of money impulsively (not thatthat’s in the cards either). As your legs lose their spring, moneybecomes mobility, whether locally or to change the climate for aseason. Money can lend woof to life’s warp if the weeks growmonochromatic —greenbacks are “salad ” once you have filledthe freezer and the furnace or looked for tolerable old-age
accommodations. Women with their own careers can move outcomfortably on an exasperating husband, like men seeking anautumnal bachelorhood. Nearly any mother’s son descends intoa constricted level of activity before buying the farm, as thesaying goes. However, people don’t need to join the faithfulminority who acknowledge a spiritual presence in their dailyrounds to make life work for them. The sunrise blazes as
trumpet-colored for the doubters, and nothing prevents themfrom swinging their young sons and daughters up to straddletheir shoulders for the morning strut to school. They can smileup their sleeves at the absurdities of the workplace, as much asany churchgoer, and wind up rather like that particular
grandparent one is especially fond of.
We’ve got the option of duplicating qualities we admiredgrowing up, like the generosity of a certain teacher, the loyal,lifelong craftsmanship or professional affiliations of another.Balance tends toward moorage in a safe harbor—and perhapsthat smile in old age on a gurney. I’ve seen famine in Africa,Asian poverty, deaths in my own family, but never regarded lifeas not worth living for mine or other species. In hardship we
squint a while, but green and cerulean are the colors of the worldand lift our spirits by and by, with energy the syrup of life—which is why I’ve loved cities so much, Cairo and Calcutta as well asParis and New York. Once we’ve abandoned the notion of
channeling Elvis or Einstein to whittle a stance for ourselves, our
quotient of contentment is likely to rise. I have public benches onMain Street to sit on or can walk around to the library, not tomention the county courthouse, where I sometimes rubberneckon trial days, observing the sorrowful mishaps individualsblunder into, imagining that maybe a lady wishes to see theirprivate parts or that shoplifting wouldn’t piss off a storekeeper.The parade-ground regimentation of the legal system after anarrest is dwarfed by the byzantine tangle of rituals regarding sexand property it regulates.
I was too afraid of women as a youngster to bumble intotrouble by crossing forbidden boundaries. Before then, scaredenough by the Sunday school story of the boy Benjamin, in
Genesis, chapter 44, ensnared because a “stolen ” silver cup hasbeen deliberately planted in his belongings, that I never
committed the petty thefts of candy or whatnot my classmatesdid. But coveting was not a major problem for me. Nor did I laterwant a jumbo car or house. Cultivating anonymity was better fora writer whose bread and butter was asking questions andwatching others inconspicuously. With a few exceptions themasterpieces I admired had not been written by authors ofpeacock fame. Publishing what I wrote and keeping it in printwas my aim, which over the decades I managed to do—as, without feeling like a Pollyanna, I’m inclined to think that
others, in different avenues, often parallel. Not so many put all oftheir eggs in one basket, but that quotient rivals mine. I rarelymeet somebody over about 30 who has set his sights upon a
goal so front and center that he might irreversibly fail. Instead weretool, “reinvent, ” ourselves. Like a bird twitching its wings or afish its tail, we switch directions in order to upgrade our
prospects. Engineers describe becoming marketing executives,science teachers turn to employment as corporate chemists (orvice versa), a backhoe operator is licensed for real estate
appraisals, a truck driver puts on a trooper’s uniform, an officemanager launches a business of her own, pumping out
proposals. My father recalibrated his legal career after beingrefused a partnership at the firm where he had worked his first10 years; and in my 30s I realized my aptitudes were better suitedto essay writing, after publishing three early novels. Flexibility isthe stuff of life. Life is an arc.
At those senior lunches, church suppers, midmorning dinerconfabs, I hear retirees chatting about the trajectory of their lives,deepening the smile lines they already have. Hindsight logicseems half the fun. Who would have guessed you’d end upselling clothes, or as a custom carpenter or court clerk? There’sno exaggerating the role patience may play in living well, or
wearing a coat of the proverbial many colors—bold caution andhumorous solemnity. You’ve talked to children and to themilitary, yet sometimes held your tongue, except about
McCarthyism and Guantanamo. Balderdash still wins votes forpopinjays, but the lag period when an environmental rescueeffort, for example, can be mounted has shrunk alarmingly,voiding the chances for a new president to put the glaciers andrain forests back together or reduce sea flooding, restore thevanished galaxies of species. We prefer a president who mirrorsus —a lowbrow braggart when we’re in that mood, or a gallantand humane man for World War II and the Marshall Plan. Ourframe of mind does need repair, but that’s been true for athousand years.
Pudgy, we sit in the senior center occasionally recounting thedeaths
of our spouses, round robin, for solace. How one was tryingto lift his legs off the bed when the embolism took him—or awoman’s heart failure, starting on the toilet, that crumpled herat the sink—and my mother, a long-term stroke victim trying to
speak, whose eyes seemed to beg for death, after she could nolonger swallow without choking. But was she possibly askingsomething else?—she wasn’t able to write. Agewise, we may allbe in the same boat, and yet a healthy sprinkling of us havewrinkle lines denoting repose: not chewing over grievances orkicking ass, even our own. Instead, we enjoyed a good run andnow could be an advertisement for life’s beneficence, if theword doesn’t mean you can’t also die of thirst in the desert.You might, but we exerted ourselves not to.
Doing what comes naturally should prevent your childrenfrom feeling estranged even if at some point you did get
divorced; and keep you from beaching broke on the shoals of oldage, unless you never shed a dice-or-drink addiction; anddissolve some of your midlife mortgage anxiety. Paying outmostly balances out, and the kids who ought to land in collegeeventually make it there. I believed in theory that character is fatebut have been surprised a bit, firsthand. Not to find that hustlersbeat nice guys, but that it doesn’t matter; they come a cropper,as you can read like newsprint in their faces; the length of lifeunstrings them. I can go to an Ivy League alumni reunion andmeet posh fund managers who either wish they had pursued adegree in ornithology instead of finance or are fretting about atax shelter gone gravely awry, not to mention a painful
mismarriage. An auditor disqualified the shelter and a judge isdivvying up their assets as if to provide for their stepchildren aswell as the wife: is that fair? Although grads at the Ivy gatheringgot a head start over nine-tenths of the folks at the senior-centerlunch, long before their seventh decade the effects of early
privilege had petered out, at least according to the emanationsof contentment versus discontent at each location. George
Orwell’s last notebook jotting observed that “at 50, everyonehas the face he deserves.” (Sadly, he didn’t make it to that
age.) And I tend to agree, especially if you advance the criterionto the white-hair phase, when a thousand accumulatingdecisions at first defined and then achieved our goals. Ifsubliminally we wanted to be couch potatoes, we are—or exercised a real green thumb, cooked delicious pasta, andmastered the organ in the corner church. Perhaps there was amountain in the Adirondacks whose profile stirred us to drive theAlaska Highway, and later we threw lire into the Trevi Fountain,raised Belgian shepherds, adopted a three-month-old child toenlarge our family, worked in wholesale. Whatever the
destination, it turned out not to be Phil Rizzuto’s or Phil
Donahue’s or whoever we idealized originally. Life’s gaugewas broader than we anticipated. Not in the sense that we battedin Yankee Stadium or chatted up celebs like Montgomery Clift;but our aims multiplied and vicarious satisfactions punctuatedour days. A snatch of Scott Joplin on the radio (we don’t needto have composed to exult); a daughter on a winning basketballteam; a seagull, surplice-white but primeval in posture, that landson the lawn to grab food left for the dog.
A certain self-selection of course takes place in who showsup for the monthly Men’s Breakfast at the senior center, forinstance —I sat with an ex-harbormaster and ferryman and acrane operator—or college reunions. Welfare clients aren’t aslikely as pensioners to come, and loners stay away, or the moredeeply discouraged and unmoored. Among the Ivies, high-flyingalumni who can talk about which prep school their children gotinto and about financial derivatives sit together, not with theirclassmates bemoaning the inequities of health and luck. Veteranswho 50 years ago decided not to use the GI Bill to earn a collegedegree wound up with solid businesses and nest eggs, too, ifthey wished for that and followed through. But following
through does not determine contentment if they also wanted
beer chums or love liaisons that might derail their concentrationyet engrave those smile lines people wear when reclining ontheir final gurney. Sly pleasures will do it, as well as the daily
straight and narrow and a life of kids dashing around on summerevenings.
Integrity is rarer and doesn’t tell on the face as clearlybecause, unlike pleasure, integrity involves cost-consciousness,even for the honest soul whose ultimate choice will never be indoubt. Stubborn sacrifice is demanded, which can mark their
expression_rs somewhat in the way attention-seeking eccentricitymight. People possessing less will brand it as a quirk.
Contentment at the end of life isn’t a kind of be-all, however.Orwell’s criterion didn’t specify what we should deserve.Discontent may be as admirable—although not self-contempt.What has surprised me is the widespread repose I’ve sensed inrubbing shoulders recently with old people, as one of them. Inmy ’50s college generation, existential pessimism,
counterposed to postwar prosperity, was all the rage. Yet I was adissenter, skeptical of the skeptics because, believing in animmanent divinity, I thought life could be radiant, especially ifyou got outdoors. Most people aren’t pantheists, though, and,accepting the cranky clichés about geezerdom, I expected theywould be unhappier in old age than they’ve turned out. Settlingfor less than some of their dreams hasn’t seemed such a
compromise because the satisfactions from unpredicted quartershave ripened so fully, whether familial—the prodigal
grandma —or just waking up each morning with no tasks to trekto.
I’d realized World War II had validated Kafka and Camus asmy classmates’ heartthrobs, but was instead a Whitman fanduring the 1950s and ever after, loving every metropolis Iencountered as well as the thunderous surf, the rolling
landscape. Children are born with bursting buoyancy. Give thema few yards and they will start to play. But I didn’t guess that, 70years on, that artesian buoyancy in subdued form would remaina force. Call it cosmic gaiety, planetary photosynthesis, the BigBang, or the green thrust. Life is thrust.
Edward Hoagland is the author of 20 books, the most recentof which is Early in the Season. He is a contributing editor of THEAMERICANSCHOLAR.
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