HOW TO KEEP YOUNG

Hokitika Guardian, 28 August 1929, Page 2

HOW TO KEEP YOUNG

“I dread to come to the end of the year,” a friend once said to me. ‘‘lt makes me realise I am growing old.” That suggests a question: “When is a man old?” (writes Bruce Barton in the “New York Herald-Tribune”). In Shakespeare’s time a man was old at forty a.ml often invalided long before that. Sir Walter Scott at fiftyfive bemoaned the fact that lie was an old man. Montaigne retired to his castle at thirty-eight to spend his declining years in peace and study. Br. Samuel Johnson once remarked that at thirty-five a man reached his peak and after that his course must he downward. Physiologists tell us that in all mammals, except man, the period of life is five times the period of growth. A dag gets its full growth in two years and lives ten; a horse in five years and lives twenty-five. On this basis a man should live from one hundred to one hundred and fifty years. But William James, the great psychologist, said that most men arc “old focies at twenty-five.” He was right. Most men at twenty-five are satisfied with their jobs. They have accumulated the' little stock of piejndices that they call “principles” reicl closed their mind to new ideas, fhey have ceased to grow. The minute "a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute lie begins to be old.- On the other hand, the really great men never grow old. Bismarck, who died at eighty-tliree, did his greatest work after he was seventy. Titian,, the celebrated painter, lived to be ninety-nine, painting right up to the end. Goethe pas sea out at eighty-three and finished his: “Faust” only a few years earlier; Gladstone took up a new language when he was seventy. Laplace, the astronomer, was still at work ulien death caught ,up with him at seventyeight. He died crying, “What "‘e know is nothing; what wo do not know is 'immense.” I suppose that is the real answer' to the question, “When is a man old?” Laplace at seventy-eight died young. He was still unsatisfied, still growing, still sure that he had a lot to learn. As long as a man can keep himself in that attitude of mind he is still young.