Péchés de Vieillesse
Sometimes when a thinker nears the end of his life, he shows it by going out and shooting his friends as part of a general attempt to clean things up. Tentativeness on important matters is a very unsatisfactory place to end, but faith, which finds its ground and answers outside this life, requires it.
The man near his end may still be functional in that all the normal capacities of his lower logic are still in place—he can still eat his dinner and converse intelligently—but odd things begin to happen in the higher regions, out of which his intellectual work came. On one hand, his former impressions seem to be coming together to form a greater coherence; his pattern-seeking activities seem to be converging upon the final place to which advancing age, study, and long acuity have led them in his attempt to understand the world. But sometimes these lead by the same paths into distinctive forms of reductive craziness. (“All is vanity and vexation of spirit” would be a good example if it were not canonical and to be taken seriously.)
Older men need to be very cautious about these things and keep their wits about them. There are certain temptations to which they were much less susceptible in earlier years—when they knew less and were searching for something in this world to serve, obey, and defend—than they are at the end, when they have failed to find it and want desperately to clear the decks of a great many things that trouble them.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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