Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887

  Chapter 18

  That evening I sat up for some time after the ladies had retired,talking with Dr. Leete about the effect of the plan of exempting menfrom further service to the nation after the age of forty-five, a pointbrought up by his account of the part taken by the retired citizens inthe government.

  "At forty-five," said I, "a man still has ten years of good manuallabor in him, and twice ten years of good intellectual service. To besuperannuated at that age and laid on the shelf must be regarded ratheras a hardship than a favor by men of energetic dispositions."

  "My dear Mr. West," exclaimed Dr. Leete, beaming upon me, "you cannothave any idea of the piquancy your nineteenth century ideas have for usof this day, the rare quaintness of their effect. Know, O child ofanother race and yet the same, that the labor we have to render as ourpart in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physicalexistence is by no means regarded as the most important, the mostinteresting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We lookupon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devoteourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual andspiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life. Everythingpossible is indeed done by the just distribution of burdens, and by allmanner of special attractions and incentives to relieve our labor ofirksomeness, and, except in a comparative sense, it is not usuallyirksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not our labor, but thehigher and larger activities which the performance of our task willleave us free to enter upon, that are considered the main business ofexistence.

  "Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic,literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thingvaluable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of lifechiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, forsocial relaxation in the company of their life-time friends; a time forthe cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and specialtastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of recreation; in aword, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed appreciation of the goodthings of the world which they have helped to create. But, whatever thedifferences between our individual tastes as to the use we shall putour leisure to, we all agree in looking forward to the date of ourdischarge as the time when we shall first enter upon the full enjoymentof our birthright, the period when we shall first really attain ourmajority and become enfranchised from discipline and control, with thefee of our lives vested in ourselves. As eager boys in your dayanticipated twenty-one, so men nowadays look forward to forty-five. Attwenty-one we become men, but at forty-five we renew youth. Middle ageand what you would have called old age are considered, rather thanyouth, the enviable time of life. Thanks to the better conditions ofexistence nowadays, and above all the freedom of every one from care,old age approaches many years later and has an aspect far more benignthan in past times. Persons of average constitution usually live toeighty-five or ninety, and at forty-five we are physically and mentallyyounger, I fancy, than you were at thirty-five. It is a strangereflection that at forty-five, when we are just entering upon the mostenjoyable period of life, you already began to think of growing old andto look backward. With you it was the forenoon, with us it is theafternoon, which is the brighter half of life."

  After this I remember that our talk branched into the subject ofpopular sports and recreations at the present time as compared withthose of the nineteenth century.

  "In one respect," said Dr. Leete, "there is a marked difference. Theprofessional sportsmen, which were such a curious feature of your day,we have nothing answering to, nor are the prizes for which our athletescontend money prizes, as with you. Our contests are always for gloryonly. The generous rivalry existing between the various guilds, and theloyalty of each worker to his own, afford a constant stimulation to allsorts of games and matches by sea and land, in which the young men takescarcely more interest than the honorary guildsmen who have servedtheir time. The guild yacht races off Marblehead take place next week,and you will be able to judge for yourself of the popular enthusiasmwhich such events nowadays call out as compared with your day. Thedemand for 'panem ef circenses' preferred by the Roman populace isrecognized nowadays as a wholly reasonable one. If bread is the firstnecessity of life, recreation is a close second, and the nation catersfor both. Americans of the nineteenth century were as unfortunate inlacking an adequate provision for the one sort of need as for theother. Even if the people of that period had enjoyed larger leisure,they would, I fancy, have often been at a loss how to pass itagreeably. We are never in that predicament."