The Unrealized Potentials of Adulthood

"It is a rule of life that when one door closes, another door always opens. Let us not, therefore, mourn so much for the losses behind the closed door that we miss the opportunities waiting for us beyond the newly opened door."

André Gide

"The century of adult self-fulfillment" --this is the proud title that might have been given to the twentieth century in Western society. And in spite of terrible wars and human deprivations, it is true that our social system, now approaching the year 2000, has made great gains in providing some of the means to actualize human potential..Great gains-but also great failures, the greatest of which has been the throwing away of the rich unused resources available in multitudes of men and women in their later adult maturity.

How is this possible in a society that has had the imagination to provide networks of services and inventions which directly or indirectly support and encourage adult personal growth and learning? Technological progress has made possible a popular low-cost culture-- paperback books, stereo sets, long-playing records and cassettes, the transistor radio, and television with many high-grade as well as lowgrade programs. Government aid has made possible thousands of public libraries, thousands also of adult education courses, night schools, colleges and universities, and pension and medical support schemes. Medical research has made possible an extension of life by over 20 years for the average citizen (more so in the case of women). Thus the adult in 1983 has gained almost another life of mature activity from the adult life of 1883.

The n9ted gerontologist Bernice Neugarten is even able to apply the term "young-old adult" to those adults in the age range 55-75 whom she describes as "relatively free from traditional social responsibilities of work and family ... relatively healthy, relatively well-off, and politically active. We predict that these characteristics will become increasingly salient by the year 2000." The rather rare usage, "salient," means "conspicuous"; Neugarten's statement is a prophecy, in a book of the future: Aging into the 21st Century. Taken with the seemingly affirmative gains of the society, already cited, the picture seems to be one of glowing optimism.

If so, it is optimism for the future. For the existing scene in North American society a tragic contrast exists between the inherent potentials of men and women in their middle and later years and the technological and social benefits conferred by the environment, on the one hand, and the actual realization of those potentials, on the other hand, in terms of what Abraham Maslow called, "self-actualized adulthood." Once again, as innumerable times before in history, we are confronted with the power of obsessive ideas, of life deforming myths, in governing or misgoverning human development.

Seven great myths about aging still dominate whole aspects of our society and the minds of probably most adults, young and old. These are the myths: that, if you only live long enough, you win likely become senile; that in the later 50s and thereafter, sexual pleasure and practice virtually cease (or should cease!); that in the later years you will become more rigid in thought, more intolerant in attitude; that learning powers decline throughout later middle age (if not before) and radically fall off by late age; that creativity is likewise a steadily declining curve from the 30s on; that time for the creative life is typically exhausted (the "I-always-meant-to" syndrome); and that energy, physical and psychic, is exhausted, too.

Since great folk attitudes, whatever their source, saturate society and govern its practices, it is no surprise to find the rich promise of middle and later adulthood in our time unfulfilled. Thus, we have the phenomenon of millions of older adults, still competent, highly experienced,, well equipped with creative potential, designated as "senior citizens" and "golden-agers," literally, not merely figuratively, "put out to pasture," "put on the shelf," and other obliging metaphors of the prevailing social attitudes. In North America, at least, an incessant propaganda pours from advertisers and commentators, from all forms of the media, on the health, vivacity, strength',' and upsurging activities of youth and younger-age adults. So far as older adults appear, they appear either as social problems for discussion ("What shall we do with our aging population?") or as members of an exhausted generation rather than vigorous confréres in the situation comedies, eternal soap operas, and later night movies. The advertising commercials that saturate the media are just beginning to acknowledge the presence of older adults, worked in among endless reminders of the joys and physical needs of youth, as a late conversion to a steadily growing consumer market of later-age people.

It is true that the media, the commentators, and the politicians dwell also upon certain major problems of the young: notably such issues as drugs, abortion, and unemployment. But both youth and its problems are redeemed in the eyes of these people by a virtue that they deny the older adults-potentiality. Meanwhile youth and younger adults are presented with images confirming what it can mean to be old, ill, and alone in a throwaway society-to be caught in a succession of poverties: poverty of financial means (two-thirds of widowed women in Canada and the United States, aged 60 and over, live, e.g., below the poverty line), poverty of energy and achievement, poverty of motivation, and saddest of all, poverty of hope and love.

It is true that many younger adults feel for a time a certain indignation and compassion for the neglect of the human needs and conceivable aspirations of older adults. But usually this passes. Young adults must get on with their own lives. Some ' where in their thinking recurs the determination to, at the least, avoid entrapment in nursing homes, which are the cages of old and alienated "senior citizens." Yet inevitably, because they are fellow voyagers with older men and women on the great human highway, younger people do not cease to observe. Consciously or unconsciously, they are always monitoring the scene, recording what older people are like, mentally trying on certain identities they see among older adults. They look with a certain fascinated

curiosity at these people, who are quite diverse in backgrounds and in the varieties of success or failure with which they seem to handle their exacting roles on the stage of later life.

Some of these "ambassadors" from the "growing old" country are, in fact, prestigious and affluent. One would expect prestige and wealth to be two sure ramparts against the hardships and sorrows of age. Yet "the man who has everything" may in fact have missed the greatest gift of all--the ability to live creatively, lovingly, and serenely through the later years. Frustrated and embittered millionaires are well known to priests and journalists; while everyone knows penniless old men and women, racked with illness, whose timeless and cheerful spirits and productivity within their own small worlds astonish and reinvigorate the younger people around them.

At all events, wherever these people go, they are observed. The aging and the old may be neglected and patronized, but they will nonetheless be observed. They represent a country privately dreaded by much of society, not for its strength but for its weakness, and not for its potential but for its supposedly interminable decline into exhaustion and death. It is the country largely assumed to be one of non-roles and non-creativity-the country of Non.

If you are young, sensitive, and observant, and secretly curious about how adults negotiate the process of aging, as has been the case with dozens of students in my seminars, you are certain to meet frequently at least these three envoys:

1. The first is the older adult to whom life always seems to have happened, rather than he happening to it, to paraphrase Erik Erikson. His lifestyle might be described as consisting of Total Expectedness. He has indeed nearly run the race and nearly finished the course; but the race has always been run on the safe and well-pounded track of routine, without the runner's even taking an occasional sortie into the enchanting but possibly dangerous countryside extending outside the track. When the chips were down-and the chips were down periodically during his early and prime years-he did what was expected of him. This type of later adult is very often a "good" person, both with and without the quotation marks, but his or her life has consisted of negatives: Don't rock the boat, don't step outside the limit; don't get involved; don't explore yourself too much; don't disturb your years with dreams because dreams may let you down.

Many of these adults are the unknown citizens of whom W. H. Auden wrote: "Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd. Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard." In fact, as they have done all their lives, they continue to preserve a passive spectator role. Often warmly attached to the domestic scene, they are especially desolate in the later years if death or the mandates of the holy "nuclear" family leave them bereft and lonely.

2. The second envoy to come under the young adult's scrutiny may at first seem more heartening. Here is a person who at least seems to have gone through some attempts at the identification of self. He is not afraid to speak of early abortive efforts at creativity outside the expected lifestyle and career, and to talk of unrealized dreams or of untried opportunities. This individual is at least aware that in his life certain vistas, certain experiences that might have brought him closer to fulfillment, have been missed.

Thus, this older adult could well appreciate a forgotten story told by Albert Edward Wiggam in his Marks of an Educated Man. One summer night, to the home of a bored and disappointed man in his later middle years comes a visitor who enchants him with his wisdom, wit, and loving-kindness and also with his tales of travel, adventures, remarkable friends, books read and written and lovely deeds performed for and by others. When at length the disappointed man emerges from the spell long enough to ask the visitor who he is, he replies, "I am the man you might have been."

This second envoy is also much more aware of his own identity than the first. Through the years he has made brief sorties into the domains of unorthodox ideas, magical concepts, and across class and ethnic barriers marked "Out of Bounds." All of this has given him a certain aura that attracts younger adults.

Still, there is an air of pathos and defeat about this possible model. When all is said and done, he does not feel himself to be the man "he might have been," which is to his credit. But the disaster is that he clearly feels that the whole game is over. What can you do, he thinks, with the later years, with the zest of youth faded, the neuron system closing,down, and creativity a hill city left behind with the lights receding?

3. The third representative seems at first glance to be the kind of older adult with whom one can at least join in a joyful expedition in the often forbidding country of the later years. This is the adult who has been consummately successful in his chosen field. The sight of such success in a world filled with half-successes and outright failures is often stimulating and reassuring to the success-oriented young.

Then, with a chill of recognition, the younger observer and wouldbe disciple notes that many of these individuals have opted out of "the creativity game." These are sophisticated people, the smart ones, the people with the answers. Some have read Harvey Lehman's book, Age and Achievement, in which the peak of creative powers is placed in the 30s; or they have heard dozens of similar comments over the past 20 years. Besides, they, too, are infected by "the manifest condition": Isn't it manifest that most later adults, notably from the mid-60s on, have ceased to be creative? Thus, for even these debonair performers of yesterday, there are no new worlds to conquer because life itself and the old wives' tales of the folk culture have conquered them.

The form of "disgust and despair" that fills the lives of many of these older adults, though less corrosive and heartbreaking then that of non-achievers, is real and poignant enough. If you are a life-lover and something of a Faust who wishes to play many parts on the stage of what Kim's lama called "this great and terrible world," the objective is noble, and there is never enough time to realize it. A dozen lifetimes are not enough.

But in any case, this particular kind of disgust and despair does not take its most debilitating form from the brevity of life. Rather it comes from the conviction that, even with the precious time that is left, little or nothing can be done of any creative significance. If one can believe this-millions do-and make a way of life out of it in later adulthood, then indeed there is no place to go but down. The sadness of this descent can be seen even in apparently exuberant figures among this third group of older adults whose inner pessimism seeps into and sours their late-life style. -

Thus our society slopes downward in the great human "life cycle," as it is brutally named, to a dark valley in some ways more fearful than the Psalmist's valley of the shadow of death. And this fact is known to the young, at least as a "gut feeling;" and as a depressingly imminent state to those adults who are themselves already on the brink of old age.

It is at this point, however, that a remarkable fourth protagonist appears upon the stage. He brings light with him, the light of creativity retained or regained, and the surging joy of human powers confidently held and used.

This is the exciting later adult personality whom I have chosen to call "the Ulyssean Adult."

The title comes, of course, from Ulysses, the Latin name for Odysseus, the adventurous King of Ithaca and hero of Greek legend who would have been about 50 when the great series of adventures described in The Odyssey was coming to an end, and perhaps close to 70 when he began his last adventures. Nonetheless, so open and resilient was his mind to experience, and so dauntless and questing his spirit, that Tennyson chose Ulysses as the subject of a poem dedicated to the thesis that only death can end the creative searching of such a man-and possibly not even death.

Tennyson had been an absorbed student of The Odyssey for years, and the portrait he paints of the classic hero is a projection of the authentic traits of Ulysses with which he had long been familiar. However, his portrait also owes a heavy debt to Dante's conception of Ulysses in late life in the wonderful Twenty-sixth Canto of his Infemo. In Dante's version, Ulysses, already a man in full maturity when he returned from ten years of adventures after the fall of Troy, makes the decision in late life to yet again

Tennyson's poem shows Ulysses a number of years after his return from his Mediterranean wanderings, during which time he has ruled his little kingdom of Ithaca. But he is dissatisfied with routines of king ship that could be done as well or better by his son, Telemachus. Ulysses has, in fact, been living for some years the life of Total Expect edness. This does not satisfy his restless, searching mind and spirit.

but they have all been preparations for yet more adventures and discoveries:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move...

The quest of adventure, mystery, and beauty has been the compelling motive of his entire life. But for all his joy and love of life, Ulysses is too much a realist not to know that although the years have given much, they have also taken their inescapable toll. Still, he calls his comrades around him, and summons them to join him in adventures in which the will is the critical element-the will to search, to discover, to accomplish dreams-in the continuing creativity of their later years:

Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

About 2,600 years separates the two great poems in which Ulysses appears as the central figure; yet both remain among the deathless poetry of the human race, not merely because of their craftsmanship, but because Ulysses himself is of enduring fascination to people of all centuries.

Ulysses has become, through this immense span of human time, an heroic, semi-mythical figure, but he is not a god. He is not a freak or a' mutation, but intensely human: a man who symbolizes the aspirations of men-notably, of course, in his confrontation of time and fate. Yet this confrontation is without bravado. Ulysses turns it into a quest and makes it a part of the human condition.

Ulysses thought and behaved as he did because of the kind of man he was, not because he was a king in Ithaca living among gods and heroes. The time in which he played out his intrepid and beautiful life was seemingly very different from our own-light-years seem to separate the world of the barque on the wine-dark sea from our society. But the Ulyssean adult can still be found in every stratum and ethnic group in our world of the late twentieth century.

What qualities especially identify the Ulyssean person? Perhaps the most remarkable is the governing sense of quest. Ulysses has for centunes been synonymous with the restless search for travel and adventure-even to those millions who may know little of the classic. This identification with Ulysses still exists in spite of the homogenized modem education to which many younger adults have been exposed. Otherwise the story of Ulysses would not have been chosen as the subject of a hugely successful Hollywood film.

Courage is the most striking quality Ulysses manifested in his search for new experience. He is famous, it is true, for other characteristics: shrewdness and cunning, resourcefulness, loyalty to comrades, and alltoo-human capacity for cruel revenge upon those who have hurt him or his family or who have endangered his honor. But his courage is so strong a feature of his nature that when it is combined with his sense of quest and his frequent loneliness and hardships, the result is a person not only heroic but movingly human-perhaps throughout history and legend the most human and heartwarming of all heroes.

Therefore, in our own time, a later-life man or woman who maintains the questing spirit, and who does so with courage and resourcefulness in a wide variety of circumstances, public or solitary, many of them terribly, even tragically adverse, may well be described as Ulyssean. It is not the time or the location but the quality of the life being lived that creates the Ulyssean adult.

The essential quality of that life is creative' and it appears in two major sorts of later-life creators. One, which for the sake of convenience might be termed Ulyssean One, is the man or woman who begins new creative enterprises, small or large, in later years. The other, which might be called Ulyssean Two, is the older adult who does not strike out on new paths and creative territories but who remains creatively productive within his or her own familiar arena of life and work from later middle age into the very late years.

- The working designations, Ulysseans One and Two, are not to be taken as indicating respective grades of merit. Both are equally fine in their enactment of the drama of continuing creativity in the later years. However, although both kinds of Ulyssean adults are equal in merit and in beauty, there is a special excitement to Ulysseans One because of their quality of unexpectedness. These are best illustrated by a few actual profiles of people, in this case obviously attractive to me, but whose number could be supplemented by hundreds of others.

Edith Hamilton, whose paperback books, The Greek Way, The Roman Way, Mythology, and others are found throughout the world, had no thought of developing a career as a popular writer when, nearly 60, she retired as headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School for Girls. Returning to the old family home on the New England coast, she began a life of charming domestic retirement. She played expertly the roles of good sister, good aunt, delightful friend, preparer of meals, member of the community, and watcher of tides and seasons. She also told and retold stories and legends from the classical period so vividly that her friends urged her to start writing them down. For some years she resisted, refusing to believe that a wider audience existed, and insisting she was not a writer. Finally, under persuasion, she sat down and began the book that was to become The Greek Way, and a bestseller. Other publications followed. Yet all through her long later life, and in spite of this dramatic new venture, she maintained her other roles. She never lost her love of life. At the age of 90, having decided to visit Europe again after 25 years, she was amused to hear that her sister had remarked to a friend how glad she was that Edith would have a last chance to make that tour. Edith Hamilton then revisited Europe on four annual tours accompanied by her close (and much younger) friend and later biographer Doris Read. At 91, Hamilton received the freedom of the city of Athens in a moving ceremony in one of the great theaters. She described this as the proudest moment of her life. Hers was the unusual case of the Ulyssean One adult who actually touched the borders of the heroic legend itself.

Ulyssean One adults, in fact, turn up with remarkable frequency in the writing world, often as novelists, performing a totally new role after most of a lifetime spent in other pursuits. Thomas Costain was a prominent editor and a dedicated reader of history for years before he began at 55 writing a series of immensely successful novels. Costain had had at least an association with writing, but Cervantes, who began to write Don Quixote when he was almost 60, had been a professional soldier. Lloyd C. Douglas was 50 and a noted preacher in Montreal when he began Magnificent Obsession. The story was peddled among a dozen editors before becoming one of the most successful bestsellers of the century. At 72, Douglas produced the famous novel, The Robe. Wilder Penfield was world-famous as a brain surgeon when, in his 60s, he picked up an old story his mother had always hoped to write, and transformed her notes and ideas into the radically different plot and milieu of the fine novel, No Other Gods. Penfield followed it six years later with another novel, The Torch.

In all these cases, the factor of unexpectedness is constant. No one expected the editor, the soldier, the preacher, the brain surgeon to break out into the new adventure of writing a novel, which even as a physical exercise is strenuous and demanding-and to do so in their later years.

The reverse process is found in the late life of the French novelist, Lou Andréas-Salomé, which is recorded in a few pages by Simone de Beauvoir. Andréas-Salomé entered the world and the thought of Sigmund Freud at age 50; was in her 60s when she became a practicing professional psychotherapist; awakened late to physical participation in sex and carried it on for years, transferring this to loving platonic friendships with men in her very late years. Harassed by terrible physical illnesses and by the terrors of the Nazi occupation of France, she nevertheless sought to open up new channels of thought and action for herself not only in psychoanalysis but in philosophy, in the improvement of the human condition, and through tender friendships with a wide circle of all sorts of people. She experienced the full assault of the world on her body, mind, and spirit; yet her life was lovely at the close, still seeking enrichment in new interests, still unembittered. The life of this Ulyssean One, in fact, demonstrates that in spite of everything, life is always conquered by the unembittered.

Benjamin Spock, in his late 60s, was an internationally famous pediatrician-wealthy, medically orthodox, the foster father, in effect, of millions of American and Canadian 'Spock babies.' There was no apparent evidence of Ulysseanism in his late life, except perhaps in his devotion to intelligent play and recreation. Then the terrible Viet War escalated-no more terrible, in fact, than a hundred wars before it, and far surpassed by the obscene tragedy of World War One. But television delivered the conflict daily into the kitchens and living rooms of the American people, and the tens of thousands of young Americans who enlisted and died seemed uselessly sucked in by a quagmire. Public revulsion grew, but American patriotic sentiment was still strong, and Benjamin Spock's totally unexpected appearance as leader of the anti-war forces took courage and imagination. A widespread outcry arose against him; the federal government pursued him into the courts; he found himself often cold-shouldered and scowled at in airports and on streets. But the Ulyssean adventure was a success: Spock's courage was matched by his shrewdness, and he knew that he spoke for the forces of life and sanity. Furthermore, his leadership on Vietnam was simply the beginning of a second unexpected Ulyssean career in civil rights.

In his fine book, Starting Over, Damon Stetson describes the thoughts and actions of a midlife adult at the point where he turns from one secure and successful career and seeks a second or third one. The case in point is that of David E. Lilienthal, who by the time he was 50 had become successively chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. At this point he sought "a newer world." In volume three of his journals, called significantly Venturesome Years, Lilienthal writes:

The words could almost be a paraphrase of those of Dante's Ulysses. Lilienthal traveled for a time, rested, thought much, then entered a new world of action as a managerial and industrial consultant privately dedicated to helping improve the life of ordinary people of all races around the globe. In doing so, he obviously made great use of past expertise-but so did Ulysses, and so do all who venture on new enterprises in their middle and later years, even if only to use their accumulated resources from the bank of faith, hope, and courage.

Sometimes adversity, not success, is the force that drives the Ulysseans One into wholly unexpected ventures. Misfortune also presents one with choices: either to accept defeat quietly or to launch out into new creative planning and action, hoping for the best. Ralph Knode's case, also cited by Stetson, is a vivid illustration of this. Knode was born into an affluent Philadelphia family and, following college and service in the air force, married and became a successful salesman with a cement *company. He had an expensive home and a portfolio of stocks started for him in his youth by his family, and seemed set in the pattern of that fortunate minority who are "comfortably fixed" for life.

Ralph Knode, however, had a severe drinking problem, to some extent the result of work for which he was emotionally unsuited. As is often the case, the two problems, the alcoholism and the work, interacted upon one another. The company placed him in office work, which he found boring. He had reached a kind of moment of truth; fortunately he had the support of an understanding wife. He made a radical decision, a Ulyssean One decision: with recollections of a boyhood trip to Wyoming, Knode decided to explore a wholly new world. For a year he worked as a ranch hand, a grueling year of hard physical work. Then he and his wife bought a small ranch, then a much larger one. Six years later, in 1970, although he still had heavy debts incurred by purchasing the ranches, Knode had conquered his problem with alcohol. He owned over 2,000 acres and a very large herd of Black Angus cattle. Ralph, his wife, and their three children were united in a life that offered more isolation than eastern city routines, but had the compensation of being home on the range. For unexpectedness, it would be hard to imagine a more dramatic change of career. Perhaps those who seek the path of Ulyssean One would do well to remember Charles Luckman's dictum when he abandoned the presidency of Lever Brothers to return to his profession of 20 years back (architecture): You don't have to prove anything to your friends, and you shouldn't disturb yourself about your enemies.

Sometimes Ulyssean changes in middle and later life lead to not only second and third but even fourth careers. The Canadian educator and facilitator of cultural growth, John Everett Robbins, was 50 and had been a prominent civil servant in Ottawa for 20 years when he had the opportunity to help launch the Encyclopedia Canadiana as its editor-in-chief. The challenge was exciting, but the venture involved giving up the usual securities of civil service life, not least the pension arrangements. Robbins took the plunge, however, producing over five years the ten-volume publication that was hailed as a major contribution to Canada's sense of identity. What next? Robbins could have stayed on with the encyclopedia, but for so innovative a person the zest was gone. He soon took on the presidency of a small college in western Canada which during the ensuing decade he transformed into a university. When he resigned in 1969, it was a gutsy decision because his term had three years to run and he had no immediate prospects. In fact, he was soon considering a post as coordinator of campus contacts for the program of external aid. But before he could begin his work he was offered, in midsummer of 1969, the job of first Canadian ambassador to the Holy See. After his three-year tour, which Robbins and his wife described as "beautiful," he came home to Ottawa, where at 71 he deeply involved himself in the work of World Federalism and other "passionate causes."

A child of fortune? Perhaps, to a degree. But Robbins was always ready to take the Ulyssean decision: to seek a newer world where the creativity he felt to be an integral part of his life could have free play, even at the risk of occasionally astonishing friends and baffling enemies with unexpectedness.

Men who retire, and women who embark on enterprises outside the home in middle and later adulthood, are often glowing examples of Ulysseans One. One example is a New York State Commissioner of Education who, on retiring at 65 in the 1950s, announced to his startled friends that he had always wanted to be a lawyer. He thereupon enrolled in the Albany Law School, graduating at 69 and arguing cases for years, including situations where he appeared before his successors as Commissioners of Education! A recent Canadian counterpart is the Ontario medical executive, Glenn Sawyer, who at 65, in the fall of 1974, enrolled in law studies at the University of Western Ontario, graduated in 1977, and now practices medico-legal work in Toronto.

Still another Ulyssean undergraduate was Harry Craimer of Montreal, who gave up the active management of his accountancy firm in 1974 to enroll at McGill University in the East Asian Studies program, taking courses in Chinese language and history, Japanese literature, and comparative economic systems.

An even more striking case of the Ulyssean student is E. Lyall Nelson of Montreal, a former banker who retired after 44 years and began B.A. studies at Concordia University which he had intended to pursue almost a lifetime before. Nelson entered in 197 1, graduated in 1974 after taking 20 courses in three years, and then enrolled in M.A. studies.

Yet Craimer, Sawyer, and Nelson are mere youths compared to 90year-old Mal Wickham, described in April, 1975, as "the oldest student at the University of Wisconsin." Wickham, we are told, returned to college studies after a career that included 40 years of farming. He jogged to his classes.

Enormous numbers of women now return to a former vocation after 15 or 20 years of married life. Increasingly, of course, they combine both work and marriage from the honeymoon on. But the Ulyssean element enters with the re-entry of women of quite advanced years to career or educational ventures, or with those of middle years who, feeling themselves no longer growing as persons, strike out on new paths with the inevitable hazards of possible failure. Barbara Powell O'Neill in her stimulating book, Careers for Women after Marriage and Children, "for the woman who wants individual self-fulfillment as well as marriage," cites Ruth K. Caress of East Meadow, Long Island, as an example of this.

Ruth Caress had reached the age of about 40 with an early college education, an able and understanding husband, a family of three children, a number of worthwhile community voluntary activities, and an attractive home. Her expression, however, of certain personal problems she was experiencing as an individual could serve as the classic stereotype of the unrealized woman in her middle years. In her interviews with O'Neill these phrases occur: "Despite all this . . . a deep sense of personal frustration ... a sense of being without any personal identification ... Deriving little or no gratification from the shape of my life. . ." (This syndrome could, of course, be matched by many thousands of men also, about whom L. E. Sissman writes, "Men past forty/Get up nights, And look out/at City Lights. . .")

Caress tells us that her early academic record had been mediocre; she had been long away from studies; if she went back, she would have to accept teachers who were younger than herself. Nonetheless, she decided to take the plunge and enroll in a school of social work. In spite of the hard work and anxieties of this late studentship, it was a success; there were also pleasant surprises. For example: "The kudos from teachers and supervisors were rebuilding a self-esteem badly battered by years of intellectual stagnation." She became a caseworker for a family service organization, thus pursuing a creative Ulyssean search for a richer personal identity.

Often with women as with men, the Ulyssean One adventure is something that astonishes not only one's friends but oneself. The Canadian columnist True Davidson in 1968 entered upon the extraordinary odyssey at age 66, of becoming mayor of one of Ontario's large surburban cities, East York. When she retired from the post in 1972, it was not because she felt herself too old but because she felt the urge for other ventures-writing a column for a Toronto daily paper was one. A characteristic of many Ulysseans is that they do not plan their moves as though these were chessboard strategies; they seek experience as "an arch wherethro" Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades/ For ever and ever" as they move. The mayoralty of a large city was not part of Davidson's long-range calculations at, say, age 60, but her Ulyssean spirit made her ready for it.

An outstanding case of how the Ulyssean One experience can be thrust upon somebody essentially ready for it is seen in the later life of the French writer and mystic, Gabrielle Bossis. This remarkable woman was born in Nantes in 1874 and died on June 9, 1950. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, a charming, high-spirited girl whose mystical nature was long concealed by her participation in all the social and artistic activities of her class. She rejected the chance to become a nun, thus seeming in the church's eyes to choose the world; yet she refused offers of marriage that might have separated her from her hidden vocation. Bossis undertook "quite late in life," according to her translator, Evelyn Brown, the writing of religious plays, which she also of ten acted in and produced. She traveled extensively, not only because of her plays, but seemingly because of her joie de vivre and deep interest in people and their situations.

The Ulyssean adventure that marked an extraordinary development of her life occurred at age 62. Bossis began to keep an intimate personal journal of a type she could not possibly have anticipated in earlier years, and which is wholly original. It began with her trip to Canada on the Ile de France, continued through her cross-Canada tour, and ended shortly before her death. It was almost wholly devoted to a series of dialogues with a mysterious inner voice that Evelyn Brown remarks, Gabrielle Bossis "felt with awe, though sometimes with anxious questionings, to be the voice of Christ." The journal was written during constant travels at airports, at sea, at dozens of stops throughout France, Europe, and North Africa. Bossis was not a recluse. She had inherited money and was intensely life-loving; she had many friends and had made for herself in her later years a successful career in her own sphere of play-acting, writing, and producing. Still, the journal, which she kept for 13 years, was an intensely private thing; she never attempted to exploit the experience of the Dialogue for personal gain or power. It was published anonymously very late in her life; some years after her death, Bossis was, revealed as the writer in the edition produced by Daniel-Rops as Lui et Moi (He and I). The news of its authorship astounded her friends.

The secret journal was the Ulyssean adventure of Bossis's later years; to read it is to encounter a loving, creative, and Ulyssean spirit.

As we have said, the man or woman in later adulthood who does not suddenly convert to new careers and enterprises but who remains richly productive within the sphere of creativity where he or she has long performed is a Ulyssean Two. Interestingly, Ulysses himself was really a Ulyssean Two. His essential role, imposed upon him in The Odyssey by apprenticeship to the gods, was that of skilled captain-adventurer-his obligations as a king were both essential and incidental to his great role. The excitement of his epic voyage in late life through the Gates of Hercules was not that he embarked upon a wholly new career but that he resumed the life of quest, risk, and discovery when he found himself drying up and losing his sense of self significance. To be a Ulyssean Two, one must obviously be more than a repeater of the routine. There must be creative action, not merely continued motion. While the dramatic and unexpected change in lifestyle and/or career that marks Ulysseans One makes the adventure and creativity of their later lives stand out unmistakably, the picture is less clearwith the other Ulysseans. Here the whole question of what is creative living and doing arises much more urgently.

The word "routine," says the Concise Oxford Dictionary, means "the unvarying performance of certain acts." It has, interestingly, nothing whatever to do with the quality of the performance itself. A successful and aging comedian on national television may continue to delight viewers with comedy styles and laugh-inducers, which he shrewdly repeats for the fortieth year; a preacher may continue to console or inspire congregations with repeated or revamped sermons that guarantee his acceptability; a homemaker may make the same marvelous pies and present the same appetizing menu on the supper table through years of family life; and a politician may continue to be re-elected election after election by uttering the same clich6s. Such habitual performances can be admirable in themselves-but they are not Ulyssean.

In all lifestyles, including those of Ulysseans, a certain amount of routine is indispensable. It provides the settled minimum order of daily living that frees mind and body for higher activities. But when the routine becomes the lifestyle, when the lives of men and women operate only within a circular track of unexamined attitudes, unimproved skills, and numbing rituals, then the creative spirit enters into a long catalepsy. This is the situation that led Whitehead to compare much of middle age to a highway clogged with cars, each moving at the sluggish pace dictated by the stupefying conformity of all. At the worst, the years of routine may create a personality insensitive or hostile to even promising change, made rigid by the drying-out of laughter and hope, and warmed by the memories of past achievements and redundant honors.

The word "still" can be deadly when applied to men and women caught in the nets of dull, unliberating routines: "Do you mean to say that Thorold is still in that job at Gray and Company?"; but it glows with life and energy when it describes the continuation of creative achievement into the later and often very late years. Alfred North Whitehead was still so filled with the fires of thought that he published his four major works after the age of 65; Balanchine still choreographed brilliant ballets as he crossed his 70th birthday; Edison was still inventing with rich imagination in his late 70s and early 80s; William Butler Yeats took what runners call his "second wind" after a stormy and troubled middle age, and still produced nobly and beautifully until his death at 74; Buckminster Fuller's mind and hand still teem with innovation at 85 as they did at 60.

In the lives of all Ulysseans Two the sense of quest and wonder is strong, undiminished by age. This persists in spite of enormous handicaps. Consider, for example, Handel's crushing debts, Wagner's neuroses, C6sar Franck's almost constant neglect by the musical public, Holst's loss of most of the public he had temporarily gained with The Planets. The quality of intense humanness was also characteristic of these men: Whatever they were, they were real, not plastic, people. This human reality ranged all the way from Haydn's great sweetness of nature and affection to Wagner's assortment of hatreds, the most repulsive of which was his macabre anti-Sen-,dtism. No one can pretend that all the Ulysseans are "nice" people. Chou En-lai's nature was clearly both tough and cruel, yet he would certainly qualify as a Ulyssean Two.

The world of painting seems to swarm with these Ulysseans Two. Reading, for example, Alexander Liberman's book, The Artist in His Studio, which consists of Liberman's interviews with nearly 40 noted European artists of our time, is an invigorating experience. "Our time" begins with C6zanne, Renoir, Monet, and Bonnard, and concludes with a group of artists elderly in years but still fully generative: for example, Dubuffet, Ernst Richier, Bazaine, Giacometti, Hartung, and Manessier. The first astounding fact to emerge about these Ulysseans is their longevity; the next is their vitality. All but six reached age 70; eighteen lived to age 80, and half of those to beyond 85. Liberman began his odyssey among these painters and sculptors just after World War Two, and longevity was the least of his interests. In fact, to the absorbed reader it plays a secondary role to the 61an, the joy in the wonder and beauty of the world which continues to characterize what are, after all, very elderly men.

At a great age, and ill, the Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, tells Liberman that he is still working on the concept of the bird-that in fact what he seeks is the meaning of flight. Georges Rouault remarks that one must be humble and not think that one knows; that everything must be begun again; that, after all, he has waited until age 70 before going to Italy! And Alberto Giacometti, whose passionate creativity finally exhausted him at 65, says that he has been 50,000 times to the Louvre, copying everything in drawing, "trying to understand."

Unlike Pablo Picasso, who continued to produce lavishly into his 90s ) and who felt compelled to strip himself of any possessive hand, even the hand of love, few of these Ulyssean Two artists kept burning their bridges behind them. Nevertheless, they have found "that untravell'd world" in the inexhaustible continuity of their creative lives. Thus Georges Braque, who in the 1930s began his hundreds of paintings of noble and exquisite birds, is able to tell Liberman that the mystery of his great painting, Grand Oiseau, is beyond words-a symbol of an ever-more mysterious cosmos. And this magnificent old Ulyssean at 78 remarks wistfully to Liberman that he needs another storey for his house to shelter his accumulating canvases!

Perhaps there is both a physical and an emotional release in painting and sculpting that promotes the Ulyssean adventure, much as with other arts, especially the so-called executant arts. Conductors of orchestras are often Ulyssean figures. Arturo Toscanini continued to conduct with power until close to his death at age 90; he was not only emotionally intensely alive, but according to his masseur had much of the skin texture and the suppleness of an athletic young man. On the other hand, Otto Klemperer, who died at 85, conducted from a chair, having survived in the course of 25 years a terrible accident, a, brain tumor, and severe bums. Stravinsky was still conducting and composing in his 80s: a frail, pixie-like man whose varied facial expressions so distracted his youthful biographer, Robert Craft, at their first meeting that Craft could hardly concentrate on the maestro's words. (Stravinsky was in his late 60s before Craft even met him.) His rich, often corrosive, sense of humor was the verification of David Raff's definition: "humor is a form of courage."

There are also many Ulysseans among concert pianists and other musicians. When I was a boy the story was widespread that Paderewski had to stop playing in his early 60s because of stiffened fingers, and it fortified the legend that this was the natural fate of solo instrument performers. But Arther Rubinstein's playing in creative style at over 90, and Horowitz's triumphant return to the concert stage at 72, demonstrates that the world of the Ulysseans is available to musical artists. The list of fine public performers in their later years is long and includes such names as Segovia, Montoya, Bachaus, Casadesus, Menuhin, and Isaac Stern. To these can be added the remarkable jazz virtuosi: for example, Ellington, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, and Louis Armstrong. It was Armstrong's heart that did him in at age 70-there was nothing wrong with his fingers and his spirit. His death after a brilliant all-night private performance during convalescence was classically Ulyssean. Stephane Grappelli at nearly 80 continues to enchant audiences across the world with his gifts as a jazz virtuoso of the violin.

Just as in music a great deal of attention has been given to the phenomenon of young geniuses, so in poetry a persistent myth exists that poetry is a young person's game-that the poetic fires die down as the poet enters middle age, and disappear as he or she crosses into the late years. Yet the domain of poetry is filled with Ulyssean figures. It is well known that Thomas Hardy turned away forever from the novel at about age 50 and steadily produced poetry of the first order until his death at 85. What is one to do with the astounding productivity, undimmed in quality, of Robert Frost? And the wonderful later poems of Saint-John Perse, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Paul Val6ry, Boris Pasternak, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Wallace Stevens, and Eugenio MontalO

Ulysseans both in and outside the arts are mold-breakers of conventional folk myths and pieties. Thus, Pablo Casals, Zoltan Kodily, justice William 0. Douglas, John R. Mott, and Avery Brundage all at an advanced age married young women, and these unions turned out to be loving and enduring. Men and women supposed to be ready chronologically for retirement homes, or at the very least for settling into the safe routines of ' later middle age, encircle the globe in small craft or set off on humanitarian missions among people of other cultures and tongues half a world away. And older adults who tenaciously love such sports as running, skiing, and fencing (among many others) prove in their Ulyssean way that "at hlete" is not, as popular usage mistakenly supposes, a word always linked with young performers, but that in fact the Concise Oxford Dictionary is perfectly correct in defining it as a "competitor in physical exercises; robust, vigorous man" (to which, of course, we add "woman"). It is the Ulysseans who remind us that we must refer to soand-so as "a fine, athlete" without raising in our minds the eternal concept of youth.

Likewise, Ulyssean people in politics and statecraft break the mold that stamps elderly arrivals to positions of power as being typically "caretaker" figures. John XXIII was 78 by the time he reached the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that until recently had the. courage and wisdom to ignore artificial retirement thresholds. (Even now the defined or implicit limit is placed at a generous age 75, which nonetheless means that Angelo Roncalli would never have become pope at all.) Roncalli was a short, obese, unhandsome, peopleloving prelate who remarked wryly on his election that he could not be called "a television pope." Except to the informed, who were few, he seemed to be a typical career churchman whose slow rise to the Curia after an early election as bishop had been marked by years spent on the half-forgotten peripheries of power: at 78, a useftil "caretaker pope." Yet when this jolly, seeming nonentity found himself at the controls of a remarkable instrument called Papal Infallibility, he set in motion one of the most extraordinary enterprises in the church's history: Vatican Council II-a Ulyssean adventure. When he died at 83 his death was felt to be premature! A light, visible to men and women of every race and faith, had gone out. So you can never tell with the "caretaker people": they may be Ulysseans Two who are at last ready for the great voyage.

Most Ulysseans are not involved, however, in enterprises that catch the eye and the ear of the world. For many men and women in middle and later adulthood who feel a certain stirring or potentiality for the Ulyssean life but who still hesitate, there may seem as much discourgement as incentive in reviewing a cavalcade of famous Ulyssean people. "These are, after all, geniuses or individuals with some kind of spectacular talent," they will say. "The life arenas they work or have worked in are in themselves of heroic dimensions, with all too little reference to the equipment and potentialities of those (like us) who don't happen to move on those Olympian heights."

There is some truth in this, but fortunately not much. (This is why in later chapters you will find cameos of many private people, not celebrities.) There are, of course, 'creators among the Ulysseans who are almost demigods, who seem to illustrate vividly Karl Barth's definition of man as "the being who dwells on the border between heaven and earth." Michelangelo is an example who leaps to mind. Yet when one studies the many-sided portrait of Michelangelo that is presented in, for instance, Professor Robert J. Clements' biography, his genius is seen to be only an element in his Ulysseanism. Although it may seem incredible at first sight, the dimension of his talent is- clearly irrelevant to the splendour of his later Ulyssean life.

On the other hand, there are two qualities in Michelangelo's late years that are most moving and which most fire one's imagination: his strength of will and his summoning-up of what Kipling calls, "heart and bone and sinew" for herculean tasks in spite of all kinds of fears and sorrows-these qualities are accessible in some degree to every adult who turns his face toward the Ulyssean trails.

Without them, the trails cannot be entered or the journeys completed. For many older adults in modem Western society with a great deal of free time, perhaps not affluent but not impoverished, probably not radiantly healthy but not in bad health either, it is a fact that even the writing and mailing of letters can seem a major undertaking. All the more so the labor of writing a lengthy appeal to an editor, keeping a journal, organizing easel and paints and a painting trip, sitting down to study the first elements of a foreign language, even just the physical chore of writing down a short story or a small play, let alone trying to get it published or performed, composing some poems, good or bad, or writing up or sketching out designs for new programs or buildings or enterprises-in a word, all the physical and mental effort involved in any creative exercise. Any and all of them seem too much: "We are past all that."

For all of us who have been in that state, the performances of certain "great" Ulysseans are instructive. True, they have or have had unusually powerful motivations or have long conditioned themselves to methods or patterns of work they can continue into even very late adulthood. Still, they, too, have the same physical equipment as other men and women (some, like Prescott, Pasteur, and Parkman worked under crippling, almost immobilizing disabilities), and in their later years are just as subject to the hazards of fatigue and debility.

Considering this, some of their applications of will and physical effort make one want to take stock of one's own days, schedules, and habits. A photograph exists of the 81-year-old Leo Tolstoy bent over his desk writing, and it gives one pause to realize that ten years earlier he had just completed Resurrection, writing all of its 200,000 words by hand. Victor Hugo, too, who had carted the mammoth growing manuscript of Les Miséables in and out of France for 20 years on his various escapes and hurried journeys, and had written it all by hand, also wrote out the huge Toilers of the Sea when he produced it at age 63. Voltaire's marvelous satire, Candide, which he wrote at 64, was far shorter; nonetheless, it required a major expenditure of concentrated will and sheer physical effort. Thomas Mann had the consolation, if one can call it that, of the typewriter. Still, the three major novels he published after age 70 (Dr. Faustus; The Holy Sinner; and the largely rewritten Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man) comprise in all about a half-million words. Much the same nerving of will and physical effort is seen in productivity after age 60 of such women writers as Colette, Pearl S. Buck, and Katherine Anne Porter.

Companion adventures illustrate the same point. Will Durant's monumental History of Civilization comprises in all ten volumes of about 300,000 words each: Three of these (The Age of Faith, The Renaissance, and The Reformation) were composed and written out or typed by Durant after age 58, the third at 65: Durant followed these with five more volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel, from age 69 to 89. William L. Shirer was in his mid-50s, and long removed from the success of his Berlin Diary, when he produced the huge Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, evidently written over three years in the privacy of a hotel suite. Shirer then followed. this with a work of equal size and importance in his mid-60s, The Decline and Fall of the Third Republic. Jacques Maritain was 70 when he involved himself in the labor of committing about 120,000 words to paper in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, and Andrd Maurois was 78 when he prepared his 200,000-word biography of Balzac.

The labor of writing these books, wholly aside from the output of creative imagination required, suggests that another characteristic of Ulyssean people is that they do not brood in advance about the physical demands of their various enterprises but simply move ahead. They so absorb themselves in the adventure at hand that, so far as possible, they put out of their minds preconceptions of the arduous chores of planning, writing, typing, shutting themselves off from social pleasures, and so on. Least of all do they fret about whether they will live to complete their task.

In an utterly different world-a world very close to that of the original Ulysses-the same qualities of exertion of will and of physical energy further illustrate the Ulyssean life. Francis Chichester's name became a household word in the 1960s. What everyone neglected to mention about him was the point superbly made by J. R. L. Anderson in his book, The Ulyssean Factor: that in 1960, at age 59, in his first transatlantic race, Chichester changed sail 118 times in 40 days, in addition to endlessly trimming the sails of his Gipsy Moth III. He did

this, moreover, under the handicaps of poor eyesight, of sometimes wretched health, and often in pitching seas. When he was 70 Chiches ter set out on still another transatlantic race, alone again, knowing that the illness that had pursued him for years was at last to bring him down. In fact, he had to turn back, but this took nothing from the in domitability of his spirit and will, and the nobility of the effort. Chichester was sailing, Anderson suggests, not to discover and explore anything except himself. And in fact, in our time, when nearly all the physical world is known, the search for the self constitutes the greatest Ulyssean adventure.

Most Ulyssean achievements are highly personal affairs and often they occur in settings that seem quite comfortable and almost effete. In 1959 Ethel Sabin Smith, an American prose poet and philosopher, when nearly 70 took a round-the-world journey by freighter, and not merely described the trip in a subsequent book but analyzed what this strange Ulyssean act meant to her and could mean to others. Since the cargo ships she chose usually had good cabins, good food, good service, and pleasant crews, in what ways was the adventure Ulyssean? For one thing, because in spite of the comparative comforts of travel, the voyage itself had certain hazards for what is usually called an "elderly" person, hazards both psychological and physical. Obviously, as she was steaming from Hong Kong to Singapore on a slow cargo boat without a doctor, the only woman passenger aboard-and aged 70 at that-physical crises could occur. But more real was the emotional wrench in leaving familiar scenes and friends and the comfortable routines of predictable days for months of unknown experiences, however compensated one might feel by new experiences and personal growth.

For another thing, the adventure was Ulyssean because of Ethel Sabin Smith's own attitude. She found, not surprisingly, that not all older adults who set out on voyages are Ulysseans, and she makes the point, without any thought of Ulysses or reference to him, that the traveler must have, or must develop, attitudes of quest and receptivity to change. Thus, writing of her own circumnavigation of the globe, cargo-ship style (Passports at Seventy), she says:

Openness of mind, sensitivity to the need for new ways and new experiences; resourcefulness, courage, curiosity and a continuing sense of wonder at the kaleidoscopic beauty and mystery of the world and the cosmos; acceptance of the fact of aging but not being intimidated by it; and consciousness of the quest for the self-these are clearly some of the significant traits identifiable in the personalities of Ulyssean adults of widely differing eras and places. Equally clearly, the title "Ulyssean" is potentially available to all older adults.

The Ulyssean response at many intersections in the life journey is not only active but creative. How to choose well among the many options that open to the seeker adult, or to make some of those options possible-this is one of the qualities of creative adulthood. But creativity has many qualities, as will be seen in the next chapter.

[ Chapter 1 ] [ Chapter 2 ] [ Chapter 3 ] [ Chapter 4 ] [ Chapter 5 ] [ Chapter 6 ] [ Chapter 7 ] [ Chapter 8 ] [ Chapter 9 ] [ Chapter Notes ] [ Selected Bibliography ]