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Ulysseans In ActionUlysseans come in every appearance, role, and characteristic, but their common trait is an irresistible desire to "drink life to the lees," as Tennyson's Ulysses puts it; or, in less dramatic language, to continue to grow, to make life a continuous series of explorations. This common and powerful motivation can be expressed, for example, by Ulysseans otherwise so different as an existential philosopher (Gabriel Marcel), a small-craft circumnavigator of the globe (Ben Carlin), and a blind teacher of the blind (Susan Miller). Marcel, who died aged 83 in 1973 and was the founder of a French school of Roman Catholic existentialism, was also a literary critic, playwright, composer, and pianist. To him, life should be a matter of "passionate inquiry and of participation in whatever occurs." Man should not seek detachment from the world but "should consider himself an active participant." To Ben Carlin: If this view gives a too idealistic picture of the state of readiness of all men and women in general, at least it well defines a Ulyssean trait. And in the down-to-earth clich6s of everyday speech, Susan Miller, born blind 87 years ago, and an Associate in Music of the Royal Conservatory in Toronto whose devoted avocation in late fife is weaving, advised in her 80s: "If you own a rocking chair ... stay away from it. My plans for the future are to keep on going. The rocking chair doesn't fit in there." Rocking chairs, which have certain charms of their own, and in which it is quite possible that creative ideas might be born, are nevertheless,a very negative symbol among Ulysseans. This is because they usually immobilize the productive activity to which the Ulyssean life is devoted, whatever the scale. In fact, although the Ulyssean life can of course be developing in the deep self without outward signs, most of the time it is the productive or creative act that signals Ulyssean progress. Of all the arenas in which Ulysseans perform in the modern world, none is more appropriate than that of the original Ulysses-the oceans and the seas. Consider, for example, the striking and (in North America) virtually unknown figure of Alain Gerbault, who died in 1941 at age 43. Gerbault is an exception among the numerous illustrations of Ulysseans in this book, in that he died well before he reached what we have defined as the Ulyssean age: but his lifestyle was so well marked and irreversible that it is possible to include him as a superb example of the Ulyssean type in action. Gerbault was a man who seemed to bear with him something of the drama and tragedy of the time of the Greek gods. He survived the terrible war of 1914-18, in which many of his friends were lost, and after completing studies as a civil engineer went on to become an internationally recognized football player, bridge tournament star, and tennis champion of France. Society and the press sought him out; he had every attribute that attracts the attention, and often the adoration, of the French and European public, and for a time it looked as though he might become one of the enchanted circle of world tennis stars. Instead, at the height of his prospects, in April, 1924, Gerbault began a 17-year odyssey in a 39-foot English cutter, the Firecrest, built wholly of teak and oak, which was his only companion in the circumnavigation of the world, and in many other seaborne journeys. Gerbault's choice was made not so much out of love for the sea, although that was also a powerful motivation, but because he was repelled by most of what he had already seen of modem urban and corporation life and the seeming inhumanity of men. Although he ranged the whole world, he was especially enchanted by the Polynesians and their islands. In Tahiti he met again the same types of French bureaucrats and would-be tycoons who had partly caused him to set out in quest of a new world in the first place. He was appalled at the vulgarization and defilement of Polynesian fife by the arrogant imposition of Western commercial and tourist life, especially in Papeete and the more frequented and exploited islands of a once free and still beautiful people. He cared enough about this to abandon to some extent his personal renunciation of the French worlds of power and politics, and to try to use his considerable personal fame and influence to guarantee the preservation of Polynesian culture. -But these interventions could only be episodes in Gerbault's life -his life was his, testament. He wrote: "Every man needs to find a peak, a mountain top, or a remote island of his own choosing that he reaches under his own power alone in his own good time." In fact, the Ulysseans never do find the ultimate haven, nor did Alain Gerbault: fife is the haven -the quest is the fulfillment. Even physically, Gerbault had many adventures analogous to those of Ulysses. Among the Pacific islands in a powerftil gale his boat was sunk and he was almost literally left naked on the beach. He had to spend six weeks waiting among the hospitable Polynesians until help came, the Firecrest was refloated, and Gerbault put out again to sea. He had left Cannes in April, 1924; he returned to Cherbourg in July, 1929, having circled the globe. -As usual, he was overwhelmed with praise and publicity. He was named a member of the Ligion dhonneur; he could have remained a kept hero among the members of café society, but he was indifferent both to acclaim and to the seductions of the so-called smart set. He continued to rove the world for the next 12 years, during which he wrote two enthralling books, published posthumously, Flight of the Firecrest and In Quest of the Sun. In the first book he says that he could have settled many times in one of the Polynesian islands, married, and raised a family in a kind of paradise. Like his prototype, Ulysses, who might have remained with Circe and Calypso or at the households of friendly kings, Gerbault was called back to the sea. He writes, "What demon is continually urging me back to the sea?"-and Charles A. Borden, in a brief account of Gerbault, in his fine book Sea Quest, says: "Sailing for Gerbault was part of a need for islands, remote anchorages, solitude, simple people; part of a positive need to wander and a need for streaming in through the sense of new vistas and experiences." (Italics mine.) Although he sought solitude as Ulysses never did -one always thinks of Ulysses surrounded by comrades, in spite of periods of enforced loneliness-Gerbault was in no way alienated from mankind. He was alienated from those he conceived to be the dehumanizers of the human condition: the getters and go-getters of modem Styrofoam acquisitive society. For the many simple, deeply human people he met on his 100,000 miles of solitary cruising he had a tender communication and love. This revealed itself also in his passionate crusade on behalf of the preservation of the best of Polynesian culture. Gerbault's death was appropriate to the nature of his life. Ill from malaria and alone on his boat in a Far Eastern Portuguese harbor, he was found and cared for until his death on December 16, 1941. He was buried on the lovely island of Bora Bora by the French Navy. There is something especially moving about the sea exploits of those veritable Ulysseans who are supposed to be collecting their "golden age" cards, or at least to be relinquishing any exploits of physical stamina and intrepidity to the young. Consider the remarkable case of Eleanor Wilson, a 59-year-old missionary and pilot in the Marshall Islands who suddenly had to take over as skipper of the schooner Morning Star VI, which helped supply the islands and provided all kinds of religious services to the islanders. When the schooner foundered in the hands of an experienced male captain, she took over the Morning Star VI, and remained a familiar figure in the South Seas. Eleanor Wilson had the training and the skill of a pilot, but to be the captain of a schooner with an all-male crew was an altogether different and far more demanding challenge. A woman captain in the islands was unheard of (How common is it anywhere?) Nonetheless, as Charles Borden writes: Everyone knows of the exploits of Sir Francis Chichester and Joshua Slocum. Scarcely anyone knows of the exploits of the extraordinary Tom Drake, whom Borden has rescued from oblivion in Sea Quest. Drake was an outgoing man who simply loved sea life better than life on land, and enjoyed people everywhere. Brought up on big ships, he made the personal choice to change his nautical career from that of captain of large brigs to the solitary sailing of his own schooner, the Sir Francis, which he lost in a Caribbean storm and replaced with the 35foot Pilgrim. He was 65 and had had a stroke that left him lame in one hip when he sailed Pilgrim eastward across the Atlantic from Charleston to London, England, where his attempt to make a temporary docking at one of the more snobbish yacht clubs was rejected. When at age 66 he lost the Pilgrim, this Ulyssean built a new schooner, the 37-foot Progress-the fourth schooner Drake had built for himself-and sailed 3,000 miles down the Pacific coast and over to Hawaii. When in a violent Pacific storm he broke one arm, Drake steered a long voyage home with his left hand. He cruised thousands of miles more in the Progress, a boat he had come to love: "She'll never fail me. I don't suppose many of you can understand this craving of mine for blue water, but you get mighty close to something big when you're alone at sea. At times I am lonely all right, but probably no more than an albatross or the North Star." At age 73, in November, 1936, this indomitable voyager left California from the Golden Gate to sail for the South Seas, and was never heard from again. Such a conclusion of a Ulyssean life is too poetically true to be tragic. Sailing was virtually Drake's life. However, other older adults have been able to pursue conventional careers into the late years, and then-to everyone's surprise-become seafaring Ulysseans. For example, a retired army dentist and his wife, Bill and Gretchen Lee, cruised across the world in a 33-foot sloop, and then, with a dental office installed in a new boat, decided to sail to the remote settlements of the Bahamas. In 1966 John Goetzke, at age 72, completed a world circumnavigation during which he was at one time held captive for 39 days by pirates in the South Seas. A former engineer, Frank Casper, occupied his 60s by sailing on a leisurely schedule around the world-a voyage filled with colorful names: Tahiti, Pago Pago, the Cook Islands, Auckland, and Timor. To Lafinch out across oceans in a little craft, often alone, in one's later years may strike many people as exotic and eccentric-but at least everyone knows that there were ancient mariners and old pilots. On the other hand, the modern motorcycle is wholly identified with youth (often with brawling, delinquent youth), and it is seen as almost a sexual symbol of youthful adventure and power. Is there any reason, however-aside from society's deeply grooved prejudices about the incapacity of older adults-why the domain of the motorcycle should be reserved for youth? John Pitt, age 62 in 1973, a resident of North Hatley, Quebec, a real estate appraiser by vocation, and a great-great-grandson of the eighteenth-century- British Prime Minister William Pitt, thought not-and launched himself upon what was perhaps the most remarkable long-distance motorcycle saga in history. Thirty years earlier, Pitt had been a daredevil rider of motorcycles at rodeos, so that he was indulging a longstanding passion. In fact, he had kept on riding them from time to time across the years. Yet this takes nothing away from his astounding feat of riding 32,000 miles in nine months to the fabled country of Tierra del Fuego, at the extreme tip of South America. He made the decision to do this one snowbound winter night, after reading a newspaper article about a family living on a sheep farm in Tierra del Fuego. He wrote and told them he would visit them. John Pitt's itinerary took him down the east coast of the United States to North Carolina, across the South into Texas, down to Mexico, and then to Central America and Panama, where he * took a small ship to Colombia. From there he went to, Ecuador and Peru, and south on the coastal highway that skirts the lonely and magnificent beaches and dunes of the Pacific. After crossing the pampas of Argentina, and the Magellan Straits, he at last arrived, after three months, in Tierra del Fuego, 16,000 miles from his home in Quebec. Pitt's diary is filled with vivid accounts of the joys, hazards, and exploits of his astonishing journey. To cross North America on modern transcontinental highways all the way, and without a passport, and to do so in one's early 60s, on a motorcycle, is exploit enough. But in John Pitt's odyssey, he had to negiotate whole networks of often badly maintained national highways, encounter successions of puzzled or surly customs guards or police, make dangerous portages or water crossings, and often sleep out night after night in wholly unfamiliar territory. His journal tells of a collision with a "huge white longhorn steer" looming out of the mist in Nicaragua, a collision that forced him to take an hour to reassemble himself and his machine in pouring rain with trucks going by; of nearly disappearing, motorcycle and all, in an oversized canoe struggling to take him and other passengers across stormy waters to a remote jungle village in Colombia (Pitt's motorcycle helmet saved the day as a bailing instrument); and threading his way, in pitch darkness, along the edges of mountain roads, with precipitous chasms below. Pitt's odyssey even had its episode of romantic love. In the wake of a landslide across a highway in Argentina, he met a lovely Argentinian woman, a professor of history, half his age, to whom he became engaged and who joined him in North Hatley. Mayra Scarborough, who in 1972 at the age of 57 began a journey on a Honda 450 motorcycle through all the United States and much of Canada, was, unlike John Pitt, a total amateur in the motorcycle world. Her mission, she told the Canadian columnist Lotta Dempsey, was to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution by presenting special flags to the governors of all 50 states. A professional librarian, Mayra Scarborough after age 50 obtained a diploma in librarianship and took a job with a pharmaceutical company. She then learned how to fly. But why the motorcycle? Mrs. Scarborough makes clear that her choice of this unconventional vehicle for adults grew out of a love-hate relationship. She strongly disapproved of her young daughter's buying one; urged her to to give it up as much too dangerous; then one day could not resist trying the machine out herself. Her only mishap came at that point-she slipped when standing beside the bike and broke her collar bone! But after that, Mrs. Scarborough entered a new world hitherto bizarre to her-trans-continental motorcycling. By June, 1974, she had traveled 34,000 miles of her safari, moving along at speeds of up to 80 miles an hour and often camping out. Dr. Jack Wilmore, a physician at the University of California, who was conducting studies to determine what can be expected as the outer limits of physical fitness for older people, reported in October, 1971, that he had discovered what he termed "a 73-year-old superman-a superman for his age" who had the walk of a teen-ager and "a heart so strong that he can run the mile in 61/2 minutes." The subject of Wilmore's study, Noel Johnson, a retired aerospace executive, had developed his own physical formula for a long life: Eat at least 12 times a day and run over 150 miles a week! Meanwhile, in Great Britain, on May 6, 1973, the Sunday Express reported the story of surely one of the most remarkable late-life athletes in the world. Duncan MacLean was a first-class international sprinter in 1904, when he ran 100 yards in 9.9 seconds. In 1973 MacLean was aged 88 and was still regularly timed as running the 100-yard distance in 14 seconds (and the 100 metres in 14.6 seconds). In Toronto, in August 1975, at the age of 90, MacLean ran the 200-metre dash in 49.2 seconds at the World Masters Championships for men over 40. This was 4.5 seconds slower than the gold-medal winner, Fritz Schreiber of Sweden. "MacLean was not even perspiring or out of breath minutes after the race,", wrote reporter Bob Koen. He wanted to take on Schreiber again! Like many Ulysseans, MacLean had returned to an early love after a long career in a totally different medium. Born in Scotland and brought up in South Africa, where he became the country's champion amateur sprinter, he returned to Britain and became a professional music hall artist for nearly 50 years, at one time understudying Sir Harry Lauder. Since MacLean and his fellow competitors had to pay their own way to the Masters Championships (about E150 each) MacLean raised E100 of the amount by appearing on a television show. And his diet, that endless enigma of the students of creative and zestful old age? MacLean remarked: "The secret of keeping fit is in having the right physical and mental outlook. I don't smoke and I eat very sparingly. I have no special diet, except that I never touch fried food. And I don't mind a drop of liquor now and again.", He was still active at 95, in 1981, when his life ended. Another remarkable older Ulyssean athlete is Herman Smith-Johannsen, honored in February, 1975, at age 99 as the Dubonnet "skier of the year." Tributes at the New York gathering in his honor named him as "Viking of the century," and in Lowell Thomas's phrase, "the world's most famous skier" -Thomas, himself a CBS news commentator at 83, was a frequent skiing companion of SmithJohannsen. Smith-Johannsen lives in a small bungalow in the Laurentian hills of Quebec at Piedmont, and each morning goes out alonefor a five-mile run. In the afternoon he skis four'more miles to pick up his mail. He "works up a good sweat," then settles by the fire with a pipe and a glass of beer. His life has had Ulyssean features before: for example, his attempt to enlist in the Canadian Army ski troops at age 64 in 1940 (he was turned down). Among his secrets for maintaining his athletic schedule and his trim physique, he cites "the ability to keep from worrying and a will to live." The exploits of women in athletics in the later years are rarely disclosed and are presumably far fewer than men's because of traditional lifestyles. There is now, however, a Women's Masters Tournament in track and field, and the exploits of a number of aviatrixes also remind us of the usually unreleased potentials of women. A remarkable example of a Canadian Ulyssean woman is Helen Brunton, who in 1976-77 at age 72 backpacked around the world. Brunton is a cultured and vivacious former university librarian, who, after her husband's death, raised three boys and then found herself faced with what to do next. One of her answers was to go to London, England, where she discovered the Explorers' Club. She signed up for a tour of Europe and found herself in a large group of 30-year-olds who, she reported, "seemed surprised" to be joined by a 72-year-old woman. However, they readily accepted this warm-spirited older comrade. The following year she joined a group backpacking around the world! Returned to Canada, she joined the Ulyssean Society of Toronto, and found herself the centre of media attention, as a result of her exploit. (Brunton's "backpack" which is a feminine rose color, contains, among essentials, a party gown!) She has since backpacked to Alaska and South America, and at 78 in addition to her trips, she is a devoted concert- and playgoer, gourmet cook, and avid searcher of new leads turned up in the course of her wide reading. For me a most extraordinary example of the woman Ulyssean in physical achievement was the Toronto centenarian Louise Tandy Murch. A professional teacher of voice and piano, Louise Murch considered her last 30 years "the most productive of her life." After shattering her hip at 75, she rejected a doctor's verdict that she would never walk again; after two years of struggle, she not only walked again without crutches but at age 90 took up yoga. She worked out every day in spite of steel pins in both hips, inserted there after a second fall and broken hip at age 94. Her astonished interviewer, Bob Pennington, of the Toronto Star, noted that Louise Murch could easily do waist bends and put her palms on the floor, do the routine of bicycling with legs raised, and various yoga exercises. Louise Murch's whole old age, until her death in 1978, was Ulyssean. Her long-sustained good health, other than the accidents, was a foundation, but her vitality, love of people, eagerness for new experiences, and openness to the future meant that in Robert Peck's terms, she had reinvested herself in life and made great age seem almost incidental. She gave concerts to groups of older people and community college students, accompanying a young singer, Paul Schillaci, whom she coached and who said about her, wonderingly: "You have only to meet Louise to change your entire idea about old age." And he added, significantly: "Many of the older folks we entertain are 20 to 30 years younger than Louise-yet many of them look sad and defeated, reconciled to being old and acting old." There was no television set in Louise Murch's home. She played the piano for an hour daily, entertained a great deal, did her own baking, welcomed people of all ages who came to see her when they themselves were depressed or lonely. She periodically flew off to Arizona or other places where her three sons live. And as a yoga expert and late-life believer in the joy of the body, she took care to include in her diet a ration of brewer's yeast, cod liver oil, lecithin, and vitamins B and E -and always whole wheat bread. There continues to be something beautiful and deeply meaningful in the actions and results of the older adult who takes as one form of the Ulyssean adventure the loving care of the body and the faith in it that can vitalize his or her own late years and serve to inspire younger people. Yet, in spite of the fitness and jogging fads, all too few older adults take advantage of health clubs and spas, although they would be welcome. Some regularly swim; a number (mostly men) fish and hunt; a substantial group of older executives continue to play golf, often for business contacts rather than self-actualization; a few play tennis. Both men and women in their later years continue to curl in Canada, the northern United States, and Scotland; a few continue to do so into the very late years. Both men and women lawn-bowl, a beneficial sport that takes players out into the open air and onto the green grass on a summer evening. Shuffleboard is the game of sea voyagers and of elderly adults -even the name has a geriatric sound. At all events, we should not just stand around, mouth agape, gazing at the Douglas MacLeans, Noel Johnsons, and Louise Murchs; we should also make physical activity in late human life part of our own Ulyssean experiments, on whatever scale. Ulysseans of all types share one quality that is an accompaniment of much creative activity in the later years-the quality of deathless childhood: of the child to whom the "incongruous" or the "odd" is intriguing and delightful. If this trait were not present, it is doubtful whether many or perhaps any of the adventures would take place. Picasso, throughout his immensely long and continuously creative life, seemed to have always retained something of the outlook and nature of the entranced and entrancing child. This accounts for much of the freshness and virtuosity that propelled him on to new styles and experiments in painting and sculpture; but it also appeared in continual glimpses of his personality. When Alexander Liberman visited Picasso for lengthy interviews, the artist was, successively, age 68, 72, and 73. Nonetheless, Liberman's description of their meetings is filled with references to Picasso's childlike qualities or to the way the world of childhood somehow intervened. Thus, when Picasso was expecting some Spanish visitors at his villa on the Mediterranean coast at Vallauris: "He decided to get up and dress-in a polka-dotted blue shirt and wide, baggy shorts. With his extremely large head, this short, stocky man seemed like a young boy dressed in his father's clothes. There was a feeling of youth and at the same time of age. . . " These might seem to be Liberman's subjective impressions, but then the visitors arrived, and: "The great man walked from one to the other, always with an expression of childish amazement and wonder. He seemed to be surprised at everything -delighted, pleasant, and anxious to put his guests at ease. Time seemed to be of no importance." When the group were ready to go somewhere to eat (no decision had been made), And when later Picasso's son Paolo amused him with a variety of antics, Liberman remarks: "Picasso liked clowns." Passing through a succession of studios, Picasso opened the door to an immense room crowded with sculpture. Liberman remarks on the "countless toys" Picasso made for his own children (he was a father at 64 and again when past 70), such experiences "enriching him and transferring to him some of the energy of youth," and he concludes: "His agile, playful mind needs such amusement. The sense of humour, the sense of theatre, the childish delight in play are underlying qualities in many artists. Maybe one dares more under the excuse of play: the creative act becomes less pompous and self-conscious. " This quality of the curious, wondering, and delighted child-furthermore, the child exuberantly showing off, or plunging incautiously into some enchanting project-is typical of many other men and women whose creativity continues to flourish through their later years. In Maurice Goudeket's recollections of his Ulyssean wife, the French novelist Colette, many vignettes of the sensitive and responsive child appear-the creative child whom no number of contacts with the sophisticated and synthetic world of adult protocols nor the sorrows and pain of old age could destroy. Colette's intense and moving empathy with animals was one evidence of this. Her spontaneous employment of the senses was that of the child to whom the world is new and filled with wonders. Thus, after her third and at last deeply happy marriage, to Maurice Goudeket, in April, 1935, when she was already 62 (and he 44) they lunched at a country inn, and "on our way home, between two sunny intervals, snow began to fall, snow with large flakes of dazzling whiteness. Colette asked me to stop the car and got down to receive this impalpable manna rapturously on her face." Goudekevadds that Colette could never recall the date of her wedding, being usually forgetful of anniversaries, but "she always remembered that springtime snow, to the point of speaking of it eleven years later in LEtoile Vesper." Colette's reactions to the worlds encountered by her senses were unimprisoned by the usual accumulation of adult postures and defences. Compare the behavior of this enchanted child, as described by Goudeket, with the restrained and well-bred demeanor with which we ordinarily walk about and formally observe and comment when visiting gardens: Yet, Colette's fresh childlike empathy with nature in no manner lowered her empathy for human nature. She remains among the small circle of the most penetrating and compassionate observers of human beings to appear in the past century. There is another aspect in which the child appears in the later creative years of Ulyssean adults-in the plunging of one's self into enterprises that delight the mind and warm the heart, without sensibly and cautiously measuring the costs in advance. "A mature person," we say, "would never have got involved like that": but then the "mature person" would never have acted at all. Ulyssean people and exploits can be born, and beautifully so, from among slide rules and balance sheets, but this is not their natural milieu. It would have been more mature for the chanteuse Josephine Baker to have adopted only three or four foster children when she was about 50, instead of filling a large villa near Paris with a dozen or so of these lively young human beings from several racial cultures as an eloquent symbol to the world of the need for all men to love one another. Because of her impetuous humanity, Baker was for years in difficulty with landlords and creditors and a variety of authorities-still, her action was a great action. Its intrepidity contributed to its splendor, and the element of the child that contributed to it may well also have been one of the sources of the singer's astonishing success in continuing as a fine performer up to her death at 69 in 1975. Elements of what Eric Berne called the "OK-Child" also account for the remarkable ability of Ulyssean adults to abandon old rubrics, to take on new roles, to engage in new ventures, large or small, to try to acquire new skills, to branch off from established paths. Consider Hella Hesse, a remarkable mother of five sons, a 71-year-old Canadian widow and hospital administrator. Exiled from childhood on by war and revolution, first from Russia and then from Germany, Hella Hesse finally found herself an exile in Canada in 1959. Her husband had been a political prisoner of the Soviets, and had died in Europe before he was able to help his family in Canada. She and her young sons took every kind of job to stay alive. Mrs. Hesse worked as a hospital kitchen maid and dishwasher, a floor housekeeper in a Bermuda luxury hotel, and, after taking correspondence courses was accepted as the executive housekeeper of a hospital in British Columbia. She was by then 61, and her sons had become young men with responsible posts. Hella Hesse might well have finished her days in comparative calm and security in the British Columbia hospital job. Instead, "to the amazement of my sons," she told Bob Pennington of the Toronto Star, she applied to a number of international agencies for service abroad. The first to reply was CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas), and the work offered was health administration in Nigeria.* "My sons were startled to see the old lady giving up her job and setting out for another continent, but I'd always wanted to volunteer for an international agency." She thereupon found herself administering one 40-bed district hospital, a rural health centre, and ten dispensaries-work so extensive that during her 1973 furlough in Canada four different people replaced her. She did not view herself as a heaven-sent messenger bringing light to a less developed country, although of course she could see the value of her technical skill. On the contrary, for Hella Hesse the Western world had much to learn from the African people: "The cultural wealth and social attitudes of the African people are healthier and more mature than our own. There is much to learn from Nigeria in its refusal to segregate old people and its absolute acceptance and integration of all generations."
*The neglected list of older women serving overseas may well be a very long one. Many, of course, join their husbands in CUSO or American Peace Corps projects, making up first-rate teams. However, there is a special quality to the stories of solitary women who, like Hesse and Welthy Fisher, and like Dorothy Schick, the Ulyssean Newsletter editor, take on lonely odysseys abroad. Schick, at 64, in 1972 went for four years to Ghana to teach English as a second language. A former university official, she was the only Westem woman in an area of 400 square miles. She returned to take up renewed university studies and to help cofound the Ulyssean Society.
Another striking illustration of a Ulyssean at work on the international scene is Welthy Honsinger Fisher, an extraordinary American woman. I met her briefly at a symposium in Toronto in October, 1969, when she was on a furlough as president of the World Literacy Movement, centred in India. She was then 89 years of age, and already celebrated in special circles: for example, in adult education, for having established Literacy Village near Lucknow, from which thousands of teachers have gone out to provide chances for lifelong learning among enormous numbers of illiterate people. I was one of a group of academic men and women who waited for her to appear at a little afternoon reception and tea; almost no one had met her, and we expected to see a bright but fragile old lady leaning on someone's arm. Instead, a remarkable figure entered the room, alone, erect, and poised, handsome and imposing but without pretension, a woman one would turn to look at again. She was dressed gracefully in a sari, and in everything she said her mind was clearly full of India, and of the Third World; yet to speak with her was to feel her intimate interest in people simply as people. Seven years before, she had published a personal memoir, To Light a Candle, which had gone into eight printings and which described at least four lives of Welthy Honsinger Fisher: the girl and young woman who might have been a first-rate concert singer and perhaps an opera singer; the missionary teacher in China with a host of colorful experiences; the wife and companion across 400,000 miles, of an American Methodist bisAop, Frederick Bohn Fisher, with whom she worked and traveled throughout India; and then the Ulyssean life, which began about age 60, after the bishop's death. Because of her love for her husband and her intense companionship with him, Welthy Fisher was extremely lonely. Since she -had married late, at age 44, her family consisted of her adopted Chinese daughter and her husband and a little Chinese grandchild, and these comforted her. She was made a lay preacher of the Methodist Church and a deaconess; she tried to take up the conventional parish work of these roles, but they neither eased her loneliness nor met the demands of what she calls her "undiminished energy." The fact was that something Ulyssean was waiting for her. She felt this instinctively, enough to decide to go around the world, "with no basic reason than to find nothing but myself." When she reached India she fulfilled a vow and scattered her husband's ashes at sunrise on the great slopes of the Himalayas. That day she made an entry in her journal, one of the refuges from her loneliness: "Oh God, help me to keep my sanity and not to live in the past, for I amsure Bohn is still living in the future, as he always did here." The entry epitomized the openness of spirit of this 60-year-old widow to new experiences and to the Ulyssean way. The subsequent years did not yield their special treasure easily. Welthy Fisher found a young American woman as a companion in new enterprises, one of them the renting of a houseboat in Kashmir where she hoped to settle down and write (this proved impossible), and on shopping and travel excursions meant to be joyful. The effort to be carefree was in a way Ulyssean, but it was riot enough for Welthy Fisher. For a number of years she continued her "seminars," as she called them, studying educational systems in Mexico, South America, and the whole Middle East-almost parenthetically she recounts how at age 70 she broke her knee and was on crutches for the whole of her journey through Greece, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel. She also learned to speak and read Hindustani, something she had long put off in the busy and exciting years before her husband's death. The signal for the ultimate Ulyssean adventure was provided in 1948 in a personal interview with Gandhi six weeks before his death: "As we parted he took my hands and said, 'When you come back to live in India, go to the villages and help them. India is the village.' It was several years before the message was fully decoded by the steady accumulation of events in Welthy Fisher's life. In 1952 an invitation came from Allahabad to help train teachers in villages to instruct illiterates. This, as it turned out, was the special Ulyssean treasure. Within a few years she planned and built a ten-acre village, the now celebrated Literacy Village, which opened with the support of American funds, wholly deeded over to Indian ownership at Welthy Fisher's insistence. A new and powerful force had been launched in the world as a result of the energy and zest for tomorrow of this remarkable widow already far into her 70s. Remarkable-still, intensely human, as when she stood shaking at the news that there were cobras in her garden, and when in search of a famous English architect now living in the foothills, she found herself compelled to cross a raging river on a temporary footbridge with a slippery rope railing ("clinging to the improvised railing, I set one foot ahead of the other and prayed"). Openness to experience: As a wise European-born Ulyssean friend of mine remarks, one of the most important phrases in life is, "You never can tell." Life from time to time delivers unexpected reverses and disasters, but it also delivers unanticipated achievements and adventures-sometimes, as in the case of the Ulysseans, whole new sectors of life. Thus Welthy Fisher, mourning and lonely for her husband at age 60, in no way anticipated Literacy Village, which did not begin to materialize until she was 72. Similarly, Pablo Casals in his mid-50s could have had no inkling that he would spend the last 37 years of his life in exile from Spain; nor that in addition he would become almost a sublime figure of political and human freedom; that he would found the Prades Festival, the school and festival in Puerto Rico; that he would become the deeply beloved and admired maestro every summer of the Marlboro Festival in Vermont; and that at an advanced age he would marry a lovely young woman whose companionship illuminated his last years. Among the Ulysseans openness to experience means openness to new experiments. This includes the creative life, even where that fife has been long productive and successful. Thus two modern performers in the arts who died recently at advanced ages-Jacques Lipchitz, the sculptor, at age 81, and Edward Steichen, the photographer, at 94-were both described in their lengthy New York Times obituaries as being twice-born-but in each case these were Ulyssean adults who continued to create works that showed the perpetual odyssey of their spirits. They were twice-born in the sense that at least once in their careers they made epoch-making conversions of their artistic lives or their styles. Lipchitz, from being a brilliant early avant-garde sculptor, a cubist who never lost what one critic has called "the syntax of cubism," turned his greatest energies to what the same critic has called "the mythological, monumental works ... that would be capable of sustaining the grandeur and eloquence that haunted him." Steichen, a painter, became a photographer of such imagination and perception that he transformed photography into a fine art. In his old age he remained as productive and creative as ever, although he could have stroked himself with the innumerable tributes paid to him as the founder of a modern art form. He could have joined the circle of very old men flattered and consoled by endless honorific citations and testimonials. Instead, when a party was given for him at the Plaza Hotel in New York on his ninetieth birthday in 1969, Steichen took the floor to say: Perhaps practitioners of the arts, professional or amateur, in their later years are wise (or fortunate) because they have provided the self with an arena of unusual potentiality for maintaining zest of life and creativity. One example among many has been the American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Her life and work, especially in her latest major dances, performed in New York in May, 1973, are powerful examples of how the arts make fruitful the self in the late years, and the self the arts. What is exciting about Graham is not just that she continued to dance commandingly and beautifully with her young company until her retirement at 75. Now it is Graham the choreographer in old age who is exciting. She seeks to find and to express the divine synthesis of the creative self and the deep inner self, and to ally them with what she calls "the surge of life." Her response to the criticism that by emphasizing pelvic movement in her dancers she created a sexual emphasis to many of her ballets (she has composed nearly 150 of them) has been to say: "You have to take life as it surges through you, and sex is part of it." No wonder it was possible for Graham to tell the newspapers, "I've just entered a new cycle of energy. I'm going through a rebirth-with anything artistic, one must die to be reborn." One of the dances dealt, suitably enough, with the figure of Ulysses; the other, Mendicants of Evening, interpreted Saint-John Perse's magnificent poem, "Chronicle." Some conception of the searching, radiant creativity of its choreographer at 79 can be seen in her program notes for the four pas de deux: A Ulyssean achievement-yet when Martha Graham felt she had to take the decision to retire from dancing, the crisis was almost more than she could bear. Ulyssean decisions, are often difficult. What restored her and maintained the surge of life was her almost equally deep love for the art of choreography. Thus, what the lively arts do for those who participate in them as professionals or amateurs in their later years is clearly to permit the reinvestment of the self in new adventures-where the process of selfdiscovery is continuous. For an example of an amateur artist and Ulyssean in action, I turn to my own personal journal, and an entry for November 15, 1973. (The entry is necessarily abbreviated.) This remarkable Ulyssean man, by opting for fife, not only fills his own path with light but the paths of younger adults to whom his great age is not a barrier but a bridge. In Fairley's case, the painting that is the central motif of his late years is also the force that provides him with a special circle of younger friends who, along with older companions help him to externalize his thoughts and maintain his creative engagement with life.* Another interesting example of a man who made painting a late second career is Lachlan MacLean Morrison, a former Ontario civil servant. At 70 he exhibited a collection of 22 oils in a Toronto gallery, all of 'the paintings done during the previous two years in bars and taverns where Morrison finds the people who fill his canvases. Morrison, who for health reasons cannot drink himself, and who has a severe hearing impairment that shuts out most of the noise of the bar, makes his *At 94 he still appears weekly in the dining circle of the Faculty Club of the University of Toronto, and exhibits new canvases regularly. sketches there and then paints his subjects on masonite or board back at his tiny studio. Kay Kritzwiser in the Globe and Mail brings out strikingly the way in which routine can be allied with Ulyssean adventures. She writes of Morrison and his wife Helen: The late emergence of an artistic talent can occur in settings and arenas unbelievably different from the scholarly backgrounds and the glowing tea hours of retired professors. Clementine Hunter is a black painter, age 96, living in her birthplace, Natchitoches, Louisiana. Hers is the saga of a Ulyssean adult who did not put brush to canvas until she was over age 60, yet within a few years had the pleasure of seeing Edward Steichen choose one of her paintings "to illustrate an essay he wrote on the meaning of a picture-the inner vision-which sets it apart as a work of art." (The quotation is from a perceptive interview by Mary Gibson, in Family Circle Magazine, August, 1973.) Clementine Hunter had no formal education; she was a farmhand, picking cotton, then a worker at the Melrose Plantation in the Cane River county of Louisiana. One evening, according to the writer and critic Frangois Mignon, who was then a guest at the plantation, Clementine Hunter simply appeared at his door with several tubes of used oil paints which she had discovered, and announced that she, too, could "mark a picture." Mignon said, "When I told her to keep the paints, I never dreamed of the talent that was about to be released. At dawn the very next day, she returned with her first picture, a vivid primitive scene. Her talent was unmistakable and exciting." Yet Hunter's talent had been unactualized for 60 years! She has now achieved a certain modest fame, and she is still -35 years after that summer evening-vigorously producing still lifes, primitives, glowing flower studies, and murals. Mary Gibson's report describes her "standing straight-limbed and proud in a pert blue-flowered dress with big beaded blue earrings, very much a model for her own paintings." She lives in her small house close to the Melrose grounds, chopping her own wood, planting her own garden. Perhaps the earthy simplicity of her life contributes to the vivid humanity that is found all through her painting. Whether they produce the Ulyssean adult or not, the arts have of course provided a therapy for older adults in times of critical strain or crisis. Thus, Eric McLean, music critic of the Montreal Star, tells how the aunt of one of his friends, "a lady in her sixties who was going through a period of deep depression, was persuaded to take up the recorder." McLean goes on to narrate how growing interest in the instrument led to the restoration of the woman's health and morale. Renewal through individual use of the recorder led also to a reawakening of social involvements: "Now blooming in her early seventies, she is an enthusiastic j9iner-in with groups of amateur musicians." In fact, she had achieved a Ulyssean victory. McLean writes with a sympathy rare among professionals in the musical world on the subject of frustrated would-be learners of instruments who cannot seem to find anything tailor-made for them except music appreciation courses at the conservatories: "We know that the eager but embarrassed forty-year-old is looking for a place to address himself for guidance where he will not find himself, like a doltish Li'l Abner, sitting in the midst of a passle of twelve-year-olds." He cites with enthusiasm the English industrialist W. W. Cobbett as an example of finding oneself in one of the arts (in this case music) in late adulthood. Cobbett was born in 1847 in Blackheath, England, and made a fortune as the founder and chairman of the Scandinavia Belting Company. After retiring at age 60, he devoted the next 30 years of his life to chamber music, offering prizes for competitions, and scholarships for talented musicians. Cobbett had long been an amateur musician, but dedicating his whole life to it from the ages of 60 to 90 was Ulyssean. Besides, in his 709 he began the considerable adventure of attempting to compile an encyclopedia of chamber music, which in fact he published in two volumes as the Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music when he was 82. Cobbett found that taking part in chamber music recitals renewed him, and he put forward an unusual argument for the advantages of playing a musical instrument as against painting or writing: Whatever else was true of the writer of this statement, writing in his 80s, he had achieved something far beyond successful personal therapy from the arts. He had achieved a major Ulyssean adventure in his life at age 60, and enlarged it in his 70s so that by age 90, when Cobbett reached "the Happy Isles," he could look back on a long odyssey that was in effect almost another life. So varied are the approaches to the Ulyssean life, and so diverse are the personalities of those adults who qualify as Ulyssean, that it is difficult to compose a catalogue of their characteristics as, for example, Abraham Maslow did for his "self-actualized adults." Perhaps this is the way it should be: Maslow locked himself into too specified a description of the self-actualized person. For example, could a person not be highly self-actualized at 60 although his life violated half of Maslow's 14 desired traits reflecting self-actualization, provided that special creative powers and dynamics of the personality flooded him with energy and the capacity to grow? . Frank Barron recognized this problem when, as a research psychologist he became fascinated - with the question of what made, in his words, "delightful normal people" tick. Barron studied a substantial sample and emerged with a catalogue of characteristics. He also noted that at a conference of psychotherapists and psychologists dealing with the "goals of psychotherapy," there was a considerable consensus on what were the characteristics of a "psychologically healthy human being.)) The most commonly mentioned traits were: (1) accuracy of perception of reality; (2) stable body functioning and freedom from psychosomatic disorders; (3) absence of hostility and anxiety; (4) capacity for friendly and cooperative relations; (5) spontaneity and warmth; and (6) social responsibility. Barron listened, he tells us, "in comfort and mild edification" until ' there drifted across his mind the images of a dozen great creators who not only lacked a number of these qualities or skills, but had some quite opposite characteristics-yet was it possible simply to dismiss them or classify them as psychologically unhealthy? His own list of traits discovered in the delightful young people in his own study seemed too pat to him. Nor did his own studies seem to confirm L. S. Kubie's thesis that neurosis only inhibits, never promotes, creativity. If Ulyssean people from many different arenas could come together to observe one another and to exchange experiences, the whole scene might confirm how difficult it is to devise some formula for the Ulyssean life and personality. Some would seem "self-actualized," in Maslow's terms; others would seem to have deficiencies of personality; some would be flooded with success; others confronted with huge reverses of fortune; some would be in radiant health, others almost immobilized. Not surprisingly, there are Ulysseans who seem light-years apart in their approaches to self-growth-a fundamental criterion. Thus, Bernard Berenson, the most noted art critic of the twentieth century, was at the very end of his life still engaged in a search for the deeper meanings of the self-this might be called an inland, or inward, odyssey. The journals he kept from age 88 to 93 are enthralling, and show Berenson in full possession of his powers. He records many impressions of visitors to his villa in Italy, as well as external events; but it is the adventure of his ideas and insights that lends excitement to these late-life entries. Likewise, Carl Jung, at age 80, and aided by Aniela Jaff6 as transcriber, composed one of the most unusual autobiographies, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, ever recorded, devoted chiefly to Jung's extraordinary experiences in the, revelatory world of dreams. Jung compares himself to a mountaineer moving among the awesome ranges and abysses of the inner mysterious self. His course was a psychodynamic odyssey with its own excitements, dangers, encounters, and rewards. Seemingly poles apart from these probers of the inner self are the Ulyss6an adults who attach themselves to social and political causes heavily involving the persona, the public self, which can be seen to respond and to change in various ways. Bertrand Russell is perhaps the most notable modem example of such an externalized Ulyssean. Russell fulfilled Simone de Beauvoir's exhortation to the very old that they should attach themselves to passionate and burning causes. In his massive autobiography, which he completed only a few years before his death at age 97 in 1970, Russell defined the inner flames that had burned undimmed through his life: "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind." And how did he feel he had fared, as he reviewed his enormously long life? He felt, he said, that only one yearning -the yearning for love-had been fully satisfied, and this only when he was 80 and married to his fourth wife, Edith Finch, a 52-yearold American. He felt that he had achieved "a little" of knowledge, "not much"; while as for assuagement of his "unbearable pity" for mankind's suffering, he wrote: He suffered, but he also knew joy throughout his life. He had remained open to experience (young people always thronged around him); he had grown continuously; he had been creative as both a thinker and a writer, and as a leader of causes, often intensely unpopular (he organized the highly biased International Peace Court at Stockholm in 1967, and was, of course, accused by his critics of being "senile"). He had lived, not one life, but seven or eight-as mathematician, I philosopher, leader of social and political causes, prolific writer, exponent of sexual freedom, educator, conversationalist, a friend of an extraordinary circle of people extending from Alfred Tennyson to Graham Green and Jean-Paul Sartre. Russell's life splendidly presented the qualities of creative performance and of growth-of-self as shown in both the contemplative and the intensely socially active Ulyssean adult. Vivid examples exist, however, of a type of later-life performer much further removed from the introspective worlds of Berenson, Jung, and Gide, and closer to what Beauvoir meant when she suggested that older adults can be galvanized by passionate causes. A remarkable example was provided by the Canadian public health physician, Gordon Anderson Bates, described with understandable excitement by the columnist Sidney Katz of the Toronto Star in March, 1971, when Bates was 85. Bates had been a crusader all his life, and had gained early attention as a young physician in heading a movement for legislation to control venereal disease. He was still Director of the Health League of Canada when he finally died at age 94! Almost 60 years later, with the VD problem again resurgent in the country, Bates added it to the list of situations that must be reviewed with the objective of developing new strategies and defences. The passion of his attachment to his various causes was precisely what Beauvoir was talking about. Thus, when Bates noted that few among the perhaps more than 150,000 victims of Parkinson's Disease in Canada could obtain L-dopa, a new and potent drug to help control the disease, he felt hot indignation and he was not interested in preserving medical niceties and protocols. Katz reported that Bates's blue eyes "blazed with indignation" as he said, "The specialists, like neurologists, are narrow-minded. They think they're the only ones skilled enough to administer L-dopa. And the general practitioners are apparently uninformed, ill-informed, or apathetic." Constant badgering of physicians, hospitals, and government health agencies had led, Bates reported, to one important gain: the University of Toronto medical students were now taught how to use L-dopa in future practice. Bates had explosive views about the silly custom in present-day society that retirement should occur by at least age 65. His response to a question by Katz about his own retirement was heated: "Retire? Never! A person can keep going as long as he wants to. I'll never quit. I'm working 15 hours a day. Look at the things I have to do! And indeed he was not short of personal projects and professional causes. At 75 Bates flew to Paris, lived with a Parisian family, attended a Sorbonne course, and learned French. He returned to Canada to form the Alliance Canathen and to join half-a-dozen French-language clubs in Toronto. He drove around in a bright yellow Packard touring car, custom-built for the Prince of Wales when the future Edward VIII visited his Alberta ranch in the 1920s. Needless to say, this veteran of many past health crusades-to fluoridate water, to pasteurize milk, to compel immunization for diphtheria, and in general to support the forces of preventive medicine-was intensely interested in the extension not only of the working life but of life itself. He studied reports from Russia on the large numbers of enormously long-lived people near the Caspian Sea, and checked further with Paul Dudley White, the noted American heart specialist who visited some of the Georgian communities, and decided that the secret of longevity lay in a simple, abstemious life, nonpolluted air, no retirement, and maintenance of an even temper and an optimistic disposition. Bates told Sidney Katz that he himself neither smoked or drank, ate lightly with the emphasis on nonfat protein foods, walked a mile a day, and usually went to bed by 11 P.M. Bates was then able to work out an analogy with the famous Thomas Parr, a 156-year-old wonder still living at the time of Charles I, who (if one can believe it) is alleged to have subsisted throughout his life on cottage cheese, dry bread, and water. Parr, according to Dr. Bates's account, was taken as an exhibit to the King's court in London where he was plentiftilly supplied with meat, pastries, and wine. "Parr didn't last long after that," Bates told Sidney Katz, presumably with relish. The sustained, passionate devotion to a cause galvanizes late adults in many political and social arenas, some of them in positions of great er. For exampli, the astonishing Chou En-lai fascinated Mark Gayn, the Canadian journalist, when he interviewed Chou, then 72, in 1971. Gayn, an able and tough observer of the modem People's Republic of China, was the last person to be taken in -by postures and faqades. He was enchanted with the premier: "He still looked indestructible-lean, erect, physically fit, intellectually dazzling. The interview ran for more than three hours, but he showed no signs of fatigue." Gayn was struck by the probing curiosity and agility of Chou's mind. This also was the impression of the Australian-born Harvard professor, Ross Terrill, who met Chou in 1972. Terrill was very much aware that he was meeting one of three or four major architects of a titanic revolution in which, by the nature of revolutions, millions of people had died in order to achieve the desired rebirth. Terrill did not overlook the tough expression, the steely eyes: "from a side angle, a rather flat nose takes away all his fierceness. The mouth is low in the face and set forward tautly, giving a grim grandeur to the whole appearance." Terrill was clearly impressed by the formidable power of Chou's presence-yet his chief impression was one of the premier's youthful resilience in manner and speech: "Recalling his amazing career over half a century, I marvelled at his freshness." Chou, incidentally, had for years broken the pious convention that the proper time for older adults to go to sleep is about 11 P.M. He himself worked until 4 or 5 A.M. and then slept until midmorning. Any sleeping arrangement in the later years is good if it accords with the individual body chemistry and the cultural lifestyle of the person. For example, older adults who live in or near great cities and who love classical music can hear hours of splendid recordings hitherto unknown to them played from midnight on through the channels of certain FM stations. An unpleasant illustration of a violation of individual needs is the nursing home regulation demanding "lights out" at 11 P.M. or earlier, as though the inhabitants were children and as though they had no individual preferences. (One home considered it an outrage that a vigorous old man wanted to shower at 11 P.M.) These are, of course, the institutions that provide no books, no wine, no facilities for growth. They are matched by the spouse who insists on identical sleeping schedules for his or her partner in marriage. With the obvious exception of physical emergencies, and with the provision that .11 P.M. sleepers also have rights, later-life adults in general need, not "lights out," but lights on, with more music, more conversation, more loving company, more zestful talk about the uncreated things in the great world, many more small personal odysseys. And more working schedules for those who, like Chou En-lai, cherish the hours after midnight. Passionate causes have a way of being associated with "great" leaders and "great" issues, as though the world of human values and achievements were all slide rules and weighing scales. In fact, a cause involving human rights and the preservation of beauty and civilization is just as splendid when played out in a tiny arena. What might perhaps be called "confrontative democracy" in our time is producing more and more men and women in their later years who lead or take part in movements or demonstrations designed to confront dehumanized bureaucrats or so-called "developers" where there is a need to protect and advance human needs and rights. None of these groups excludes older adults; sometimes the older adults exclude themselves. These groups are usually weak and need support, and adults in late maturity who are open to experience are valuable because their commitment is not confused with having to fight Father at the same time, as is the case with some of the revolutionary young. A late photograph taken of the crusading American novelist, Upton Sinclair, when he was nearly 90, shows a face marked by age, but so radiant with a youthful smile that one cannot look at it without a lift of the spirit. Here is seen the ever-renewed self of a man who not only helped right certain terrible national evils with his early novels (which he had to publish himself), but in the years from age 50 also attached himself to running for public office as candidate for governor and senator of the state, and on one occasion at least missed by a hair's-breadth. Sinclair's exploits are well matched in the 1980s by the remarkable Ulyssean woman Maggie Kuhn, who at age 73 founded the movement that became the Grey Panthers of America. Kuhn, a retired teacher, was appalled at society's indifference and injustice to many aged people. Like Sinclair, she did something about it. Starting with a small group, she now travels continent-wide as the rousing voice of an international movement to assert the rights of older adults. Nor does attachment to passionate causes usually demand money-just time, a great deal of commitment, and a sense of humor for the rough spots. Therefore it is all the more astonishing that older adults of all classes and conditions have done so little to head up and take part in movements to improve the general lot of older people in our society. Surely this, for older adults, is the cause of causes! The reasons why so few participate seem clear enough: if one is poor, there is an ever-present fear of reprisals-largely illusory: one cannot be deprived of his pension. If one is rich, it's the sort of thing that isn't done. The central problem usually is the conventionality of the lifestyle. We have lived too long with the mask, adjusting our faces to the faces that we meet. Yet there are many causes worth the passionate attention of older and very old adults that do not even demand the added investment of stress and worry about one's image. Of all people, the old have usually the least to lose in expressing their opinions and taking up positions; and some of them show this by a liveliness and forthrightness of attitude and expression rare in their earlier years. A case in illustration was a Ulyssean adult living in Vancouver, age 86, when reported on by the press. Yin Lo, a Chinese Canadian, was no less remarkable in his way than Chou En-lai, whose revolution placed Yin Lo where he is. A graduate in naval engineering from Cornell, a former supporter of Sun Yat-sen, a former "guerrilla banker" in South China during World War Two where he had to dodge the Japanese to pay out $1.5 million daily in remittances from overseas relatives of the Chinese, and then a merchant in Hong Kong, Yin Lo created a whole cluster of enterprises designed to bring new activity and pleasure into the lives of neglected old people, especially of his Chinese group. Lo obtained a $16,000 New Horizons grant from the federal government to expand the work of his organization, Chinese Elder Citizens (Kei Hing Wooi), which he had founded earlier. He built the group up to about 200, with a program of varied activities. Lo himself lived in a retirement home with 40 other old men-the Immaculate Conception Oriental Home-where he volunteered to provide extra care for those among his fellow residents who needed it. He did this because "I feel I'm such a fortunate old man. I led a very good life before, and now it is my time to contribute. Wherever society needs my services I go." (My italics.) In the retirement home, Lo made it his concern to see that no one felt abandoned. At the same time he found the company of children immensely refreshing and renewing, and he offered his services as a teacher's aide at an elementary school, filling in from time to time for English and Chinese lessons, and for other subjects as well. "I love children. They're very attracted to me, but I don't know why. Every time I see them I feel ten years younger." Lo noted the difference between the older adults necessarily confined at the home where he lived, and the group for whom he was providing a repertoire of new activities: "Once you get them out, a change becomes apparent . . . . They're spirited. They feel young and they act young." A highly externalized Ulyssean, Yin Lo is light years removed from the inner Ulyssean voyages into the self of Berenson, Jung, and Gide. Activity is the story of his life. In fact, for many contemplative older adults, Lo would probably be just too much. Yet he is incontestably a first-rate example of one type of Ulyssean adult: "I'm more or less adventuresome in spirit, and I always liked thrills. I hate to remain in old things.
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