(Rivista Internazionale - December 1994: We are as old as our hopes - 1/6)

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We are as old as our hopes
What are the realities which dramatically impinge on the old? What are the anxieties, prospects and problems which marginalise and diminish them? How is it possible to escape the dejection, gloom and sense of worthlessness menacing them? The answer is to be found in modern literature.

Ferdinando Castelli S.I., of "Civiltà Cattolica"

Some activities for the old in the "Fundacion Las Rosas de Ayuda Fraterna" aimed at giving comfort and combating solitude.

Fiction reflects, in various registers, human life in its most universal, dramatic and compelling aspects, and it is only natural that it must devote much space to the problem of the old. The problem of old age is one of the most serious in today's society. A problem which is social because of the ageing of the population, but above all human and religious because of the marginalisation to which the exaltation of efficiency, the Promethean spirit of the homo faber and the cult of youth condemns the old.
The problem involves everyone, because sooner or later old age will come to us all. Fiction is not sociology, and even less gerontology; it is a mirror of life, a prophetic intuition of the human condition. It does not intend to analyse the phenomenon of the old scientifically, but presents existential situations in which this human mass is involved.
These situations pose the following questions: What are the realities which dramatically impinge on the 500 million old people in the world today (1)? What are the anxieties, prospects and problems which marginalise and diminish them ? How is it possible to escape the dejection, gloom and sense of worthlessness menacing them? The answer offered by the analysis of some literary works is complex and varied.
For greater clarity we will divide it into three frames: in the first we will encounter defeat and death, in the second revenge and reconciliation and in the third transparency and transfiguration. We will refer to modern writers.

The drama of closed and empty horizons
In his story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway tells of an old man who spends his evenings in a cafe. It is late and everyone has left, except the old man who never goes to bed before three. Absent, silent and enigmatic.
Last week he tried to commit suicide - one waiter said.
Why?
He was in despair.
What about?
Nothing.
How do you know it was nothing?
He has plenty of money.
The two waiters talk in Spanish and the word nada (nothing) acquires a special echo for the old waiter. It is not the nada of the young waiter, the simple lack of something; it is a sentiment which is mixed with fear, that fear which is nourished and grows on the sentiment of nothing, embracing and suffocating every reality, which is, in fact, the only reality.
We are nothing, we come from nothing, we are directed towards nothing. «Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.
Our nada who are in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada» (2).
In the day and even at night you can keep away the spectre of nada as long as you can find a well-lighted place, noisy with voices. You are deafened, you forget yourself, you escape yourself.

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(1) A UN study of 1980 revealed that there were 190,000,000 people aged 60 and over in 1950 and 343,000,000 in 1975, but there will be about 580,000,000 in 2000 (cf «L'età inutile? Il problema degli anziani nella società industriale», in Civ. Catt. 1982 II 118).
(2) E. Hemingway, I quarantanove racconti, Mondadori, Milan 1972, 457.

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