On Being Old
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I would like to thank The Oval Show for bringing up the subject of "being old" and respond particularly to Sam Park who raised the question of whether we shouldn't now create a concept of the third part of life. I would say yes to that.

For sometime now, I have thought that the division by Jungians of life into the first and second half is no longer adequate. Well beyond middle age, I find that I am in quite a different place than I was when I went through my "mid-life" crisis and its aftermath. I am, for one thing, not quite as preoccupied with my own personal swamplands as I had been in middle age. As I approach my death, I find myself turned more towards my (and all human beings') place in the cosmos. It is also because although I have energy I realize it is limited. The body is telling me in no uncertain terms. Psychic energy is still there aplenty, but I would like to spend it differently in these years of old age. I prefer to see this as the time when we can finally and freely accept who we are, as we are, our daimon or character or fate as Hillman describes it. I begin to understand that the task of middle-age is not necessarily the task of old age. What that task is I am trying to find out, or rather, inventing as I go along.

But I am speaking, I guess, of what some have called "early" old age. As Sam says there are those increasing and profound losses which face us as we get to be old-old. And that is perhaps still another stage to be discovered in this passage of ours which is - as Jung said and Ritik reminds us - between one great mystery and another.