Their talk is not merely
literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the
speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of travel, with things
we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I have said, of
the speaker's detachment, - and this is why, of two old men, the
one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible
authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively
interests and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men
great friends; each swore by the other's father; the father of each
swore by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were
perpetually by the ears. This is typical: it reads like the germ
of some kindly comedy.
The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically
silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we
look for; it is perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman,
well on in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window
of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye; and chirping and
smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his
long career. Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also
weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present
to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still
ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart
- these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to
prefer.
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