When we’re 80, let’s celebrate!

Or celebrate

however old we are....

By Tony Lavely

[Editor’s Note: Tony Lavely is the secretary of the Yale Class of 1964, and I was among those of his classmates blessed to receive an email from him last evening. With his permission, I am pleased to share his thoughts with our readers of all ages.]

Those born in 1942 will be celebrating their 80th birthdays this year. Some of us turned 80 earlier and others may not hit this milestone until later, but it’s a cohort celebration, nevertheless. Despite our aches and pains, it’s a time to reflect and be grateful for the bounty of our lives.
    As I think about age, the words of Harold Bloom, a beloved teacher for many of us, come to mind. Here he writes about Wallace Stevens:

I am haunted by many passages in Wallace Stevens, and one that I keep hearing centers his extraordinary poem, “The Course of a Particular”:

…And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;

And being part is an exertion that declines:

One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

    And then there is Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a poem that Bloom called “the greatest poem in the English Language”:

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.

    What is going through your mind as you turn 80? What are your plans for the ninth decade of our lives?  My own thoughts return to Ulysses:

Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

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For further introduction to this thoughtful author, you might read his opinion piece, “Designed for Controversy,” in the Yale Daily News (May 25, 2019).

Copyright © 2022 by Tony Lavely