Epilogue: Old is Beautiful
From Walter Kaufmann’s Time is an Artist (1978)
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Perhaps the attack on time and its work has passed its peak, and we are on the threshold of a new sensibility. There is little to indicate that people are becoming more historically minded. On the contrary, the concern with the future far exceeds interest in the past, and the cult of youth and the lust for novelty have not abated. Yet there are three small clouds on the horizon, each of them no bigger than a human hand – and one cloud like that sufficed Elijah to predict the end of a long drought.
The first hopeful sign is that
voices of protest are being heard. This in itself is not new, and Goya and
Goethe did not stem the tide of barbarous restorations, nor did Gombrich and
Kurz. But recently the restorers have gone so far that it seems possible that a
reaction will set in.
On New Year's Day 1977, The New
York Times ran a story under the headline, "Optics at Chartres
Reported Ruined." The point was that three of the most celebrated and
venerated stained-glass windows in the world have been irretrievably
"altered by cleaning and conservation." French artists led the
protest, but were at first pooh-poohed by the officials in charge: "Who
would dream of taking the word of an artist" seriously? But some
scientists corroborated what the artists had seen with their eyes, and
thereupon it was reported, "the Ministry of Culture has ordered all
stained-glass restoration to be suspended, at Chartres and elsewhere."
At the end of January, Time magazine
ran a long story on "Chartres: Through a Glass Darkly," and joined to
it another, "Acropolis: Threat of Destruction." The Greeks, it
reported, are now planning to remove the sculptures that remain on the Acropolis
in Athens to an as yet unbuilt museum, replacing them "with fiberglass
replicas." All the ancient columns will require extensive
"restoration." The story ended: "The idea of a Parthenon
'restored' with fiberglass replicas, girdled by lines of tourists trudging
along a viewing ramp, may be depressing, but it also may be better than no
Parthenon at all."
Time's concern may have been prompted in
part by Ada Louise Huxtable's eloquent editorial in The New York Times of
January 17, 1977. Under the heading, "Alms for the Acropolis," she
said, "Pilgrimages have not been made for 25 centuries to see the marbles
of molded fiberglass. The sculpture will never be experienced properly, as it
was conceived, again. Next – a plastic Parthenon?" Even Huxtable ignored
the artistry of time when she suggested that in the 1960s the sculpture could
be experienced "as it was conceived," and that this alone is the
proper way of seeing it. Originally, the sculptures were painted, and the
Acropolis may well have looked nouveau riche to Greek visitors on the
eve of the Peloponnesian War. It was time that gave the Acropolis the aspect we
loved. But I applaud Huxtable's conclusion: "It is the peculiar arrogance
of money and technology to believe that a civilization can be put back together
again."
How can one find hope in words like
these? The problems have clearly become worse than ever. So have the
extravagances of the believers in restoration. It is not altogether impossible
that people with some understanding of culture may rally in this hour of
unprecedented need. I doubt that they would be heard, if it were not for the
other two clouds on the horizon.
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The second hopeful sign is that in
many of the wealthiest countries the birth rate has declined sharply. It is
alarming, of course, that the birth rate has not declined similarly in most
poor countries, and that in the well-to-do countries, too, the poor and
uneducated keep multiplying at a faster rate than others. What, then, inspires
hope?
For a long time, the people who were
economically better off and more educated got younger and younger, and respect
for the old and for what is old declined. Now this trend has been broken. The
number as well as the percentage of the old will rise steeply, and it is to be
hoped that in democratic countries they will not only demand respect but get
it. If so, attitudes toward age and time may change. The era of contempt and
lack of interest may draw to a rapid close.
Finally, women are at long last
insisting on the respect that is due them. On the face of it, this may have
nothing to do with time. But in fact, this is the most important of the three
small clouds.
It is a puzzle that old women have
been treated so wretchedly in so many cultures. I am not sure that this puzzle
has ever been solved. The key to it is probably man's horror of time, and his
reluctance to admit that the passage of time is irrevocable. One refused to
admit that death was irrevocable and fantasized about life after death. That
during much of their lives women tell time by bleeding periodically was
mysterious and inconvenient, but bearable. From a man's point of view, it was
not that different from other rhythms in nature. What was felt to be
threatening was that, unlike the cycles of sun, moon, and seasons, the female
cycle stopped. Men could fool themselves about growing old. They could tell
themselves, and often young women also told them, that they were still young.
They could shut their eyes to the passage of time. But a woman who had stopped
menstruating was a living reminder that the passage of time is irrevocable, and
that there is no restoration. This was most probably one reason why widows were
burned in India, and witches in Europe and in America.
To be sure, not all widows and
witches were old, but most widows are; and why wait? If the widow was still
very young, one may have suspected that she was responsible for her husband's
death. Perhaps it was just as well for her to have nothing to gain from it. The
worse male Hindus treated their wives, the more they may well have felt that it
was good if their wives knew that when their husbands died, they would die,
too.
As for young witches, they were supposed to have been
led astray by old witches. And why were old women so often believed to know magic?
Perhaps their original magical trick was that while other cycles of nature
continued endlessly and gave men the feeling that in the long run nothing
really changes, women defied this pattern of nature.
The women's movement will have to address itself to
these problems. The battle which has attracted the most attention is that of
young women who insist on not being regarded as mere sex objects, drudges, or
mothers. Many have decided not to have children. But all their victories will
be hollow if they do not manage to change the prevalent attitudes toward the
old.
In the past, ever growing numbers of women have dealt
with this problem by not facing up to time. They have tried to hide time the
way undertakers hide death, with cosmetics. They have claimed to be younger
than they were or refused to tell their age. Time was their archenemy. They did
not just fancy that; in the cultures in which they lived, it was.
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Women may soon rally to the cry,
"Old is beautiful!" Of course, not everything old is beautiful, any
more than everything black, or everything white, or everything young. But the
notion that old means ugly is every bit as harmful as the prejudice that black
is ugly. In one way it is even more pernicious.
The notion that only what is new and
young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future.
It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture
and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many
to shirk reality.
A large part of this book deals with
works of art. Many people have a very limited interest in art. Some of the text
deals with ancient Israel, India, and Greece. Most people have no intense
concern with antiquity. But the central problem of the effects of time concerns
all of us, even if millions refuse to think about it. It is not easy to get at
this problem.
The philosophers who have written on
time are not much help here. Almost all of them have ignored life at the limits
and have done their work in the eye of life's hurricane.
My experience of time owes more to
Rembrandt than to Plato, and more to the Hebrew Bible than to Kant. It has also
been shaped by the contemplation of sculptures and ruins and of alarming
"restorations." To Plato and Kant it never occurred that our
experience of time could be shaped by looking at works of art, tree bark,
erosion, and sunsets, or by reading stories like those of Jacob, Samson, or
David.
To get modern readers to look at
time in a new way, it would never do to follow the paths of the old
philosophers. I have tried a new way, placing our experience of time in a
temporal context, showing how it has historical roots, and above all offering
pictures that are no less important than the text.
Of course, "Old is beautiful"
is as paradoxical as "Time is an artist." What meets the eye is the
opposite. Yet photographs show how both claims are true. Still they do not tell
all, and it may be objected that this aesthetic approach is overly optimistic.
My approach, however, is not merely aesthetic. It does not concentrate on
surfaces while ignoring oppression, suffering, and death. On the contrary, this
trilogy begins with Life at the Limits, and Time Is an Artist deals
centrally with man's lot.
Time is an artist. But an artist is
not only an artist. Old is beautiful. But old is not only beautiful. As long as
we fail to see the artistry of time and the beauty of age, we are far from
understanding man's lot. But to understand it more fully, we still need to ask:
What is man?
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