When the Sun Goes Down..

Gianni Berengo Gardin. Scanno, Italy. 1987

“Wisdom is like the mushroom,
it grows only in the late season.”
(African proverb)

Lately the social condition of the elderly is a recurring issue. This pandemic has affected them, first of all, because they are weaker and already sick.

Being old has become an even more painful weakness, because it has become the emblem of human transience, now much more than usual.

 

Not only that, but with immense bitterness it has often been heard of a choice to be made, by doctors or regional governors, in previously treating young sick people, because time is running out and hospital beds are scarce, therefore...

It's better...

With the modesty of not saying, but letting it be understood.

In recent months, terrible human stories of deep sadness have been heard: elderly people left to themselves, sick and without the possibility of being cared for by their children, or giving them the last farewell before dying, because this evil not only undermines the physical but also the social aspect, isolating us and enclosing us in our solitudes.

Till death.

 

I have already written on the subject of old age, and about my grandparents on Ferdinando Scianna's photo.

My parents are heading towards the last phase of their life, and I never stop – every day – to take a look at their skin, their wrinkles, almost counting them.

A great thinker used to say that the secret of an intensely lived life is self-awareness. I try to remember this every day, trying to impress every little variation in my mind inside and outside of me, and on the people I love – my parents above all else.

Like when we eat and talk about this and that, part of my eyes counts the wrinkles on my mother's face, and how much my father's body tends to bend, the labored breathing.

And I feel pity, because old age is one of the few things that is unstoppable.

Like a leaf that moves swiftly along the current of a river, between rocks and whirlpools, as far as it should go.

 

So let's go back to mythology, because sociology makes me sad, too many times I have studied on the essays by Bauman and Galimberti, when I was preparing my degree thesis.

And I have already written about how old age, like illness and death, is the garbage that the West hides under the carpet of closed walls so as not to be seen every day, because it reminds us of our inexorable destiny, which frightened the ancients. in the same way as today: emptiness, absence, disappearance.

 

I have recently back to mythology, as to the Indian gods, because when you feel the end approaching, it's better to try to go back to the beginning.

In Greek mythology, Geras (ancient Greek: Γῆρας, Gễras) was the god of old age. Seniority was considered a virtue since gēras endowed man with greater kleos (fame) and arete (excellence and courage).

According to Hesiod, Geras was the son of Nix, the Night, along with Nemesis (the Divine Wrath), Deception, Tenderness and Eris (the Discord).

He was pictured as a shriveled little old man. The opposite of Geras was Hebe, the goddess of youth. Its Roman equivalent was Senectus.

These two variants of divinity gave rise to the two words for old age.

Senectus has given birth in Latin sènex, senium, senìlem, overo senile, that which ages, with the same Sanskrit root sànas, sanaka.

While from the Greek god Geras derives gerontology, the science that has as its object the study of the biological phenomena peculiar to senescence and senility, thus constituting the doctrinal basis of geriatrics, which instead focuses its attention essentially on the pathologies of senile age .

 

Heracles and Geras. Attic red-figure pelike, ca. 480-470 BC.

How beautiful the etymologies; but even more myths. 

The god of old age was born from the Night. I guess because, for the ancient Greeks, it was easy to identify old age with the latter part of the day, when the sun hides and darkness comes, and there is nothing more you can do but lie down and close your eyes.

“Eternal rest, give them, O Lord” reads the beginning of the Christian prayer for the dead, which in Latin sounded: “Rèquiem aetèrnam”.

 

I have already told of the myth of Eos, the Aurora. Well, it is linked to the myth of Titone's eternal old age, loved by the madness of the goddess who begged Zeus to give him immortality so that she could love him all her life, forgetting, however, to also ask for eternal youth, so that the poor Titone was condemned to an endless old age.

Reduced to the limit and looked after by Eos in a wicker basket, he was transformed into a cicada by divine will.

Funny, a cicada, which is the one who sings during the day and in the scorching heat, but if it sings at night it is a symbol of human frailty.

She became the muse of poets, who sings beauty and transience, as well as Titone who never stopped singing the praises of life, in an eternal aging.

It's no coincidence that the ancient Chinese put a jade cicada in the mouth of the dead, as a symbol of human immortality.

 

I would lose myself endlessly in this labyrinth of stories, myths, legends and etymologies. But, maybe you who read don't care about this.

 

What does the jade cicada have to do with my father or mother? Or poor Eos who, forgetting to specify her desires, condemned her beloved to eternal deathless old age?

It's just that old age is all of this.

It is part of the myth, it is something that cannot be forgotten in the enclosure of a nursing home, or sacrificed to younger lives, because by now they have already completed their journey, they are already at the end, so we might as well...

And we are silent.

Instead, it's precisely for that long journey that the elderly must be venerated, protected, loved.

 

African culture is not my best, but I love reading African proverbs collected by the anthropologist Marco Aime.

“If a child knows something, he learned it from an elder.”

Say one of these proverbs, and it's a great truth.

 

One of the African legends says that real life is one in which one grows old with time and never before time. A wisdom as deep as ancient Greek mythology.

When we are able to understand this truth, in its essence, we will understand how much we have lost, forgetting our elders.

Thinking that they are expendable, to the myth of eternal youth and immortality.

 

In the meantime, I continue to count the wrinkles on my mother's face at the table.

And with hers, I start counting mine too.

 

Gypsies. Rome – 28 March 2017

READ ALSO:

• Riding Time 
• The Factory of Permanence 

Gianni Berengo Gardin: “Scanno – A country that never changes” (Baldini, 1987)
Marco Aime: “The breath of the ancestors – African images and proverbs” (Einaudi - I Maverik, 2017)

Italian version