“The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie than anything was ever under control.” — Bob Dylan
In anticipation of President Trump’s 80th birthday, The New York Times asked prominent celebrity octogenarians, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem, Robert De Niro and others, to share their thoughts on the best and worst things about experiencing such blessed longevity. I say blessed because, as the psalmist says, “Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong” (Ps 90:10).
Unsurprisingly, Bob Dylan offered the most thoughtful, least predictable or tiresomely political response, managing instead to be lyrical and wise: “You don’t chase the parade anymore,” he wrote. “You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program.”
I so liked his remarks that I typed them into a Word document and then, since that felt too much like filing it away into some fast-forgotten and cold hard-drive distance, I hauled out the ersatz commonplace book I have begun over the past year and committed penmanship.
Studies repeatedly show that cursive writing boosts brain connectivity and memory, and I felt determined to store Dylan’s warm, wordy wisdom within the depths and creases of my own aging grey matter, and then to actually ponder it. To ponder is to ruminate, to think, to reflect — all things we seem to do less of today than in past centuries. To ponder is even to invite in wonder which, to paraphrase St. Gregory of Nyssa, “leads to knowing.”
In October, God willing, I will be 12 years away from becoming 80. When younger, I considered that it might be fine to clock out at 75, but as one advances into psalm territory, it becomes easier to accept that being 80, or even Dylan’s 85, is perhaps not so very old, after all.
Of course, not everything the timeworn troubadour shared rang wholly true for me. “You’re not haunted by the things you did,” he wrote, “you’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.”
Perhaps 80 looks different from 68, because I still harbor regrets — “for what I have done, for what I have failed to do” — although I do find myself more willing to apply a balm of mercy to them, accepting that my faults and frailties are not as exceptional, nor as inexcusable, as I’d imagined them to be, but merely human.
Enumerating the “worst” things about being 80, Dylan declares “nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also, you’ve run out of illusions.” I can identify with that.
Horror is different from scandal, of course; earthquakes, bombings, mass slaughter, human trafficking — these should horrify all of us, assuming we are still capable of feeling anything after our desensitizing habits of scrolling through news.
To me, though, it seems like the only people “surprised” or scandalized by the expositions of human crudity, political fecklessness or social grandstanding put daily, (hourly) before our eyes are those who actually want to be scandalized (Jesus never was, nor were the saints), so that they might have something to post about in outrage or high dudgeon, seeking out the almighty dopamine hit and weird sense of validation that comes with a clicked heart or upward thumb.
Dylan is correct; there are no surprises and few illusions. There may be nothing more boring, anymore, than social media, where every post and pronouncement from anyone with a sizable platform has become completely predictable and thus unnecessary — amounting, truly, to Macbeth’s “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Finally, perhaps most poignantly, the “voice-of-a-(Boomer)-generation” adds that at 80, “you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.”
A long life wasn’t something I’d ever particularly wished for. Dylan makes it sound quite a lot better, and only a little worse, than I’d imagined. Here’s to 80, then!
“Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart” (Ps 90:12).
Elizabeth Scalia is editor-at-large for OSV. Follow her on X @theanchoress.
