Third Age?

          Currently, I’m reading a novel about mental illness*. It’s written in the first person, which helps me appreciate the complexity of the narrator’s predicament rather than seeing him simply as a random patient. It was a coincidence, therefore, when, this morning, I came across this extract from Melville: “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity”. Then, in a further coincidence, I looked up and saw a rainbow that had appeared, conveniently, for me to test his proposition.

          The rainbow analogy could be applied also to the range of political or ideological views blending into one another, though it seems that polarisation too often supplants this rosy view and we find ourselves at loggerheads with each other. It was with this sort of thing in mind that I originally joined the local University of the Third Age (U3A) Discussion Group. I was disappointed at first that it did not live up to my vision of stimulating sessions where ideas and theories are exchanged and tested with rigorous philosophical analysis in the academic mould. But I’m over that now. We are just a random group of ‘third-agers’, keen to stay engaged with the world and its dilemmas. Our discussions run more along the lines of anecdote-swapping and statements of ‘facts’ based on the unsupported premise that “most people would agree that… blah”. But the upside of this is that, by attending regularly, we get to know each other and, so long as our discussions are held together by a modicum of intellectual rigour, they benefit from our familiarity with our respective backgrounds and the way they influence our views. (If only this process could transfer to Parliament, we might have more empathy in politics. But there is too much power at stake for politicians to play nicely.)

          Getting to know each other in our U3A group is a gradual process: not everyone is immediately forthcoming about themselves but, over time, we reveal our histories. However, there’s one man who remains a bit of a mystery. I know him only as David and have been told that he’s “well into his nineties”. If so, he’s in good health. He told us last week that he had never had a bout of the flu! But he does have an air of other-worldliness about him. He has no phone and relies on a daughter to keep his diary, which is perhaps why he always comes unprepared for the topic. Nor does he concern himself with the ‘discussion’ format, interjecting occasionally only to make us aware of his pet concerns, be they relevant or not. Unlike the rest of us, he makes no pretence of trying to remember names and shows no interest in the other members.

          He tells us he is vegetarian and would never harm an animal. He described how he rescued a bee from a spider’s web in his garden, taking an hour to disentangle it from the silken thread so that it could fly away (thus depriving the spider of a meal, a point he had failed to consider). He then pulled out a cutting from the local paper, a letter he had written demanding five-years in jail for anyone found carrying a knife. He has previously advocated (in the group) compulsory national service in the armed forces and the return of capital punishment as part of his plan to rescue society from the depths to which it has descended.

          He may be exercising that privilege of extreme age – freedom from vanity and the need to care about what others think. Or it may be that he inhabits that zone where violet and orange blend.

*The Shock of the Fall, Nathan Filer (2013).