ARTISTS AND OLD AGE
299
the mystery of things, and
if
I live to be one hundred and ten every–
thing I do, even
if
it is no more than a stroke or a dot,
will
be alive."
Here we come up against the question that has occasionally been aired
in literature-what would the world have thought of certain men had
they died earlier than they did in fact? In
this
particular case it is
the question what would have been left of Hokusai
if
he had died
before his seventy-third year.
"All Eastern and all Western lands/Tranquil lie within His
Hands"-so I took counsel with our Olympian great-grandfather
Goethe and studied his
Maxims and Reflections,
a book that everyone
who has his troubles should dip into for a few hours each week.
There I found the following aphorisms:
1.
Growing old means entering into a new business; all the
cir–
cumstances change, and one must either entirely cease to act or take
over the new role with purposefulness and deliberation.
2. When one is old one must do more than when one was young.
3. On the guillotine itself Madame Roland asked for writing ma–
terials in order to write down the quite special thoughts that had oc–
curred to her on her last journey. What a pity it was denied her-for
at the end of life there come to the resigned and courageous soul thoughts
that were hitherto unthinkable, and they are like blissful spirits, settling
radiantly on the peaks of the past.
Blissful spirits-on the way to the guillotine! Very Olympian,
very gigantic I-and indeed this great-grandfather of ours, with his
many talents and possessions of every kind, was quite the man to
start upon a new business at any moment. All the same, this was
scarcely of a generally illuminating nature. However, in the same
volume there was the fragment
Pandora,
and I found myself con–
sidering the strange figure of Epimetheus:
uFor Epimetheus I was called by my progenitors,
he who muses on things past, and traces back,
in the laborious play of thoughts, the quick deed
to the dim realm of form-combining possibilities."
To muse, to trace back, in the laborious play of thoughts, to the
dim realm of form-combining possibilities--perhaps this EpimetheW!
was the patron of old age, a twilight figure, sombre, backward–
glancing, in his hand the torch already lowered.
