PARTISAN REVIEW
aging. What medicine has to say on this subject doesn't amount to
much. Its current formula is that aging is not a process of wear-and–
tear but of adaptation, and I must say this doesn't convey much to
me. It goes on, as I have discovered from its journals, to deplore the
lack of unprejudiced, systematic psychological examination of old
people who are not in psychiatric clinics. I don't know how many of
you will
also
deplore
this.
Nor am I going to say anything about
rejuvenation cures, or about the celebrated Bogomoletz serum either.
What I am more concerned with is the question at what age aging
actually begins.
The forty-six years after which Schiller died, the forty-six years
after which Nietzsche fell silent forever, the forty-six years after
which Shakespeare had done his work and retired for five years more
of life as a private citizen, or the thirty-six years after which Holder–
lin became insane--such, surely, is no great age. But mere arithmetic
will
of course get us nowhere. There can be very little doubt that
foreknowledge of an early death compensates, in terms of inner life,
for decades of physical life and the process of aging that goes with
them. Such seems to have been the case with those who suffered
from tuberculosis, for instance Schiller, Novalis, Jens Peter Jacobsen,
Mozart, and so on. The early death of so many men of genius- some–
thing that the bourgeois-romantic ideology likes to connect with the
notion of the consuming and devouring character of art-will have
to be looked at a little more closely in each individual case. Some of
these young men died of acute diseases. Schubert and Buchner died
of typhus. Accident or war caused the deaths of Shelley, Byron, Franz
Marc, Macke, Apollinaire, Heym, Lautreamont, Pushkin. Kleist,
Schumann, and van Gogh committed suicide. In short, the ranks be–
come thinner in relation to a direct causal connection between art and
death. And looking at the dates when men of genius died, one makes
a very odd observation of an entirely different kind, which I paS'S
on to you not as the result of deep thought or as something of a
metaphysical nature, but simply because it is interesting. It is this:
it is astonishing, indeed quite amazing, how many old and even
very
old men one finds among the famous. Let us take as our basis the
figures that Kretschmer and Lange-Eichbaum give for those who
have been regarded as people of genius or of extraordinary gifts dur–
ing the last four hundred years in the West; there are between a
hundred and fifty and two hundred of them. Now it turns out that of
