King Lear had a terrible time in old age, but at least he did not have to run for re-election. President Joe Biden officially, as of last week, has no such luxury.
In Shakespeare’s play, whole acts go by without Lear’s subjects commenting obsessively on his age. Not a single duke or earl calls attention to any trouble the king might have had with staying on a bicycle. And only the fool gets away with mocking the king’s gaffes.
It helps to be king.
For weeks and weeks, innumerable commentators, pundits, and quotable political strategists have made it their mission to remind us that our president is very, very old. But now, on the grounds that I have been brooding about the dilemmas of aging for half a century, I am pleading for a personal exemption from this drumbeat of reminders.
When I was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, I was a constant commuter between the company of the young and the company of the old. This began as an ill-conceived project for turning the elderly into anti-war activists. But it soon evolved into a prolonged enterprise in building a bridge of intergenerational transition, a bridge that came to carry a lot of traffic.
Here is one revelation that this back-and-forth travel imprinted on my soul.
When a friend in her eighties told me about her wild activities as a single woman in the
1920s, she compelled me to realize that she had not always been old. The corollary of this revelation was immediate and unmistakable: if this transformation from youth to old age had happened to my once-wild friend, it was almost certainly going to happen to me.
And so, on multiple visits to retirement homes, as the old folks and I sang “Let Me Call Your Sweetheart” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” I was already attuned to the wild ride that time had in store for me, wondering which ballads of the Beatles and Rolling Stones the young folks would be singing to me in the 2030s.
And my point?
Like me, Joe Biden was once young. Now he and I are old. And yet we travel back and forth in chronology, riding in a time machine with an old-fashioned clutch prone to slipping.
It is my empathetic guess that, unlike the nation’s commentators, the president does not spend every minute of every day thinking about the fact that he is old. Anyone trying to appraise his cognitive operating system would be well-advised to keep that in mind.
Having just declared his intention to run, Joe Biden–along with his venerable counterparts among the nation’s leaders—might benefit from contemplating the gracious intergenerational transition that King Lear hopes for, but waits too long to achieve.
Here is the intention that the King declares in the opening act of the play:
When the time comes,
‘Tis our fast intent
To shake off all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths while we
Unburden’d crawl toward death.
Minimize the part about crawling, and intergenerational transition never sounded so good. Or at least so sensible.
Patty Limerick is the director of the University of Colorado Applied History Initiative and can be reached at patricia.limerick@colorado.edu.
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