In traditional societies, the transition from childhood to adulthood was seamless, as young people reproduced the ways of working and living of their elders. And only physical deterioration marked the onset of old age, which required the assistance of loved ones.

Modernity has invented two intermediate periods. The first is adolescence, when human beings, having reached physiological, psychological and civic maturity, undergo a period of training and take on professional and family responsibilities that have continued to expand.

But it has been little noticed that, with ‘retirement’, our societies have invented another intermediate period between working life and old age. Those we call ‘young retirees’, in full possession of their physical and intellectual means, live an increasingly long time before entering dependent old age. It's a kind of ‘second adolescence’, obviously very different from the first, but sharing with it a fundamental point in common: enjoying full human autonomy without directly exercising professional and family responsibilities.

Claude Olivenstein (1933-2008), a psychiatrist specialising in the treatment of drug addiction, notes that these two periods of life are the most propitious for questioning the meaning of our lives: ‘There are two privileged ages for worrying about the meaning of life: adolescence, when everything is awakening, when anxiety, which can be extreme, is tinged with hope underpinned by boiling life forces; and then the moment of recognition, through the intimate conviction of the birth of old age, of its inevitable course, the starting point for a questioning, to drive you mad, about your future’ (Naissance de la vieillesse Ed. Odile Jacob 1999, p. 401). So it's hardly surprising that ‘young retirees’ now make up a significant proportion of cultural, community and political activities.

These two in-between periods - adolescence and retirement, which is not yet old age - are defined as times of ‘passage’, when we learn that we are ‘passing through’ and that the only risk would be to cling to supposedly stable universes, such as childhood or full maturity.

In a beautiful poem, In Praise of Old Age, the German writer Herman Hesse (1877-1962) invites us to experience these times of transition as new births:

         ‘To each call of life,

           The heart must know how to say goodbye and start again

           To forge new, different ties,

           To commit to them bravely and without regret.

           Every beginning contains a hidden magic

           That protects us and helps us to live on.

           The successive spaces must be crossed cheerfully,

           Not to be cherished like so many homelands,

           The spirit of the world neither confines nor binds us,

           At each stage it frees us, makes us greater

           As soon as we enter a sphere of existence,

           As soon as we are at home, we risk apathy;

           Only the man who fears neither departure nor distance

           Escapes the habit that numbs him...’

Christmas, which we celebrated a few days ago, evokes the fragility of a birth for a young couple displaced by an administrative census.  The fragility of a birth in a makeshift shelter, because hostels only welcome those who have the financial means. For Christians, this humble event, celebrated on the day of the solstice when, after increasingly long winter nights, the light begins to overcome the shadows, seems like the beginning of the world all over again. Far from the triumphant fanfares, the great economic and military successes, it is this fragility that appears stronger than anything else.

In one of the last texts written a few months before her death, the essayist and novelist Christiane Singer (1943-2007) wondered about this mystery: ‘How, on this most interminable night of the winter solstice, the night of Herod's killers and the long knives drawn, could a turnaround be possible, even thinkable? How could it be? It is on that night and on no other that the miracle will happen. And it does! Because here it is, the secret of the world revealed by Christmas! Even if man must die, life is given to him to be born, to be born and to be born again... It is birth that is promised to him, not death. All the King's horses, all the tanks and all the bombers of all the armies in the world cannot, when the hour comes, hold back the darkness or hinder the irresistible rise of the dawn! All you have to do is nod, and the miracle will be accomplished in you’ (Childbirth, Eros and Old Age).

See, Le temps de l’homme passant

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