Madame Blavatsky on Old Age

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 6 pages

Six pages written a few months before her death, published in Lucifer under the title Forlorn Hopes, and unusually reflective for her. It answers a proposal to abolish old age with a refusal: to destroy old age may be truly glorious, yet we Theosophists, at any rate many of us, would rather decline the offer. Eternal youth is an alluring but dangerous gift — youth being quite long enough already to let each mortal spin a Karmic web wide enough to cover several successive lives with a dark veil of sorrow.

The argument is carried mostly by quotation, and the choices are bleak and beautiful in turn. She sides with the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus that the happiest fate is not to be born at all and the second best to die young, and with Menander that he whom the gods love dies early. Against that she sets Bruck's image of the wave of an individual life rising out of the sea of Being and returning to it, and of a happy old age carrying us insensibly out of the current as on a ship — so that we do not feel the motion, but seem to watch the shores move past until we reach the Ocean of eternal sleep unawares. Cicero stands at the head of the piece on the pleasures of a learned retirement.

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