50

Approaching 50, let me tell you (if you don’t already know), is not at all like coming up to any other decadal landmark. At 40, those jokes about “life begins” are not entirely sarcastic; you are probably much happier than you were at 20 and you can still, on a good day, feel and look young(ish). But no one can pretend either that life begins at 50 or that at 50 you are young. The Romans made a clear distinction between a young man (iuvenis) and a mature man (vir). I used to get an immature pleasure, up until a few years ago, from being addressed in Spain (by far the most Roman of the countries Rome colonised) as “joven”; my days as a joven are behind me.
Searching for positive signs as the half-century comes close, I go back to one of my richest sources of wisdom and provocation, Plato’s Republic. It might surprise many contemporary readers, and politicians, that Plato (or Socrates, the main speaker in the dialogue) does not consider his guardians, those chosen by their philosophical bent to rule over the city, to be ready for politics until they are 50. (There go most of the current British cabinet, and Barack Obama.)
There is a general prejudice these days that life before the advent of modern medicine was invariably nasty, brutish and short. In fact, a remarkable number of leading Athenians lived into old age (all the three great tragedians, the comedian Aristophanes, the historian Xenophon, the philosophers Socrates and Plato) – though of course many more were cut short by plague and illness. However low the average life expectancy, the philosopher did not consider that vigorous youth should lord it over all.
Why did Plato think that political life should not begin until 50? First there was a little matter of education, education, education. The intellectual training Plato thought necessary as a preparation for politics included a thorough grounding in mathematics and five years spent on “dialectics”, or “the development of the reasoning powers by rational discussion” (Shorey). You could see this as special interest pleading coming from someone who was not just a philosopher but ran a philosophical school or university, the Academy.
I fear I will never understand advanced mathematics and my steps in philosophy are stumbling and slow, but what I find encouraging in Plato is the idea that education is not only, or even perhaps primarily, for the young. As I approach 50, my hunger for knowledge and understanding is just as keen as it was when I was 15.
The particular fields that attracted me, poetry, music, art, ornithology, seem no less infinitely rich and attractive now. Some music in particular has gained in depth and fascination: listening again to Mozart’s last string quartet, K590, the other day for the first time in 25 years, I felt I was only just at the beginning of understanding the infinite tonal subtlety of this work, which is so deceptively easy on the ear. Some new fields are also opening up: I was never before now interested in cultivating plants.
But there is more to reaching 50 than this joyful, continuing pursuit of knowledge. That was what Plato thought, at any rate: his philosophers would have been happier contemplating in their ivory towers but they were called back down to the cave to help lead others out of darkness and ignorance. I have no aspirations as a political leader (you may be amazed to learn) but I have another view of Plato’s endlessly interpretable myth of the cave.
The cave, that place of darkness, imprisonment and deceptive shadow-images, is an image not just of the polity but also of the mind. The darkness in which we spend much of our time shackled is the purblindness of ego – of not seeing beyond our own desires.
At 50 I might just be making some tentative steps out of that prison. Some, such as Jung, think of the second half (or, to be more precise, the third third) of life as a time for drawing inwards, after the external striving of the early years. “What youth found, and must find, outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself.” I have a rather different notion: of a continuing outward expansion of the mind, an opening rather than a closing.
I don’t want the journeying and the exploration to end, but I have hopes that the destination might not be the cul-de-sac of personal gratification but the wider shores of compassion. When I was young I was both self-centred (it goes without saying) and Eurocentric: I remember visiting the astonishing Inca city of Machu Picchu and feeling repelled, or frightened, by the evidence of a cruel and conformist culture.
Nowadays I seem to have a wider sympathy for, and interest in, all sorts of human cultures, stories and endeavours, no doubt influenced by a clearer sense of the shortcomings of my own culture. I hope I am continuing to stretch and be stretched: even for the stiffest person, as my Yoga teachers tell me, there is still hope at 50.