NONFICTION - Jan. 26, 1992

THE JOURNEY OF LIFE: A Cultural History of Aging in America by Thomas R. Cole (Cambridge: $27.95; 249 pp.). “If you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything,” the author’s vibrant grandmother, Reba, used to say. While the perky aphorism will be familiar to most of us because of the Geritol commercials, Reba’s experience shows that it has a more insidious side: Once her body began failing her, Reba felt she had nothing.

Reba’s despair, the author contends, arose because she had internalized our contemporary notion that aging is not an ineluctable part of the human condition, but a problem to be solved. We haven’t always thought this way, says Thomas Cole, a professor of medical humanities at the University of Texas: Our Protestant forebears once linked hope and triumph dialectically to tragedy and death. “Buoyed by faith and the vision of life as a spiritual journey,” Cole writes, “early American believers had sought strength and personal growth by accepting frailty and decline in old age.” But during the upheaval of the Renaissance and Reformation, the old bonds of status, family and locality, all of which reserved an ennobled place for the elderly, were superseded by a new emphasis on careers, which found no place for them.

The difference between these old and modern views, Christopher Lasch writes perceptively in a jacket-cover blurb for this book, is between “thinking of life as a gift and thinking of life as a reward for good behavior.” Cole unfortunately does not pick up on this idea and consider that our neurotic denial of the inevitability of aging may serve a socially useful function: motivating us to toil hard in a naive belief that longevity will be our reward.

Indirectly, however, Cole does seem to realize that such neuroses have their benefits. In these elegant, sometimes brilliant pages, for instance, he points out that Sophocles’ young Oedipus Rex--arrogantly asserting, like many of today’s scientists, that he can solve any riddle given enough time--was far happier than the older man who accepted his many limitations at Colonus.