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"That is no country for old men." So declared William Butler Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928), a poem picturing "the young in each other's arms." Almost 80 years later, Cormac McCarthy titled his 2005 novel (which was quickly adapted to a popular film) No Country for Old Men to emphasize the plight of Ed Tom Bell, an aging sheriff who retires when faced with violence, drug trafficking. and moral chaos in a small West Texas town. As the lawman of Terrell County, Texas, for over 30 years, Bell has anchored his life in traditional values and common sense. But when a gruesome drug deal goes wrong, and the ruthlessly violent, amoral mercenary Anton Chigurh appears on the scene, Bell's world is shattered. On a cold, blustery day, Bell turns in his badge and leaves the courthouse for the last time, feeling bitter, defeated, and no longer sure who he is or where he fits.
In this essay we take Ed Tom Bell as an exemplar of problems that contemporary aging men face when they look to ahead to the so-called Fourth Age. Like Ed Tom Bell, most old men struggle with four interrelated challenges as they move along the ever-lengthening journey of life: relevance, masculinity, love, and meaning.
Relevance
In the first quarter of the 20th century, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall was—like Yeats—concerned that old men had lost their place in society. In 1922, Hall, who had recently retired as President of Clark University, published Senescence, a gloomy book that virtually invented the field of gerontology. Feeling isolated and irrelevant in his transition "from leadership to the chimney corner," Hall envisioned a time when "graybeards" would find renewed moral authority and social purpose. "The chief thesis of this book," he wrote, "is that we have a function in this world that we have not yet risen to and which is of utmost importance" (ix). If Hall's comments were prescient about the plight of old men, they were overly optimistic about its solutions.
In the late 1960s, the psychiatrist Robert Butler coined a term that accounts for the devaluation of both older men and women in American society. Ageism, he pointed out, is a deep cultural prejudice toward old people manifested in...