Czas życia jako paradygmat kultury – starość / Man’s Life as a Cultural Paradigm : Old Age. Stanisław Kołakowski’s Man’s Life (1584) and Jan Protasowicz’s a Mirror of the Old Man (1597)

Abstract

Summary This article is concerned with the notion of the ages of man’s life seen from the anthropo-logical perspective as a cultural paradigm. It is obvious in all cultures that anybody who has lived a long life has to pass through the stages of childhood, youth, adulthood down to old age. Although these four ages are universally acknowledged, the length of each phase, its relative quality and value are subject to cultural variation. To reconstruct the topoi used to highlight both the more attractive and the negative aspects of old age the article examines the contents of two books from the late 16th century, Stanisław Kołakowski’s Man’s Life (1584) and Jan Protasowicz’s A Mirror of the Old Man (1597). Chief among the benefits peculiar to senectitude is the respect given to the old man’s wisdom, his counsel and advice, the quality of his political leadership; accordingly the senex can function as a paragon of virtues, a holy man who blesses the young generation, a hale old man enjoying his well-earned retirement, and a pious old man preparing for death. This complimentary picture of the rewards of old age is however offset by its accumulating ills and miseries, clumsiness and decrepitude, habitual whinging and complaining, childishness, ill-health, loneliness, naivete, proneness to romantic infatuation and ridicule. All those features that are conditioned by the nature of biological rythms and processes have a permanence about them that makes them constants of the literary descriptions of old age. The culture of the Renaissance was on the whole unfavourably disposed towards senectitude, which is borne out by the two texts analyzed in this article.