Vanity Never Goes
For a long time I thought that vanity was a consequence of youth. That is how it appeared, people who cared the most about how the world saw them were young. Old people, I felt, were less inclined to worry excessively about how they looked or what others thought of them. I don’t know why I felt that way but it now dawns on me that I was wrong.
Vanity is not a consequence of youth. I would like to say that it is a fact of life but have you ever seen a child who’s vain? For the sake of clarity, let’s go with the following definition of vanity: “the fact that you are too interested in your appearance or achievements”.
That sounds to me like concerns which kick in as we enter teenage and stick with us stubbornly for the rest of our lives. It isn’t something we can absolve ourselves of and it can be all too difficult to assess what exactly makes us “too interested” (as opposed to just interested) in our appearance or achievements. That boundary isn’t well defined though we are, to a certain extent, able to gauge it intuitively.
The question then is: does vanity increase with age? Does there come a point when we begin to care less about our appearance or achievements than at any point in our lives? If at all that point ever comes, it probably comes at a really old age. Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously withdrew from society towards the end of his life (died at 66 in the 18th century). He was one of the most famous men in Europe at the time but he preferred to spend his final years in solitude, away from the corrupting influence of society. He wrote that the “desire to be better known to men has died in my heart”. There’s a passage in his final book where he reflects on people his age and their general attitude:
“We enter the race when we are born and we leave it when we die. Why learn to drive your chariot better when you are close to the finishing post? All you have to consider then is how to make your exit. If an old man has something to learn, it is the art of dying, and this is precisely what occupies people least my age; we think of anything rather than that. Old men are all more attached to life than children, and they leave it with a worse grace than the young.”
Although Rousseau denounces people for being “more attached to life than children” in their old age, was he really able to free himself from this very attachment towards the end of his life? He did make a claim in his final book that it was a record not for others but himself, but the beauty and precision of his prose suggests that he didn’t write for his own sole benefit. He wrote it in the hope that one day it would be read by the same people he had distanced himself from.
As Gaving McCrea puts it here, Rousseau discovered “that the physical state of detachment from community does not erase community from the mind; that, on the contrary, detachment inflates the importance of community in one’s thinking about the self, and fuels the desire to make oneself known to community, even if only to convey one’s condemnation of it.”
Vanity never goes, does it?
