There’s a special type of freedom in no longer being a young pup
Bill Bryson has announced his retirement, which is a strange thought. What does it even mean for an author to retire? Who, with regret, accepts your resignation? Who hands out the P45, and organises the whip-round? More fundamentally – why would you want to stop? We tend to think of writing, like all art, as a vocation: the manifestation of a creative libido which bubbles volcanically within, demanding release. Are we to believe that, even before old age and infirmity set in, the volcano can simply lose its heat?
It would appear so. Bryson is only 68, and his books still fly straight on to the bestseller lists. (Where resides his latest, The Body: A Guide for Occupants.) But having experimented with writing nothing this year, he has found that he likes it. “There’s no twitching going on in me at all,” he says. “The world is full of other things to do … I have masses of grandchildren, and I would love to spend more time with them just down on the floor.”
This image of the author lolling on the carpet, besieged by pups, calls to mind another piece of news. Dogs, apparently, age like humans. A study by animal behaviour experts, published in the journal Scientific Reports, has found that dogs experience gradual changes of personality over the course of their lives, and these follow similar patterns to those observed in people.
The researchers, who studied 217 border collies, found that levels of canine excitability peaked in childhood (under a year old), whereas the teenage years (between one and two) were marked by sudden torpor. Middle-aged dogs – although excellent at problem-solving and coping with difficult emotions – were less curious about new experiences. When they were placed in an unfamiliar room full of boxes and bags, the puppies went rushing about nosing into everything, whereas the older dogs just took it in their stride.
“Middle-aged dogs may be less excited about novel objects because they have lived a bit, like we have, and know that things which seem exciting at first often don’t lead to much,” explained one of the scientists, with almost poetic melancholy.
But is it actually a cause for sadness, this petering out of youthful zeal? Who, having lost it, would honestly want it back? I look back on my 20s – the years of peak attractiveness, ambition and productivity, when the magma bubbled hottest – with retrospective self-pity. I was so careless where I should have been careful (drugs, sex), yet so ossified with anxiety about things that couldn’t have mattered less (dancing in public). I started writing a dozen books, and fell back in despair, defeated. My hair came out in lumps because of the strain of trying to achieve more, faster, than my peers.
The youthful libido, as Sophocles observed, makes a “frantic and savage master” – and not just in matters of love. Age and experience loosen the fetters. We gradually stop worrying about whether we are destined for greatness, and accept instead the benefactions of a perfectly ordinary life.
Even those who have achieved greatness may find they crave something gentler. In 2010, eight years before his death, Philip Roth stuck a Post-it note on his computer: “The struggle with writing is done.” He then retired to the countryside to read, swim and watch TV – or as he put it, “set out upon the great task of doing nothing”. follow Jemima Lewis on Twitter @gemimsy; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion