The first time Rose saw Uncle Lestan, he carried her up into the stars. That is who she remembered it and nothing ever weakened the conviction that he has scooped her up from the terrace by the seawall and carried her straight through the clouds and towards the Heavens. Rose remembered always the chill of the wind and those stars above her, millions of stars fixed in the black sky like myriad burning lights. She remembered Uncle Lestan’s arms around her, and the way he whispered to her not to be afraid, the way he brought his coat close to protect her. Mrs. Marvel was 80 and she lived alone in a new council flat. Her husband had been dead for 30 years. None of her six surviving children lived in Bethnal Green although five of her six visited her regularly once or twice a week. A married daughter lived with her until she obtained a council house outside London five years previously. Mrs. Marvel wanted to stay in the district where she had lived nearly all her life. Speaking of her former home, which was recently demolished, she said, “We went in ten and came out one.” Later she said, “I am sometimes lonely, especially as my children are away. Still, I count my blessings. They are all good children.” Mrs. Foreman had been a widow for over 30 years. She had no daughters and until twelve months previously had been living with her married son. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Mrs. Foreman’s son has now moved to a new housing estate. Although she stayed with him every weekend she was lonely at home. “I do not like coming back here. I get the hump.” There remained 11 whose loneliness seemed to be due to other causes. All had recently experienced a marked change in their social circumstances. The husband of one and the daughter of another were in hospital, and had been there for some months. A third complained bitterly about the new council flat to which she had been moved a year previously; she was among neighbors she did not know or like and she was further from two of her relatives. Two married men were infirm and could not leave the house; both had been moved a year previously; she was further from two of her relatives. Two married men were infirm and could not leave the house; both had retired within the past three years. A married woman had experienced several drastic changes in the past few years and was ne of the most lonely of all those interviewed. As an extreme example, she is worth noting. Mrs. Austin, in her late sixties, lived in a council flat with her husband. She said she missed not having her seven children around her and that she was “very lonely. I cannot account for it all. I get so depressed.” Five of the seven had married within a space of three years and had left home one after another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

All but two of Mrs. Austin’s children had moved to housing estates outside London or in other East London boroughs. These two lived about a mile away. One son, to whom she was particularly attached, had been killed in an accident several years previously. Soon after the children had married Mr. and Mrs. Austin had to leave their home, because it was to be demolished. “I cannot settle here. I had been over 40 years in one house. Since it is been pulled down and we have come here I have hardly spoken to my next-door neighbors. All the old neighbors have gone. You cannot go in and out like you used to.” She saw much less of her children than formerly, although her two youngest visited her twice a week and three of the others once a fortnight. Her only sister had died three years ago. Because of headaches she could no longer read and because of a fall which damaged her hand she could no longer knit. Her husband had been in ill-health for several years and was on bad terms with some of the children. Mrs. Austin had made two attempts at suicide and had recently spent six months in a mental hospital. In this example nearly all the disturbing social changes that can occur in the life of a senior had occurred. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Close relatives had died, the children had migrated, the old home and neighborhood had given up and many activities had to be abandoned because of increasing infirmity. This was desolation with a vengeance. Now to be desolate, as defined earlier, is to have been deprived recently of the companionship of someone who is loved. And the main conclusion of this analysis is that people saying they were lonely were nearly all people who had been deprived recently of the companionship of someone they loved. They were desolates and not necessarily isolates. They were isolated only in the sense that they had become isolated, relative to their previous situation. Many were not short of company. Several widowed people, in particular, lived with children and grandchildren and had many social activities. We have seen that desolation, or the loss of someone who is loved, is more important than social isolation in explaining the loneliness of seniors. Such a change may explain much more than loneliness, for it affects a person’s health and whole state of mind. The problems of the physical and mental health of senior people need to be studied against their known social condition and the sudden changes in that condition. In Bethnal Green many people talked of the drastic effects of retirement n men and of bereavement on both men and women. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Remarks about people who had just retired or who had been recently widowed suggested they had less will to live and deteriorated quickly. “He did not want to live any more.” “Men break up when they give up work. They soon go.” “He just went to pieces when she died.” “She was left all alone in the World and did not want to go on living.” “I have got nothing left to live for.” “We will not be long in following her.” These remarks deserve careful attention. They imply the possibility of sudden physical degeneration, after retirement, for men, and after bereavement, for men and women. While this is a very complex matter which cannot be discussed in detail here, three separate points seem to be worth making. The first concerns widows and widowers. The difficulties of seniors in adapting themselves to new situations are well known. It may be particularly difficult for them to adjust their lives to the fact of bereavement. This is strongly supported by what they say about loneliness. The suggestion is that the mortality rates for people widowed in old age are likely to be higher than the rates for single and married people, and even than for people, of the same age, widowed when young. Precise statistical data are not available to test this supposition. What evidence there is does not distinguish between those widowed late in life and other widowed people. However, it is certainly not in conflict with the supposition. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Mortality rates, by age and marital status, are available. These show higher death rates among seniors who are widowed people than others. There may be a number of reasons why the death rates for senior widowed people tend to be higher than those for single and married people. Some may catch the illnesses from which their husbands or wives died. On the face of it, however, the influence of recent bereavement upon the rates may be worth a careful study. The second point concerns the higher death rates for older men than for older women. The differences between men and women may not be explained entirely by biological and physiological differences. Social factors may play a significant part here too. For example, the man in Bethnal Green, on retirement, had to change virtually his whole style of living; deserted by workmates and friends and thrown back on his family, he could rarely do other than play second fiddle to his wife. On the other hand his wife, to whom the affairs of household and family had always been dominant, could usually go on to a ripe old age doing most of the thing she had always done. Sheldon observed that fewer women than men were in extreme good- or ill health and while more of them had subnormal health their hold on life was tenacious. The present limited findings, so far as they go, confirm his observation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

It is possible that the effect of retirement on men and that the security of women in job and family may contribute to the woman’s greater expectation of life. The third point in this matter of the effect of social factors upon health concerns social isolation. The trials and tribulations of senior years may be harder for isolated people to bear, because they are not sustained by family and friends. A crude hypothesis may be put forward. Those who are socially isolated in old age, particularly those with the fewest contact with relatives, tend to make greater claims on hospital and other health and social services and to die earlier than others. In old age the death rates for bachelors are higher than those for married men but lower than those for widowers. The differences between single and married women seem to be very slight, expect at the oldest ages. The subject is, however, very complex because of the influence of physical selection for married and of diseases associated with child-bearing, to say nothing of the changes in patterns of marriage. There has been a rise in marriage rates since 1939. As those who marry are lively, on average, to be in better health than the unmarried it seems that as the number of spinsters becomes progressively smaller, a higher proportion will have inferior vitality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Recent evidence has shown that death rates of single women, relatively to married women, have increased in the last 80 years. Safer child-bearing has also contributed to the relative improvement in the death rates of married women. Even so, in a long analysis comparing the mortality of single and married women before the war the Registrar General states, “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that in the present state of society the married condition per se for women is more favorable to vitality than the single conditions at ages up to 85.” Other state concern the once-married but childless. Information has been obtained, at the registration of deaths of women who were or had at any time been married, as to whether they had had children. The number of children, and whether they were live or still-born, is not recorded. Infertility rates, derived from such information, are published from time to time. The infertility rates for older deceased widows are lower than those for older deceased married women This “unexpected” relationship, as it is described in the Statistical Review, may be due to a number of factors. One is that women with children may live longer, or may more often outlive their husbands, than childless women because the company of children helps them to keep a hold on life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

All the available information about death-rates is, however, rather scanty. None of it—so far as the writer is aware—allows any exact test of an association between death and social isolation or, more generally, any systematic study of the relation between longevity and social circumstances. Some of these speculations may deserve further inquiry. Comfort has stated that senescence is a change in the behavior of an organism with age, which leads to a decreased power of survival and adjustment. Here it is suggested that the social and especially the family circumstances of the individuals are a major determinant of the rate of decline in the power of self-adjustment and self-defense in later life. Broadly speaking there may be a marked association between each of three social factors, these being social isolation, social desolation, and retirement, and the expectation of life of seniors. Biological, physiological and health factors aside, one would expect, on the rather limited evidence from the present study, that senior women and, to a lesser extent, senior men who are at the center of a secure family live longer than those who are socially isolated or desolated, particularly the latter. Is the Quest nothing but an endless adventure and never to become a final achievement? Are its goals too high for frail humans, its exercises too difficult for feeble ones? #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The historic fact that beings have lived who have turned life’s adventure into its achievement puts an end to pessimism. If, knowing and accepting our limitations, we object that this cannot possible be done in a single lifetime, and there will be that much less to be done in the next lifetime. When a being has the right stuff in one, all one needs is just opportunity, and nothing else. If one possesses a sufficient degree of talent plus the determination to succeed, there is no stage so humble that it cannot be made a jumping-off ground to better things. The disciple’s quest must begin with one’s own simple specific needs, not with complicated generalities. One must begin with what one is and where one is: that is the starting point. After looking at the goal, and the direction leading to it, one looks for the next step. Do not let the past hold you down. Do not let dust-laden memories keep you down. Make today a fresh day, a new beginning. One can begin this inner work with whatever capacities one has now, from wherever one is now on life’s road. There is no time that is not the right time, no place that is not the right place, no circumstances which cannot be put to use in some way. For there are lessons to be learnt everywhere, meanings to be gleaned in all experiences; spiritual tests and opportunities of the most varied kinds can be found in the most unlikely situations, the most unspiritual environments. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Time is needed to being maturity to one’s development; the years must pass before one’s understanding is complete enough to stand on its own supports. What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply: They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which every one by nature carries about with one under one’s hate. However, suppose this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The only answer can be that one will recognize its rationality as one recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects one. When one gets the marks, one may know that one has got the rationality. What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is fully of lively relief and pleasures. However, this relief seems to be a negative rather than a beneficial character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is constituted merely by the absence of any feeling of irrationality? I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

All feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest, impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the respiratory motions are prevented—so any unobstructed tendency to action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, “I am sufficient as I am.” This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, or its absoluteness—this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from may cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being vouchers for itself and needs no further philosophic formulations. However, this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up the theoretic ways. The facts of the World in their sensible diversity are always before us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled with far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense of a labor-saving contrivance. The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in thought, is the philosophic passion par excellence; and any character or aspect of the World’s phenomena which gathers up their diversity into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher’s mind stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other determinations may by one be overlooked. More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the philosopher’s conceptions must possess. Unless they apply to an enormous number of cases they will not bring one relief. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The knowledge of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of rational knowledge, is useless to one unless the causes converge to a minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects. The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does one’s mind rove from fact to fact. The phenomenal transitions are no real transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered dress. Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the Moon and the apple are, as far as their relation to the Earth does, identical; of knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that the warmth in one’s palm when one rubs one’s sleeve is identical with the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the differences between human father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the Sun’s rays which made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal? But alone of this passion for simplification there exists a sister passion, which in some minds—though they perhaps form the minority—it its rival. This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole. Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

It loves to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the same time their concrete fulness. Clearness and simplicity thus set up rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker. Even more importantly while praying about life, the consciousness will begin to directly open up to the perception of the spirit in more intense ways. The more one observes something the more real it becomes. You are the fire and your movement, your thoughts; words, and deeds wield the power of counter creation which the very results of sorcery we call God. The results of our blessings is our divine will imposed on the external manifestation of our God self. All of our reality is a mirror upon which you can view true essence of self and divinity. The flesh and all of the attachment that comes along with the five sense is the veil between World. Maintain the knowledge that you are in complete control of all of creation and how destiny within this World unfolds. Maintain the awareness that you are an emanation of unlimited possibility and power. “Let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.36. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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