What "In the Autumn of Life" Taught Me About Growing Older on Purpose

In the Autumn of Life — a collection of short essays the German Jesuit priest Hermann Heuvers put together in his late seventies — is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing at 66. He arrived in Japan in 1923 and stayed for the next fifty-four years, and the essays are quiet pieces built out of small things he noticed while living there. It became clear early on that this is not a manual for growing old. It doesn't instruct so much as sit down beside you and talk about its own failures and pleasures.

Keeping a record in "the field of time"

In the preface, Heuvers suggests that to bear fruit is what a life is — that the work is to ripen something of the heart in the field of time. He then quotes Ryōkan's death poem:

katami tote / nani nokosuramu / haru wa hana / natsu hototogisu / aki wa momijiba (What shall I leave behind? Blossoms in spring, the cuckoo in summer, crimson leaves in autumn.)

A poem, he says, in which the poet and the world have become one thing. He then quietly announces that he too, having reached the autumn of his life, would like to leave something good behind — and with that, the book begins.

That phrase, "the field of time," stayed with me. I keep a growing diary on my blog for the cucumbers and tomatoes in the greenhouse, with dates and temperatures. I'd always thought of it as a memo to myself. Borrowing his phrase, though, I've started to think of it as part of the ripening.

So now I write down the seedlings I killed and the investment calls I got wrong, not only the things that went well. Precisely because I can feel my memory getting weaker, what I've written becomes the index to my own life. That thought makes the writing easier.

Giving the decline its old names

In the chapter on the art of growing old, Heuvers walks through the imagery in Ecclesiastes 12, renaming the ageing body one part at a time. The guards of the house are the hands and arms. The strong men are the legs. The grinding women are the teeth. The two who look out of the windows are the eyes. The door onto the street is hearing. The sound of the mill is the voice. As we age, he says, each of these grows thinner and quieter — and then he asks plainly what kind of heart a person should meet this old age with.

The day I read that, I thought about my own list of weaknesses: stiff joints, less stamina, waking at night, thinning concentration and memory. Written out, it's a depressing inventory.

But borrowing his method and renaming them with the old imagery made them oddly easier to look at. Stiff fingers in the morning became "the guards are slow getting up." Being out of breath on the stairs became "the strong men are stooping a little." It sounds like a game, but it worked for me. Instead of carrying each symptom as a personal defect, I could see it from a small distance, as one instance of something that has been happening to human beings for thousands of years.

This is the part I most want to pass on to people my age — not as a statistic, but as one person's account.

Deciding the shape of the day in advance

The chapter describing his own day turned out to be the most practical thing in the book. He rises at four in summer, twenty past four in winter, goes to the dark church, opens the doors at five, says Mass at six, then breakfast, work from nine, lunch, a nap, supper, reading. A day written out to the minute.

Then he offers a suggestion for old age. Get up at a fixed time. Set off slowly, as if for a walk, and walk home again. Have a pleasant breakfast at home. And then spend the day on some useful work, or on an enjoyable pastime. He writes this immediately after quoting a journalist who visited German care homes and found the facilities perfect and nobody happy.

A year or so into retirement, this landed. What I like is the two-way choice: useful work, or enjoyable play. Either is fine — but don't let the time that is neither grow long.

So I fixed only the morning. Wake at the same hour, hot water, a look round the greenhouse or balcony, then exactly one hour at the desk. The day starts once those four are done. Looking for "work" after retirement, I now think, isn't about finding a new title. It's the daily job of filling in that two-way choice yourself.

Working and resting to the heart's rhythm

In the chapter on quiet, Heuvers makes a lovely observation: there is no such thing as complete silence in this world, and the quiet we actually enjoy always has some sound behind it. Wind in the pines, a stream — and then, he adds, the city noise he is so fond of.

In the same chapter he quotes a man who left a professional career for farming in Nagano. Japanese farmers work hard, the man said, but when they're tired they rest comfortably for a while and then carry on — so it doesn't feel like hardship. Heuvers reframes this as working to the rhythm of the heart rather than the rhythm of the head.

I spent a long career in food service and never lost the habit of working by the clock. Even retired, I catch myself counting how many hours I've sat at the desk. Since reading this chapter, when I feel tired I stop counting and go out to the greenhouse instead. Then I come back and carry on — or, some days, I don't.

Curiously, I get more done with rain or street noise around than in a silent room. I settle at the desk far better now than when I was trying to manufacture perfect quiet.

Choosing the lowest seat on purpose

There is a short chapter on the lowest seat and the value of a life. A person's worth isn't settled in this world, Heuvers writes. The kingdom of God is like a banquet, and there will be higher seats and lower ones — but even in the lowest seat, how fortunate we are.

I'm not a Catholic, but that last line helped me in a way that has nothing to do with religion — because when I meet people, I measure my own position almost automatically. How much has that one got put away, that one is still working, will my pension and investments be enough. Worry about money, I've realised, usually comes out of that comparison rather than out of any absolute figure.

So lately I've taken to sitting in the lowest seat on purpose — literally, the seat near the door, slightly off to one side. And oddly, the circuit that checks who is at the head of the table simply stops running, and I hear what the person in front of me is actually saying.

Stepping down from comparison didn't require any enlightenment. Changing where I sit sorted out most of it.

Borrowing the hermit's way of listening

One chapter draws a portrait of the ideal listener. People tell the hermit anything. He doesn't probe the depths of their hearts or stare into their eyes; like an old pond in the forest, he simply listens to the end. And he doesn't hand out advice — God doesn't give advice either, Heuvers notes.

I'm honestly the advice-giving type; I taught for too many years. Since that chapter I've held myself to one rule: after the other person finishes, count silently to three before opening my mouth.

It works especially well when I have to see someone I'd rather not. I used to go in braced, ready with a reply for whatever came. Now I decide beforehand: today I'll be the pond. Don't try to change them, don't advise, just listen to the end. The difference in how tired I am on the way home is remarkable. The people I'd rather not see haven't gone anywhere. I just spend less time carrying them afterwards.

Never running out of raw material for joy

The chapter on joy contains an unexpectedly practical analysis. All joy enters the heart from outside, Heuvers says; if no material, no seed comes in from outside, nobody rejoices. And then he lists how limitless that material is: the natural world, physical movement, study, learning, art, literature, every relationship within a family, love, school and society. Then one line: a person who is alone finds this material steadily shrinking, and so grows lonely.

Reading that, I audited my own life as a stock of raw material. Nature and movement were covered by the greenhouse and walking; study by investing and reading. But "every relationship within a family" and "society" had thinned out since I retired.

So I changed how I plan the two-country year. During the winter months in Japan, I put arrangements to see people into the calendar first — not seeing people because I happen to be there, but moving in order to see them.

At the same time, Heuvers warns that making joy your only object turns you into a hedonist. Lay in the material — but don't make joy itself the goal. That he can write both of those in the same chapter is what makes the book trustworthy to me.

Thinking of the weight of age as a final polishing

Near the end of the book there's an apple tree in the garden of his childhood home. When he was a boy it bore heavily every year; by the time he was in secondary school the ends of the branches had died back, the leaves had thinned, the fruit had grown scarce. And yet it was a very faithful tree, he writes, and if anything the flavour was stronger.

In the greenhouse I know the taste of the small tomatoes an old plant produces at the end. Fewer, misshapen — and concentrated. That passage wasn't a metaphor to me; it was something I watch happen.

At the close of the chapter on growing old, he sets down a poem given to him by a friend in southern Germany. To grow old with a cheerful heart. To rest when you would rather work. To keep quiet when you would rather speak. To hope at the moment you might despair. To watch the young stride ahead without envying them. And then: that the weight of age is itself a gift, a last polishing given to a heart that has grown old.

[Note: please insert the opening lines of the poem here by hand from the book. The poem is still in copyright, so the original text has not been reproduced in this draft.]

I think that as a younger man I'd have read this as consolation for the defeated. At 66 I can't read it that way. It describes ageing not as a process of loss but as the final stage of finishing work. From the side being ground down, polishing looks exactly like diminishment. The view that says it is polishing all the same was simply not available to me when I was young.

Giving the decline its old names, fixing the shape of the day, resting to the heart's rhythm, taking the lowest seat, listening like a pond, laying in material for joy — none of these is extraordinary. But for someone in the autumn of his own life, this was a book that sat down beside me and watched the light go with me.

The book I mentioned here:

Hermann Heuvers, In the Autumn of Life (Shunjusha, Japanese edition)

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About the author and his times

Hermann Heuvers (1890–1977) was born in Dreierwalde, a small village in Westphalia in north-west Germany. The book opens with his memory of following his great-uncle the shepherd at the age of four, and that scene is the landscape everything else in him grew out of — the neighbours' sheep drifting into the flock, then picking out their owners' voices at dusk and going home; the great-uncle reading in the pasture, knitting his grandchildren's socks in silence. The temperature of everything he later wrote was set by that quiet farming childhood.

He entered the Society of Jesus in 1909 and did his noviciate in the Netherlands. The turning point came after ordination, when he studied in Karl Florenz's oriental seminar at the University of Hamburg. Florenz had taught for many years at Tokyo Imperial University in the Meiji era before returning to become Hamburg's first professor of Japanese studies, and under him Heuvers's eyes were opened to Japanese literary history. He had already found the door into Japan's language and literature before he ever sailed.

He arrived in August 1923. One week later, the Great Kantō Earthquake struck. The Japan he saw was, from the very first, a country of rubble and rebuilding. With Sophia University closed, he was posted to Okayama, then summoned back to Tokyo. He served as Sophia's second president from 1937 to 1940, spent the war and the postwar years in Tokyo throughout, and from 1947 was parish priest of St. Ignatius Church in Kōjimachi. Fifty-four years in Japan; he returned to Germany just once, forty-four years after arriving.

That career shapes everything he wrote. First, he was a man who came to teach and ended up carrying what he had learned back home. He records with real admiration the discovery of the scholar Eduard Spranger, who found that the premises Western thought takes for granted — that life has value, that time is given for progress, that joy should outweigh suffering — were not self-evident at all in conversation with Japanese scholars. These are the eyes of a man standing on a bridge.

Second, he lived through earthquake and war and refused to raise his voice about either. Most of the pieces in this book are built from extremely small material: a skylark's song, the walnut trees in the garden, a kitten, a drunk asleep in front of the church. A man who lived through enormous times chose to write only about small ones. That, I think, is where the book's stillness actually comes from.

In the Autumn of Life was first published in 1969, when he was seventy-nine — just after he had stepped down as professor and parish priest to devote himself to writing. It is, in other words, a book written by a retired man from the place retirement had put him. In his last years, after a fall, he lived quietly in convalescence, and in June 1977 he died while attending Mass in a wheelchair. He was eighty-six. For a man who wrote that the last work left to us is prayer, it was exactly the ending he had described.