SOURCE: Wolfe, Alan. “The Age of Anxiety.” New Republic 213, no. 21 (20 November 1995): 33-9.

In the following excerpt, Wolfe discusses New Passages in the context of current societal attitudes about aging.

Being old in a young country was never easy. Nineteenth-century America—forward-looking, pressed for time, anxious for efficiency, proudly mobile—had little patience with the frail. Homage may have been paid to their wisdom, but contempt defined their treatment. The old, as Thomas Cole reminds us in his cultural history of aging in America, constituted an implicit rebuke to Victorian morality. Albert Barnes, a New School Presbyterian, said it best: “One task alone remained for the old man: to tread his solitary way, already more than half forgotten, to the grave. He has had his day, and the world has nothing more to give him or to hope from him.”

Such harsh images of sinful decay came to be...