CHAPTER 2

1. Calvin Taylor and J. Holland, in an important study (1964) of possible predictors of creative performance, observe: "There is some evidence that creative persons are more autonomous than others, more self-sufficient, more independent in judgment, more open to the irrational in themselves, more stable, more feminine in interests and characteristics (especially in awareness of their impulses), more dominant and self-assertive, more complex, more self-accepting, more resourceful and adventurous, more radical (the old word was Bohemian), more self-controlled, possibly more emotionally sensitive, more introverted but also more bold." I suggest in my University of Michigan paper (October, 1980), however, that we must also be on guard to think of adults as "most creative" and "more creative" rather than dividing them simply into "creative" or "noncreative".

2. The creativity of humor-through helping shape the tone and thrust of a lifestyle-seems clearly related to physical and mental healing as well.

This relationship was dramatically brought home to the general public by Norman Cousins' widely published article from the New England Journal of Medicine (December 1976), subsequently enlarged and republished as the best-selling book, Anatomy of an Illness (Norton, 1979). Cousins attributes his recovery from a dangerous and crippling illness substantially to the healing powers of deliberately invoked laughter.

"I have learned," Norman Cousins writes, "never to underestimate the capacity of the human mind and body to regenerate, even when the prospects seem most wretched." (This is precisely why the morbid term, "terminally ill" should never be used, even though, of course, many battles are lost.)

Another writer who merits careful attention is the physician Dr. Raymond Moody, whose book Laugh After Laugh was published in 1978 by Headwaters Press. Like Cousins, he links humor to important therapeutic releases of tension and to generating the will to live. A practitioner, he cites many cases in which laughter has aided healing-both physical and emotional. "In the deepest sense," Moody writes, "humor works by rallying, and by being a manifestation of, the will to five."

And both Cousins and Moody from their fields join Roberto Assagioli in his: that we are only beginning to tap the mystery and the resources of the human will.

CHAPTER 3

1. The word "role" is a much more sophisticated word than it appears in this useful listing. We all-except the most brainwashed of our generation -have hidden roles and hidden agendas. We often live actual sub-lives or other-lives, which usually escape the inquiring mind and the eager pen of the social psychologist. And some of us live fantasy lives that, in some cases, have a power, and a hidden governing force that appear, disappear, and reappear at different stages of the life drama. Some of these hidden lives, roles, fantasies, and agendas work beneficially for the adult wayfarer. Some, as Cyril Connolly vividly portrays them in Enemies of Promise, work against the humanity and the creativity of the adult. Connolly's title is thought- provoking. What elements are there in our "system of selfs" that release us or block and defeat us as time goes on?

2. Take one example: the ebullience common to many in their 30s, as contrasted with the detachment and retrospection typical of many adults in their 60s and 70s. My own mother, when about 68 and widowed for several years, was once present with me at the successful live studio production of a Home and School broadcast. The volunteer producer, a young public relations man, and two or three teacher colleagues, all in their 30s, had expanded as much energy and excited concern on this show as though it was a major network program. Watching them quietly, my mother, who was what the older North American idiom used to call a "booster," or in the British idiom, a "well-wisher," was expected as usual to add her warm and happy congratulations. Indeed she did this, but before the production ended she turned to me and said with an expression of indescribable sadness, "When I see the work that Gerald and his friends are putting into this, and all it means to them, I think of how your Dad and I used to plan and dream, how excited we used to get." Her comment astonished me. I was not insensitive-I was simply age 35, and was myself in the throes of the ebullient decade. This charming and life-loving woman, who turned out to be a Ulyssean herself, had simply a greater perspective from the further heights of the life journey.

3. Klemme called the point of migration between young and mature adulthood, the 'mid-life crisis," and found that it seems to arise at approximately the end of the period roughly from ages 21 to 35, i.e. the period which David L. Gutmann of the University of Michigan has named the phase of "alloplastic mastery" in which young adults try to achieve mastery over the external world, seeking material gain and the approval of others. (Gutmann's interesting version of the life drama includes two other major phases: "autoplastic mastery," the period from about 35 to 60, and 'omniplastic mastery," the period from age 60 on, when the person who has successfully met the tests of earlier periods often turns his or her attention to broader concerns.)

4. Readers interested in the development of "life stage theory" will find informative studies in Gould, Levinson, Sheehy, Vaillant, and Osherson (see Bibliography for recommended titles). A fine summation of the first four investigators as well as certain other researchers can be found in Chapter 3 of Douglas C. Kimmel's text, Adulthood and Aging: an Interdisciplinary Development View, which is indispensable for the lay reader for its scope and depth in treating the subject.

The writers and researchers named above are engaged in valuable work, and write with perception and compassion about aspects of the human life journey before or approaching the period I have generally identified as the beginning of "Ulyssean adulthood". However, specifics of adult "transitions" remain unproved, outside of what can be generally accepted as "the human condition". So far, current commentators are overly preoccupied with precisely identified transition points; their samples are very limited in scope as to income group, sex, education, and radical culture; and thus far they seem to have only scratched the surface of not only the complex nature but the multiplex nature of the human adult life. Kimmel's warning is useful that too naive acceptance of suggested development "crisis" points can be self-fulfilling for certain adults.

Still, as these studies advance and others like them appear, two benefits may be seen. Great numbers of adults, not least in the earlier middle years, may be induced to think actively about the nature of the human life journey; and specifically, they may reflect more perceptively and creatively on their own life's meaning and direction.

5. The powerful thrust that adult human beings ordinarily have toward some kind of self-actualization of the mind is borne out in many ways. The studies of the Canadian adult educator Allen Tough, dealing with why adults learn and the ways in which they try to learn, have lighted up a much neglected fact: that a great number of people throughout much of their adult lives are engaged in one or more learning projects, often virtually unaware that they could be described in these terms, and with their activities unknown to most or all of their friends. Tough's formal writing has little to say about adults in their later years, but one of my students, who was captivated by the idea of this unseen learning, went through her apartment building in Toronto interviewing a number of people of all ages, and found fascinating verification of Tough's theme. The fact, incidentally, that many of these learning experiences are so-called "temporary systems"-that is, experiences and decision making exercises that "have their day and cease to be" (a jury at a murder trial, or an abortive attempt of six weeks' duration of a 40-year-old man to teach himself the guitar)--does not destroy their interest or validity.

CHAPTER 5

1. The best refutation of the myths about memory and aging is found in a superb chapter (Chapter 3) of Morton Hunt's recent (1982) study, The Universe Within (Simon and Schuster). Among many references, Hunt quotes Marion Perlmutter, a researcher on memory efficiency in both young (20s) and older (60s) adults. Perlmutter agrees that in general people in their 60s and older 'definitely recall and recognize lists of words less well than people in their 20s but, interestingly, they recall and recognize facts better". Thus Perlmutter concludes: "if, in fact, the memory task is not a rote one but a real-life one, involving a well-stocked mind, older people definitely perform better than young people.

2. Some intriguing oddities turned up among these early investigations. The psychologist E. J. Swift had decided that, if medical researchers could experiment on themselves, surely psychological inquirers could do the same. At age 43 he submitted himself to two self-administered exercises. He practiced typewriting by the sight method for an hour a day for 50 days, steadily improving and finally attaining the not very stunning rate of 171/2 words a minute. Then this intrepid pre-Ulyssean studied shorthand for 68 days for an hour and a half a day, writing (was this done ironically?) William James's Talks to Teachers from dictation and reading back copy taken down ten or more days earlier. Within two months (he was also doing the many other things his daily work required), he had raised his speed of reception and transcription so that his score climbed by 500 percent. Swift's curiosity about himself, his precision in trying to measure his achievements, and his gutsy self-disciplining until the exercise was completed still could be emulated in our time by adults of all ages who want to change themselves from dilettantes to productive learners.

3. After all these years, one feels the gusto of an investigator who can write: "We considered making up for our experimental work a brief intellectual system wholly independent of any of the existing sciences, of which all learners would have little and equal knowledge at the start, and in learning which very little of the stock varieties of human knowledge would be of specific help. A system of ethics from the point of view of the domestic cat or an artificial agglutinative language using nothing of Indo-European syntax or vocabulary are samples of the sort of material contemplated. But on the whole it seemed better to use Esperanto."

4. In reviewing Theta Wolf s life of Alfred Binet (1973), Read Tuddenham was struck with the fact that the great father of testing had himself some very strong reservations about what one might describe as no-nonsense definitions of intelligence. Noting the neglect and the distortions that have been Binet's lot ever since he and Simon devised their famous intelligence scale, Tuddenham remarks: "Those who would suppress such tests in the service of egalitarianism may be surprised to learn that Binet declined to define intelligence lest he foreclose its exploration, that he specifically believed in the power of training to increase it, that he invariably used the phrase 'mental level' (niveau) to avoid the connotations of mental age', and would certainly have objected violently to calculating the IQ (Simon called the IQ a betrayal!)."

Two great problems were bound up with the concept of the IQ from its earliest years. The first problem was, as already indicated, that the attempt to sum up the "intelligence" of a complex human being in a single box score was too nalve. The second, that it became evident as the years passed that the IQ (whatever it was) was anything but a fixed entity. The tests were saturated with the culture attitudes and knowledges of the testers. Thus, if you retested a young person after a period of improved environmental conditions and better training in language, the IQ increased-in some cases by as many as 20 points.

Since the IQ, the most primitive way of defining an individual's intelligence, was essentially a label for schoolchildren, its application had little to do with adults and the life-cycle until industry adopted testing on an enormous scale for the assessment of young adults seeking to enter commercial and industrial life. For that purpose, much of the testing is invalid. The applicant may have taken heaps of tests, often the same ones, in a three-month search for work among various firms, and under very uneven conditions of administration. No matter! there must be scores in the dossier, from which the solemn sub-priests will try to construct his competence and his suitability. Sometimes the material is highly personal and is a flagrant invasion of his rights as a private person. Older adults have become involved as job mobility has become a major phenomenon and as large numbers of women, after a period of marriage, have returned to work that involves retraining or new training. Besides, the increasing vogue for "mature matriculation" at universities has increased the trend to test the mental abilities of adults especially in the age range 25-50.

CHAPTER 6

1. An interesting example of the 'network' effect of Ulyssean learning adventures is seen in the case of Donald Love, a retired Toronto businessman, who in the course of assiduous visiting with his wife Edna of museums in Cairo and the Near East found himself facing a long-standing mystery: What was the actual appearance of the ancient Temple of Diana in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World? In pursuit of this, Love visited numerous centers and authorities, and from his studies was able to derive a highly possible design. He has reported to the Ulyssean Society that one of his discoveries was the approachability of really great scholars!

2. How did people respond to the Open University network when it began operations in January, 1971? When the university opened its list for applicants in the spring of 1970, more than 40,000 adult Britons applied; of these, 24,000 students provisionally registered in January, 1971, for the first three months of the year, and in April, 1971, some 19,500 students finally registered. By 1980 the number of people studying for credit under the Open University system was 42,000 and there was an enormous waiting list.

How many older adults have participated, that is, people over 55? This is, for our purpose, a rather crucial question! The percentages supplied by the Open University are: 6 percent aged 50-54; 3 percent aged 55-59; 1 percent aged 60-64; and about 1 percent 65 or older.

How do the Open University students perform in their course examinations? It must be remembered that many have not studied for years, and that many have no formal qualifications for regular university study. In spite of the insistence of the university on maintaining the equivalent of academic standards elsewhere, no less than 70 percent of the students throughout the British Isles have passed their courses.

CHAPTER 9

1. Pines describes a successful experiment in which she herself took part at the Menninger Foundation under the tutelage of Elmer and Alyce Green --a preliminary exercise in feedback training intended to demonstrate how one could by mental concentration make one's hands get warmer and one's forehead cooler. She remarks that after emerging with an effort from a highly successful small experiment, she "glanced at my partner, an elderly, retired businessman. He was smiling." Precisely: this man was in fact a Ulyssean person engaged in helping create new knowledge about the conquest of mind over body.

2. A fine monograph by Professor H. H. Stem (1982), which reviews the most recent research on the topic of age and language learning, first dispels the myth, promoted by earlier concepts of Wilder Penfield and others, that "the plasticity of the young brain" gives children an advantage over adults. And he quotes in summary S. D. Krashen (1973 and 1981) as concluding his views on the neurolinguistic debate as follows: "While child-adult differences in second language acquisition potential do exist, the evidence for a biological barrier to successful adult acquisition is lacking." (My italics.) Stem, although showing a scholar's caution throughout his monograph, goes on, however, to provide much further evidence that no one age or stage on development grounds stands out as optimal or critical. He asks the question, "At what age can language teaching be started?" and responds tersely, "At any age.

3. The modern psychotherapist who has written most richly and most creatively about "the human will" is Roberto Assagioli, who by the time of his death in 1974 at a very late age had established important training centres for the comprehensive or holistic psychology that he called psychosynthesis.

Any reader of The Challenge of Aging who has wanted to perform some creative act but was too inert to do it, and now can only watch with exasperation or melancholy the flow of unused time, will find Assagioli's The Act of Will healing and bracing. Assagioli, a true Ulyssean who wrote both of his major books cited in the Bibliography when past 80, appeals vividly to both mind and emotions as he indicates paths of escape and achievement from the inert self

4. Many older adults are finding fresh Ulyssean paths in "the lively arts" in our times through programs that are all too little known despite their immense potential.

Projects include orchestras, drama groups, film-production groups, and varied craft groups for participants active in the community. Especially new and creative are projects using teacher poets and teacher artists who regularly give classes in certain retirement and nursing homes (including classes for disabled adults), to stimulate latent talent among older people-to awaken sleeping interests and talents.

A splendid brochure, rich with program descriptions, Older Ameicans and the Arts, by Jacqueline Tippett Sunderland, was published by the National Center on the Arts and Aging, Washington, D.C. in October, 1976, and reprinted. It is of equal interest to Canadians and those of other societies.

Learning to Be: the great life art that Erich Fromm celebrated in one of his books To Have or To Be? (Bantam, 1976) is realizable even into the very latest years. To dance, to paint, to act, to write, to sculpt, to design, to play-the arts are always waiting with their renewal powers.