Nothing makes one think so much about the nature of personal identity as getting old. Of course, even at the age of 85, I know, in a sense, who I am. I know where and when and to whom I was born. And I know, roughly, what events followed to bring me to where I am now. I can recite all this, but can actually remember only a fraction of it. All the same, I can be reminded. A bar or two of Sibelius's fourth symphony, and I am back in 1948, with everything ahead. I had taken finals but not yet heard the results: there was nothing but the bliss of summer at home, no more exams, obsessively in love, waiting for letters, nightingales in the orchard, excitement. So I am the same person, because I can relive that summer; it is my possession and mine alone.
On the other hand, I can never quite believe people who say: "Even though I'm 80, I feel just the same as I always did," or: "Inside me I am just the same as I was when I was 18." How can they feel the same when their body, including their brain, which is what they actually are, is running down? How can they mean what they say, when they used to enjoy parties, and now, because of their deafness, parties are torture? When riding used to be their greatest pleasure, and now they could not even mount a horse without pulleys and cranes?
In 1948 I believed that the time would come when I could say everything that I felt and thought and be understood. I genuinely assumed that I would gradually experience more and more and always be able to capture it in words, write it down and have it for ever, for other people as well, if they wanted it. When did that change? It certainly got lost somewhere along the way. I now think that proper conversation, proper communication both of feelings and ideas, is the most valuable thing in life, but is difficult and rare.
I remember that Iris Murdoch, while struggling with her last book, a summing up of all her philosophical ideas, complained that philosophy was very difficult, and that she could not easily express what she believed. It was certainly sadly difficult for the reader to follow her train of thought in this final effort at communication. But she was probably then also struggling with the first symptoms of dementia, and must have been beginning to feel a bewildering discontinuity with her former life.
One day, society will have to face the facts of dementia, its enormous increase as we live longer and longer, the sacrifices it demands of younger people, often obliged to abandon their own life-chances to look after the sufferer, the huge costs it entails, both financial and emotional. Shall we ever reach the point when we are prepared to believe what many people say, that the person who is severely and terminally demented has already gone, no longer exists as the person she was? We certainly have not reached that point yet. The problem for society now is whether we are capable of looking after those sufferers adequately. And the evidence suggests that we are not.
And this leads to the much wider question of what we think is the role of the old in society, now that they are getting so very old, and so very numerous. First, we have to ask who we count as old. Chronology is no longer enough to define a category of people who, as we are often told, are "vulnerable". I am often shocked when I realise that some people are counted among the old who are 20 years younger than I, simply on the grounds that they are retired, or have grandchildren.
Of course we know that people age at different rates, according to their genes, their health or their environment; but many people in their 60s and 70s are no more vulnerable than the rest of the population, all of whom, after all, are pretty vulnerable: they may be robbed, mugged, run over by a bus, choked by the field of rape the local farmer has sown next to their house, fall victim to swine flu, whatever their age.
In fact, the very concept of vulnerability is suspect, if applied to the old as a class defined solely by date of birth. It should be reserved for those who are manifestly at risk, those whose bones, or grasp of reality, have become fragile, or who have become blind, or unable to walk.
These people are vulnerable in the sense that, like children, they need to be protected from accidents, and they can no longer live alone. These and these alone should count as old; and so when to deem yourself old at last must be a personal decision (though I admit that many people fight so hard against making this decision that they have already become a source of anxiety to their children or neighbours, who may therefore seek to take the decision vicariously).
In any case, before the decision has been taken, to assume that we all need special protection is an insult. I believe that I am as capable as any other householder of detecting a bogus offer from a cowboy builder, or a fraudulent telephone call offering me the chance to win millions of pounds. That is a matter of education and common sense, not of age. Nor does the fact of living alone itself render me vulnerable, as people often suppose. It's often inconvenient, if I can't open a packaged-up toothbrush, or hang a picture without destroying the whole wall. But I have never been able to do these things, it's only that I once had someone to do them for me, like doing the income tax returns. I'm certain that I'm not the only old person who does not want to be pitied or patronised, but left to get on with life on my own, until that becomes impossible. Then I'll be ready to join the ranks of the looked-after, and treated like a child. It will be the worst thing in the world.
So what does this dread of succumbing to the designation "vulnerable" tell me about personal identity? Am I the same as I always was? If I am honest the depressing answer is probably: "Yes, only worse." I have always been happy by myself, and now, with increasing deafness, I am more so. I have always been bad at putting up with items of popular culture like easy-listening music, convenience food, television or radio comedy (except Yes, Minister) and what the BBC calls "a light-hearted look" at this or that. Now I can bear them even less.
It is the thought that one day I may have to live in a world where there is nothing but these items that appals me, as much as the physical decrepitude I shall by then be suffering. Looking after the old ought essentially to be a matter of trying to understand what they like and hate, what they have always liked and hated, and of trying to protect them, not against their own supposed mental frailty and dependence, but against a life bereft of any of the pleasures they value. Our present record falls short of this by many miles.