Should I retire?

At thirty-eight I retired from my post in the Bordeaux parlement and withdrew to the tower on my estate. I had a Latin inscription put on the wall announcing that, weary of the servitude of public duties, I was retiring to the bosom of the learned Muses, to spend in calm and freedom what little remained of my life.nnIt did not go as I planned. I thought that if I left my mind entirely idle, it would settle and grow wise. Instead it was like a runaway horse. It gave itself a hundred times more trouble than it had ever taken over other people's business, and it produced so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, without order or purpose, that I began to write them down, to make my mind ashamed of itself. Those notes became my essays.nnSo learn from my surprise. Retirement is not simply rest. An idle mind does not become calm. It becomes restless, gloomy, full of imaginary troubles. If you stop working, you will need something else that engages you as fully: a study, a craft, a garden, a project of your own.nnI should add that I was later called back to serve as mayor of Bordeaux, and I went. Retirement need not be absolute. You may withdraw from one kind of work and find, later, that another kind calls you.nnSo do not ask only whether to stop. Ask what you will give your freed mind to do.

When I was nearly eighty I wrote an essay on how to grow old, and I was still working at ninety, so you may take me as a witness for the defence of activity. But I did not think the answer was simply to keep going at one's old job.nnThe best way to overcome old age, I suggested, is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, rushing past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually it grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea.nnSo ask whether your work, as it stands, is widening you or narrowing you. If it still absorbs you and serves something beyond yourself, there is no reason to stop because of a number. If it has become a routine that keeps you small, retirement may be the chance to widen.nnTwo cautions from experience. Do not live in the past, regretting what is gone; take an interest in the future, which you will not see. And do not cling to the young, expecting them to fill your life. They have their own to live. Find interests of your own, large enough to carry you, and you will not be afraid of the time you have left.

We are busy, I said, in order to have leisure, just as we make war in order to live at peace. Work is not the end of life. It is a means, and the end it serves is leisure, the time in which a free person can do the things that are worth doing for their own sake.nnBut leisure does not mean idleness or amusement. Amusement is a kind of rest, and we need rest so that we can return to serious activity. To spend one's whole life amusing oneself would be foolish. The highest use of leisure, I argued, is contemplation, the activity of the mind in understanding things for their own sake: studying, reflecting, appreciating what is true and fine. That is the most complete happiness, because it is the most self-sufficient and the most truly human.nnSo if you are asking whether to retire, I would turn the question around. Have you been working for the sake of something? If so, what was it? If you have the means to live, and your work no longer contributes to anything you value, then retiring is not giving up. It is arriving at the point of all your labour.nnBut prepare for it as you would prepare for any serious activity. Learn something. Read the books you never had time for. Study the stars or the plants. Spend time with friends of good character. Leisure well used is the crown of a good life. Leisure wasted is merely a long holiday that ends badly.