Strom Thurmond gives me problems. These problems came to a head last week as the senior senator from South Carolina took on a highly visible national role. Serving as President pro Tempore of the United States Senate, he opened the proceedings of the impeachment trial of President Clinton.

Seeing him standing at the podium presiding and administering an oath to William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I was prepared to see him falter. People with knowledge of the Washington political scene had told me that the senator has failed notably in both physical abilities and mental sharpness.

Yet he seemed to have carried it off quite well. “Pleased to welcome you,” he told Rehnquist as the latter approached the dais and prepared to take the oath. The soon-to-be longest serving senator in history looked on the surface to be a remarkably fit 95-year-old man.

Still, his continuing presence in the senate troubles me. Seeing him there makes me feel myself to be in an uncomfortable dilemma. Thurmond forces me into an apparent contradiction between my roles as an elder advocate and as a person concerned to find the common good.

On the one hand, I believe that age should not limit one’s right to work. Why should not older people have the same access to gainful employment as anyone else? The laws abolishing compulsory retirement in this country brought a social change which I welcomed.

And yet there is another side. Just because the law allows someone to remain in a job for an indefinitely long time, that does not mean that it’s good to stay.

In some kinds of work, perhaps so. But when you are talking about public officials, that raises questions. You have to ask if it contributes to the common good if a politician clings to office until he reaches his one-hundredth year, as Thurmond intends to do.

In some jobs the employer has the right to ask the employee to undergo an assessment of physical and mental health to determine fitness to serve. This holds true of certain public safety officers.

No such check can be make of elected representatives, however.  Chosen by the people, they can continue to hold office even when they can no longer function well.

Of course for me Senator Thurmond is a special case anyway because of his politics. Many reasons other than age incline me to wish that he were not currently holding public office. Decades ago, he had already compiled a long record as a confirmed segregationist. As far back as 1954 he set a record by filibustering 24 hours against a civil rights bill.

To get the views of an age peer of Thurmond, I consulted a 95-year-old resident of Newton named Herbert Trubek who reads this column. Asked if Thurmond should step down because of his age, Mr. Tru-bek responded: “I wouldn’t say that – it all depends on how he is. If his politics were better, if his politics were like those of my representative, Barney Frank, I wouldn’t care.”

I also conferred with Jean Evans, a Cambridge resident who grew up in South Carolina. Her comments about Thurmond were sharp and forthright. “He got stuck in time fifty years ago,” she told me, “and with ideas like that he is too out-of-date to be representing anybody.”

Jane Horton, now a Bostonian, is another person who grew up in South Carolina. Though she disapproves of Thurmond’s political views, she respects his determination. Asked if the senator’s age bothers her, she replies, “On some level yes, but as I get older I say ‘go for it, kid.’”

For me, another issue has importance here. Aside from the question of the common welfare, is it good for the person himself to remain in a demanding job into advanced old age?

Many would say that late life is a time to shift into a different mode, a style of living more conducive to reflection. One thinks of the classical Hindu approach to the stages of life whereby, after a busy career and long tenure as a householder, a person was expected to leave home and go live in the forest and there focus on prayer and contemplation.

The words of the Swiss psychologist Jung ring in my ears. “Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning .  .  . must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure.”

“To the psychotherapist,” Jung adds,  “an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.”

There is also the question of readiness to hand over power to younger generations. Does it not seem distrustful to hang on to power and deprive the rising generations of their opportunities to serve?

Richard Griffin