Month: January 2019

Ripeness and Readiness

In an essay on “Late Style in Beethoven,” the philosopher Theodor Adorno starts out with this comparison of old age and fruit:

The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation… and they show more traces of history than growth.

Putting aside the specific discussion of “late” creativity (a subject I will come back to in a future blog, surely citing Adorno’s essay, Edward Said’s On Late Style, and the fascinating Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David Galenson), I am more interested in the simile presented, comparing age to ripe fruit. It is a trope often used; Cicero repeatedly compares old age to ripeness (maturitas). But, in true old age, our fruit is beyond its peak (as much as we would like to think otherwise). It is often dry, withered. It might even start to ferment.

Shakespeare considered the issue of ripeness and indirectly compared it with readiness. In Hamlet (surely the story of the tragedy of youth) and King Lear (a tragedy of old age), in precisely the same point near the end of the play (Act V ii in both cases), we are faced with the conclusion that either readiness is all or ripeness is all. First (in 1603 or thereabouts) we hear the young Dane:

HAMLET: We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.

Readiness connotes preparation, and a proactive stance toward a situation. Hamlet may dawdle, but he finally is ready to do something. He has agency over the readiness.

In Lear (five or six years later), it is not the title character that proclaims that ripeness is all, but Edgar, talking to his blinded and despairing father Gloucester:

GLOUCESTER:  No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.

EDGAR:  What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming thither;
Ripeness is all: come on.

GLOUCESTER:  And that’s true too.

Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming thither. This is interesting, because (like many of us I would guess) my young “going hence” was even more angst-ridden than my late life “coming thither.” In the scene above, Gloucester wants to go no farther: A man may rot even here. Surely we will grow old wherever we are and, yet, his son encourages him to keep going. And the paradox is that Gloucester, poor blind, disillusioned Gloucester, recognizes that both things are true. And that’s true too. We must age and yet we must go on. It is of note here that when Nahum Tate bowdlerized the Bard to produce an upbeat version of Lear in 1681, it was Tate’s happier version that ran almost steadily until 1838. And in Tate’s unauthorized edit, the line about ripeness just disappears. Apparently, we are more willing to accept the demands of readiness than the inevitabilities of ripeness.

Yves Bonnefoy writes that ripeness and readiness are “the two irreducible attitudes. One the quintessence of the world’s order, the unity of which one seems to breathe; the other, the reverse of that order….” Ripeness connotes a passive passage of time; readiness signals a capacity for action. And, as Gloucester says, both are true. However, the readiness of old age has to be in the context of ripeness, even over-ripeness or decay. There were only five or six years between the writing of Hamlet and the appearance of Lear. Both are tragedies. Both examine a portion of the arc of life – one going up and one coming down. And both have something to teach us, perhaps, about balancing action with acceptance.

For many years, I attended a Great Books week in the summer; we read six works in advance and discussed them with the same group over six days. It was terrific and I would heartily recommend it. At one point I tried writing a novel about the experience – but after a few hundred pages, I did not think it was worth completing. I did, however, complete a chapter in which the group discussed King Lear; I attach a draft here. If you haven’t read the original lately, you might want to revisit the story of an old person who thought he had it figured out.

Baby New Year and Old Father Time

Happy New Year! The time of year prompted me to consider the image we have of an old man for the old year and a baby for the new year. The old man of the lapsing year often is conflated with the “grim reaper,” making him more than a little threatening. But generally, the ancient one (and he has gotten so old in only one year!) is just handing off a lantern or an hour glass to the babe with the admonition, perhaps, to make the most of the new life, the new year. As the light gets stronger and the days get longer, everything seems to renew. Soon the sap will be rising.

And we are swept up in it in this rebirth of the year. All us old people are making resolutions, showing up at the gym (this is always the most crowded time of year for exercise facilities and doubtless good intentions are very profitable), going on a diet, enrolling in a conversational Spanish class or some other vehicle of self-improvement, and yet – we are still old. The year is new, but we still need that cataract surgery, our arthritis still aches. Nature recycles through the seasons, but as individuals we – get old. The media tells us today is the first day of the rest of our life (and this is surely true enough), and yet we enter into it with the old body, the baggage of memory, and the parameters of circumstance. None of that changes as the year rolls over and the old man hands the lantern to a baby new year.

We want it to be otherwise. Psalm 103 tells the faithful that “[the Lord] satisfies you with good as long as you live, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” As in the image of the new baby and the old year above, I got to thinking about what this promise really meant. The eagle appears approximately 34 times in the Bible and is often associated with renewing strength. One remembers the emotional passage from Chariots of Fire, when the Olympic runner Eric Liddell, who refused to run on Sunday, reads to his audience from Isaiah 40: “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

Apparently the eagle was thought to actually be able to renew itself; the persistent legend is that at about age 50, the eagle can make a decision to fly to a special mountain where its beak, talons and feathers renew themselves after about 5 months. Certainly a five month hiatus for most fifty-year-old humans would renew some of us, so maybe we can take something from that. But the eagle thus allegedly garners another 10-20 years of life. Birders and scientists say the legend is not true, but eagles do often go through a severe molting at about five years and can look pretty scruffy for a while – until their new feathers come in and they are “renewed.” Many think that is the source of the legend. In any case, there it sits in the Bible to inspire us to a new birth, to renewal.

None of this is new. Man from time immemorial has complained that Nature renews itself in ways that the individual man cannot. (I know, I know, the scientists are working on it!). Hopkins complained on a spring day that:

See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

We get reprieves. Good doctors replace our hips, we recover from illness; good fortune gives us a better day now and then. But our bodies are not a renewable resource in the long run. (A lesson often learned too late, as some of what we suffer in old age is the result of youthful mismanagement of this precious resource.) Hopkins ends his poem with a plea for renewal of another sort. “Send my roots rain” he pleads.

In an earlier post, I wrote about “Second Growth,” quoting from Emerson’s journal about Thoreau’s observations that “men may have two growths like pear trees.” But the growth in pear trees is physical; any second (or third) growth human beings have has to be mental, spiritual. And this growth is within the old body; with this dichotomy there must be some sort of conciliation.

This is also the season of Epiphany. (See my story by that title in this month’s fiction. It is a little sentimental, but it is a Christmas story, after all.) In depictions of adoration of the magi, artists from Fra Angelico to Rubens often portrayed the wise men as of different ages: young, middle-aged and old. According to the apocryphal legends, the oldest was Melchior, Balthazar was in the middle, and the youngest magus was Caspar. Apparently, epiphanies are possible at any age.

Perhaps the best we can do is to follow the advice of Andre Gide: “Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.”  Perhaps the reconciliation of body and soul involves the willingness to accept the moral obligation of joy, even in diminished circumstances. Meanwhile we, with Hopkins, pray for sustenance for our roots.