Month: November 2022

Missing the Escape of Work – Musings from Camus and Yehoshua

I have been retired for a number of years.  I have never admitted that I “missed” work; I have acknowledging regretting the loss of regular personal interaction, perhaps missing the structure, slightly missing the challenge.  I had reason to bring this all to mind when I read an essay by Camus and a current novel by the Israeli author, A. B. Yehoshua.  First, consider this paragraph from Camus’s “Love of Life.”  He starts by talking about travel, while comparing the escape of travel to the escape of work:

For what gives value to travel is fear.  It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have.  One can no longer cheat – hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone).  I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say: “What would I do without the office?” or again: “My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow.”  Travel robs us of such refuge.   Far from our own people. Our own language, stripped of all our props, our deprived masks…we are completely on the surface of ourselves.  But also, soul-sick, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value…,(54)

What Camus says about travel could also apply to retirement.  Work gave us an excuse to be tired, distracted, absent.  I know someone who continues to work well past the standard age for retirement – he admits that if he were retired he would have no excuse not to spend more time with his elderly mother.

Work also often gave us a sense of place, esteem, belonging, structure.  Of course, once we retire, it can be disillusioning to find out how little we were needed and how seamlessly we were replaced.  Many retirees initially respond by filling their lives with volunteer work, clubs, book groups, exercise classes, travel – anything to replace a work-like structure and feel like there is a place we belong.  There is nothing wrong with any of that, except perhaps the escape from the soul-sickness that Camus describes – the dropping of the “deprived masks” that restores the real world to us.   Perhaps, in retirement, we should let ourselves get “soul-sick” enough to revert to the “miraculous value” of the world that we might have felt as children.

Yehoshua’s novel, The Tunnel, is about a retired engineer experiencing some mental confusion. The main character, Luria, and his wife meet with a neurologist about Luria’s brain scan, which shows a “spot” that may be the reason Luria is losing his memory.  (This has come to a head when he takes the wrong child home from the daycare center where his grandson is enrolled.) When Luria refers to himself as having “dementia,” the doctor objects:

“Please, why dementia?  We’re not there yet.  Don’t rush to claim something you don’t understand and don’t raise unnecessary fears, and above all, don’t get addicted to passivity and fatalism.  Retirement is not the end of the road, and so you need to find work in your field, even part-time, private work. (3)

Luria used to work for the state designing roads and tunnels, and at the urging of the doctor and his wife signs on as an unpaid “helper” to a young engineer in his old department.  This has its ups, downs and adventures, but he finds that when he is actually working at his old desk (now possessed by the young engineer), he slides right back into his old persona – at least for a while.  Of course, this temporarily relieves his anxiety and distracts him, but he soon realizes that he cannot go backward.  Somehow he needs to go on.  Though the “spot” on his brain will grow, so will his appreciation of a world beyond roads, tunnels, and logic.

Retirement need not mean “addiction to passivity and fatalism.”  It is an open door – but an open door can be scary.  Both Camus and Yehoshua realize this.  And some sense of purpose and structure is necessary – but for many of us, retirement is the first time in our lives when we can design our own structure, set our own goals.  Simone de Beauvoir said that every old person needed their own “project” in order to stay sane. (See my earlier post about de Beauvoir, “Projects of Our Old Age.”)  We should just hope to be strong enough to choose that project rather than succumbing to distraction and expectation. And it is only to ourselves that the project needs to have meaning.

This week’s story, “This Little Light of Mine,” is about meaning that a woman carves out of her widowhood and old age.  From the outside it is silly, but…  think hard.  It is perhaps no more ridiculous than some of the ways we spend our precious last years.  It is not intended as a model, but just a reminder that we should make meaning in our life in some ways.  Hopefully, yours will be a little less far-fetched.

The Archangel Michael Gives Advice on Death and Old Age

The Biblical news on old age is mixed.  Patriarchs like Abraham were rewarded with long lives – yet the very mortality of man was bestowed as a punishment. Of the many penalties that women (pain in childbirth, enmity with the snake) and men (living by toil) incurred in the Garden of Eden, the last one is death: “to dust thou shall return.”  Old age is not explicitly mentioned, but the story of the fall of Adam and Eve was read throughout the Middle Ages as the beginning of degeneration for both the world and the individual.  In Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, as in many medieval and Renaissance depictions of this event, the post-lapsarian couple looks much older once they step out of Paradise.   St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas both posited that Adam was kept from decaying by his pure soul until he sinned; once he had eaten of the forbidden fruit, decay began.

Milton extended this long tradition in Paradise Lost.  The Archangel Michael explains to Adam that he has lost immortality through his transgression and must accept that, if he lives a temperate life and doesn’t succumb to plague or violence, he might live to be an old man (from Book XI):

There is, said Michael, if thou well observe                            530
The rule of Not too much; by temperance taught,
In what thou eatest and drinkest; seeking from thence
Due nourishment, not gluttonous delight,
Till many years over thy head return:
So mayest thou live; till, like ripe fruit, thou drop
Into thy mother’s lap; or be with ease
Gathered, nor harshly plucked; for death mature:
This is Old Age; but then, thou must outlive
Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty; which will change
To withered, weak, and gray; thy senses then,                           540
Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forego,
To what thou hast; and, for the air of youth,
Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign
A melancholy damp of cold and dry
To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume
The balm of life.

Milton, whose own old age was pretty miserable as he ended up both blind and on the wrong side of the king, did not glamorize mankind’s end years in any way; “withered, weak, and gray,” we will become if we’re not unfortunate enough to get leprosy or to be impaled first.  Adam takes fright and decides he would rather die than end in the “melancholy damp” of old age:

Henceforth I fly not death, nor would prolong
Life much; bent rather, how I may be quit,
Fairest and easiest, of this cumbrous charge;
Which I must keep till my appointed day                                 550
Of rendering up, and patiently attend
My dissolution.

The angel tells Adam when he dies needs to be left to heaven; but he does have a choice about how he lives:

Michael replied.
Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest
Live well; how long, or short, permit to Heaven…

C.S. Lewis gave similar advice when writing an essay about how mankind could bear to live in the “atomic age,” with the overhanging threat of incineration at any minute. (It is interesting how immediate the threat of nuclear annihilation was to the writers of the mid-twentieth century.)    Lewis points out that there has always been a threat of death – from the plague, war, cancer – and it was the inevitable ending of old age, but he goes on, like Milton, exhorting us to “live well” in the meantime:

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

The proximity of death is part of being old; I remember the story of an old man who, every time he had to see the doctor, wondered if this was the day that he would find out which disease would kill him.  Some of us fear death as an ending; others have fears about the way in which we will die.  Most of us, I suspect, fear both.  When my mother died after a horrible couple of years with an extremely paranoic version of dementia, I told myself I would no longer fear any other kind of death, as long as I could keep my mind. But time passes and old fears (including the atomic variety I wrote about a few months ago) creep in.

The protagonist in “A Perfect Ending” is pleased with the way she completes her life, but not because she planned it that way.