Month: October 2023

Still Crazy After All These Years

Two related questions have nagged at me during one of those inescapably bad weeks.  To wit:  1) Does an individual life have any pattern, theme, or meaningful narrative?  2) Does anyone ever really change their basic nature?  These are eternal questions, posed by thinkers from Saint Paul to Pogo.  I ask myself these things as I inexplicably continue to make the same kind of mistakes I have always made.  Has living a long time taught me nothing?  Sometimes it seems so.

Our culture has a penchant for Bildungsromans, stories about the coming of age of young people. These youngsters (usually lads) go through scrapes and adventures and learn lessons along the way.  One might think of David Copperfield or Catcher in the Rye in this regard.  But these books often end when the protagonists are young adults (and usually with marriage if the character is a young woman), and I doubt anyone that young has ever learned anything really important (look around).

Then there are the less common Vollendungsromans, tales of the coming of old age and death.  Again, lessons are learned, the principal one being how to die.  One might think of Robinson’s Gideon or Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  The point of all these life stories – young or old – seems to be that life has some kind of meaningful narrative and we discern patterns and “better ways” as we gain years and experience.  And yet in my old age, I – like Saint Paul – sometimes wonder why “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).   There are certainly times when, at three in the morning, I cannot help but think that my life is not a meaningful narrative, but simply a vicious rerun of my most egregious character traits.  (As I said, it has been a bad week.)

One person who pondered the nature of the life story was Arthur Schopenhauer.  He authored an essay with the weighty title: “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual.”  (Maybe it sounds more interesting in German.)  It is, nevertheless, a fascinating piece of work.

Schopenhauer starts out by admitting that almost everyone believes that:

…the course of an individual’s life, however confused it appears to be, is a compete whole, in harmony with itself and having a definite tendency and didactic meaning, as profoundly conceived as is the finest epic.

He finds this true in almost all cultures.  In some societies, this “course of life” is ascribed to fate or providence; in others, it is seen as the inevitable result of maturation, education, and goal setting.  But, in the end, Schopenhauer thinks that it is mainly a matter of inborn character:

The systematic arrangement, here mentioned, in the life of everyone can be explained partly from the immutability and rigid consistency of the inborn character which invariably brings a man back on to the same track.

What is not determined by character is determined by outside events – which then interact with character.  Some 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus observed that “character is destiny.”  Schopenhauer seems to agree.

As a person who keeps a journal and believes writing one’s life “story” is therapeutic, I find this unsettling to think about.  Maybe Schopenhauer was right.  What, perhaps, we are trying to discover in our life review, are simply those permanent traits of character which make us keep playing the same scenes over and over again.  Rather than living out a comprehensive life plan, these traits might simply keep us, as Paul Simon puts it, “still crazy after all these years.”

Or maybe I’m wrong.  Ask me again when things in my life are going better.

Meanwhile, I also drafted a short story on this subject, provisionally entitled “Life Stories.”  Don’t take my chatter too seriously – I am as capable as the next person of seeing my life as an ongoing epic (or soap opera).

Some (New) Mysteries of Old Age

I recently read two new murder mysteries involving old people sleuthing – the plots were amazingly similar, but the attitude was quite different.  It is worth considering the portrayal of old age in one of my favorite genres.

The two murder mysteries both concern the death of elderly people – intended and unintended.  In The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann, a self-made community of elders provides euthanasia services for one of their members, by (as she requested) shooting her when she wasn’t expecting it.  The plan goes astray when someone else gets the gun and muddies the waters by shooting unintended victims.  Since the gun belongs to one of their own, the senior community has to solve the crime before they are suspected – and they have to do it without admitting to their own involvement in the first death.  A little complicated, but it is made more so by the fact that almost all the older characters are… muddled.  Now a lot of us are muddled on occasion, but such confusion seems to define these characters – who are, to be sure, muddled in a variety of ways. In one scene the oldsters are about to go into the funeral of one of the victims, when one of them refuses to go in because they are wearing hats, and she does not have one.  “Nobody wanted to give up their hat, so they continued to stand around the taxi at a loss.”  The poor soul ends up wearing a tea cozy for a hat.  Cute, somewhat funny, but not much of a compliment to the characters.

In Leonie Swann’s previous mystery, which I liked very much, the detectives were a herd of very bright and interesting sheep – for the most part.  Some were – well – stupid and silly, but I took no offense when Swann portrayed foolish sheep.  She should have stuck to animals. Please note that The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp got marvelous reviews, so I am in the minority on this.  And it is a good story, a good read, and while I do not have any trouble acknowledging the quirks of elders, I do object when realism tips into caricature.

Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die is the fourth and latest installment in the “Thursday Murder Club” series.  Again, we have a carefully planned act of euthanasia, but it is a side plot and there is a careful line drawn between the undesired deaths and the desired one. Osman’s seniors are so skillful, that they have the local police working for them, and while they have their quirks, they are not strictly old folk quirks.  And yet, as one of the characters puts it, they work with the “urgency of old age.” The most touching thing is the camaraderie among them; they help each other out in mechanical and emotional ways and show the very best of what an elderly community can be – discounting the murders, of course.

One point here about the old in both of these novels – they must depend on one another.  When their children appear on site, things deteriorate badly.  Grandchildren are fine if they are young and not in the company of their parents.  But there is a consistent despair in relying on the next generation, and greater comfort in people that understand the joy and anguish of getting old.  Both authors sympathetically explore the issue of euthanasia, although Osman gives us the more realistic and rounded view of the complexity of end-of-life decisions.

But back to my review of these mysteries.  My opinion here is not that either of these mysteries is bad; but there is a difference between having protagonists who happen to be old and spinning your plot around the quirks of bumbling elders.  I do not mind oldsters in books who have senior moments or balance problems; I object to portraying these realities as silly.

Neither of these authors is aged; Swann is in her forties and Osman is in his early fifties.  Many mystery writers, like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, wrote well into their eighties, and for a model of senior detectives, no one can beat Miss Marple.

I have written very few mystery stories, and none involving the elderly, but if you have my predilection for the unsolved problem, you might enjoy “Essentials” or “No Change Orders.”