Month: September 2024

Old Men, Old Authors, Phantom Limbs, and Dying Wishes

I like books about old characters, and I especially like it if the authors are also old.  I guess I want to compare notes about how aging feels, what it means.  Recently I read a book by an old man about an old man (Paul Auster’s Baumgartner), a book about an old man written by a middle-aged woman (Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck), and a book by a very old and great writer which should never have been published.

Erpenbeck was middle-aged (40s) when this book was released, but she writes about a recently retired Princeton classics professor (Richard) who is feeling his age and his loneliness.  There are wonderful descriptions about the challenge of what it means to be “old,” like these thoughts about what an old man should wear:

Maybe a cardigan is more appropriate to his new condition. More comfortable, at any rate. And seeing that he no longer goes out in human society on a daily basis, it’s surely no longer necessary for him to shave every single morning. Let grow what will. Just stop putting up resistance — or is that how dying begins? Could dying begin with this kind of growth? No, that can’t be right, he thinks.

Richard is somewhat lost in his old age and retirement, but his chance interaction with some Libyan immigrants ends up turning his life in a new direction.  And, incredibly, he finds parallels between the immigrant experience of wandering from one country to another (hoping for acceptance and work) and with the journey of Odysseus in The Odyssey.  Richard also finds that the oral history/story traditions of his new friends make him think of the way that Homeric epics evolved over the centuries.  And he thinks about what it means to be human but to be thought of as less than human – something experienced by the immigrants but also, at times, by the elderly.

(Spoilers coming!) Erpenbeck’s book ends with a party including Richard, and his academic and immigrant friends – and everyone seems to be having a fine time.  Richard gets into a deep conversation with the immigrants about an incident in which he talked his wife into an abortion that ended rather disastrously.

Why were you ashamed of your wife? asks Ali.

That she might die, says Richard.  Yes, he says, at that moment I hated her because she might die.

I can understand that, says Detlef.

I think that’s when I realized, says Richard, that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.

Like the surface of the sea? asks Ali.

Actually, yes, exactly like the surface of the sea.

Richard might be facing old age and death and things that “can’t be endured,” but he has learned something.  Like Odysseus, he made it home to Ithaca only to find that even homecomings are difficult, and the answer is not about slipping into an old life but forging a new one with the full recognition of the horrors that are under the sea.

Auster’s Sy Baumgartner is also trying to work out what an old life means, what he can make of it.  Baumgartner monitors himself for signs of aging.  For example, he counts the number of times that he realizes he has not fully zipped up his pants, “four times in the last two weeks!” and uses that as a measure of his decline.  He considers marrying again, but the woman turns him down.  He invites a young scholar to work on his late wife’s poetry and papers, but by the end of the book, she has not arrived.  And so it goes.

One of the most interesting metaphors in Auster’s book is that of the phantom limb, that thing that – although gone – can still cause us pain. Set to thinking about this phenomenon when his housekeeper’s husband saws off two fingers, Baumgartner considers writing a book about how things that do not even exist anymore can cause us such angst.  We all know this is so, but can’t really absorb the implications.  I had a therapist tell me once that guilt and regret are two of the most worthless emotions.  This might be true, but that knowledge did not make the regret and guilt go away. (One might think of that golden couplet of Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Pity me that the heart is slow to learn/ What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”)

These things are worth thinking about and the phantom limb metaphor helps.  Unfortunately, Baumgartner never finishes his book, nor his train of thought.

Auster’s book ends with a confused Sy Baumgartner, who, after having gotten lost on a ride to get some liquor, swerves to miss a deer and then takes his bleeding body on foot down the road to look for help.  The book ends with this ambiguous statement: “And so, with the wind in his face and blood still trickling from the wound in his forehead, our hero goes off in search of help, and when he comes to the first house and knocks on the door, the final chapter in the saga of S.T. Baumgartner begins.”  Not much to look forward to here.  This is an Odysseus who probably isn’t going to make it home.

The two books above I recommend to any serious reader.  I also recently read Garcia Marquez’s Until August – not really a book about old age, but a book that was written when the author was in his late seventies and revised in his eighties, and which he asked his heirs not to publish.   In his later life, when dementia prevented Garcia from “following the plot,” he abandoned the text and prohibited its issuance.  The great author died in 2014, but this year (2024) his heirs decided to subvert his wishes and publish the unfinished manuscript.  Such a shame.  Garcia has given us many wonderful portraits of the elderly – if you haven’t read Love in the Time of Cholera, do it soon! – but there was no need for the publication of a rough draft that this Nobel laureate left behind with instructions that it be destroyed.  In the end, reading the slim book made me uncomfortable, and it certainly will do little to further Marquez’s wonderful reputation and standing.

This action of Marquez’s executors evokes the whole issue of what we owe the dead – if the dying leave specific requests, should their wishes be sacrosanct?  What if they had dementia?  What if they were a public figure or a literary treasure???  I know, I know.  We might know little of Kafka if Max Bord had not ignored his dying wishes to have all destroyed.  We all face this problem at one time or another.  I keep thinking about the decades of journals in my closet; I could leave instructions that they be taken out with my body to be cremated, but maybe I’d better do it myself.  I’d like to hang onto them as long as possible though, so the timing is tricky!  My guess is that all of our closets are full of such things.

This Old House

In trying to find a house in the right location in a tight market, my husband and I ended up buying an old house – one that is close in age to ourselves, a 1950’s house with a lot of character and a lot of problems.  It was not the wisest of decisions, but we have always made our housing decisions with our heart and not our brains, and, in the past, we have been able to make things work.  This time, however, we are old and tired, and I am not so sure.  The house has charm, but it is the charm of an old flirt in a wheelchair.

This is not the oldest house we have owned; that prize goes to a beauty we bought in 1999, which had been given to the couple we bought it from as a wedding present from her father.  It was immaculately kept up – not modernized, just kept up.  It had the original cherry kitchen cabinets with a built-in flour sifter.  That house was like people who take care of themselves their whole lives, and do not succumb to either bad habits or cosmetic surgery.  The old house we are in now was not kept up, and all too often, modern “updates” were grafted onto deeper problems.  It has gracious bones but needs both detox and some reconstructive surgery.

Obsolete appliances and rotting wood have got me thinking about the analogies between old houses and old people – a very popular analogy.  I recently ran into this by Frederick Buechner (from Whistling in the Dark):

Old age is not, as the saying goes, for sissies.  There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it’s like living in a house that’s in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn’t work right anymore.  There are bats in the attic.  Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there’s a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather.  The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on.

Buechner’s analogy, of course, reminded me of the old revival song, “This Old House,” by Stuart Hamblen, written about the time that my house was built:

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer, ain’t a-gonna need this house no more.

Ain’t got time to fix the shingles, ain’t got time to fix the floor.

Ain’t got time to oil the hinges or to mend the window pane,

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer I’m getting ready to meet the saints.

Rosemary Clooney had the first hit with the song, but everyone from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson has recorded it.  It was supposedly inspired when Hamblen, while out on a hunting expedition with John Wayne (who else would you go hunting with in the Sierras?), came across a broken-down house where an old dog was guarding his dead master.  Believe that if you want.  The song has a catchy tune and great rhythm, but I think the song mostly resonates because it tells a great truth.  Hamblen reminds us that as the body deteriorates, we are getting closer and closer to not needing it anymore, and that is just how life is – so we might as well sing about it.

I need my body now, however, and partly I need it to make this house livable.  I need it to build a new life one more time.  But I also need to stop hearing my husband moan as he unearths (literally) some new problem.  (Though he denies it, the man is a saint.)

So, we try to cope with this old house in our old age.  Probably a mistake.  Surely feels like a mistake many days.  But maybe the process has some redeeming lessons about accepting what old is.  You can paint it, prop it up, make it over, but it is still an old house.  In the end, one can only enjoy its charms, but that is only possible if you can contain the angst and come to a kind of peace about aging, senescence.  In the Prologue to his Rule, the great St. Benedict tells us that if we grow old it is by way of a truce with God, so that we may have time to “amend our misdeeds” and “to safeguard love.” (See my earlier post, “The Truce of Saint Benedict and Rules of the Road.”) A truce, not a war.  We will fix the house the house as we are able and as we try to “safeguard love.”  We will try to remember that we are fortunate – to grow old, to have a roof, to be busy with meaningful chores.  And we came here to be near family, and there are no regrets in that regard.  As I look at our teenage grandchildren, I wonder how they see us.  And then I think of this old house again.  I hope they think that we have some charm.