In my random reading this morning I ran across this quote from Yeats: “When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.” The sentiment reminds me of James’ Beast in the Jungle – we spend life in preparation for some event, some epiphany, some revelation.
Bibliophiles like me have read a lot of books by the time they get old. They might not remember all of them, but they have spent vast swaths of their lives living in a state of immersion in the reading experience. As Ecclesiastes says, “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” And now, like the preacher at the end of Ecclesiastes, I am old and am only too aware of the “weariness of the flesh.” It seems to me that there should be a time to stop reading and to try to make sense of what we have read, what we have learned. Montaigne wonders when the old man will stop learning and be wise in what he has learned, and it seems to me that his own essays were an attempt to do just that.
But it is hard to give up. The internet assures me that this one new book will explain things to me once and for all. Or that the latest novel will change the way I think of the world, or I must read a newly translated book that was never-before available in English. And it is not just the push-marketing of Amazon and the like; when I look something up on Wiki or do a Google search, I am presented with lists of books that will elucidate the very subject which I am interested in – and I can have an electronic version of said book within seconds. And then there are the prize-winning books, the best seller lists, the books I keep seeing people walking around with. Surely, of the “making many books there is no end.”
But even without our buying books, myriads of books are available to us. Libraries have a far vaster array of offerings than they used to have, as they pool their resources and make what we used to call inter-library loans so easy. Anything we want is available one way or another – anything we want except the answers that will enable us to stop looking.
One of my early blogs (“Possessing That Which Was Mine”) was about a vow I made to read nothing new – to go back and reread what I had read for a second time and to take time to process what I had learned. That did not last long. After a few months, someone recommended something that “I absolutely had to read,” and I was off.
In addition, I have cabinets full of daily journals that go back 21 years, and sporadic journal entries and autobiographical fragments going back to my childhood. I have manuscripts of novels and short stories that I have been meaning to edit for years, but never do. I clearly like writing more than I like revision. just as I like reading a new book better than really taking time to absorb an old one. I am getting to an age at which I either need to use this material or recycle it. Do I really want my children to read my journals? (Not that they would have any interest.)
There are various ways to handle such material. I have a friend who, cleaning out his own artwork, offered to send all his friends a piece. I happily accepted. Other friends have reduced their written work to one flash drive that they can slip in their pocket and jettison before death if they don’t want their heirs pouring through the story of their lives.
But I am not ready to jettison my precious words without review. So, I have decided to do a moderated version of Swedish death cleaning with the recorded experiences and ideas in my life. First of all, I am going to try to stick to re-reading rather than reading. For light reading (which for me means mostly mysteries), having long forgotten the “who-done-it” for novels I read over thirty years ago, I have the joys of Ngaio Marsh, Amandra Cross, and Agatha Christie to look forward to again. For more serious reading, I will start with the novels that have meant the most to me over the years, probably first going back to Herman Hesse, Jorge Borges, and George Eliot. For non-fiction, I am currently rereading David Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, and will soon move on to Thoreau and Montaigne.
And as for my manuscripts, about ten years ago I drafted a novel (The Order of the Stock Farm Jesus – excerpt here) about an old woman who encounters a young girl who, for reasons of her own, wants to collaborate on writing a list of rules for life. What are the rules you live by? What is the difference between what you do and what you think you should do? Writing this novel was a good exercise then, but ten years later it seems an even better one. In conjunction with that project, I will start reading my own voluminous journals (young to old) to see what the lessons of my life were. What can I teach myself? Have I learned anything? Can I put what I have learned into words? More importantly, have I internalized these learnings and started to act accordingly? (Can you teach an old dog new tricks?)
Virginia Woolf kept journals, and – although she never got very old – said that she wrote precisely so that her older self could read her younger self: “Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920, will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost…” Marion Milner (A Life of One’s Own) started keeping journals in a desperate attempt to find out what it was in life that made her really happy. Thoreau went to Walden and kept a journal to “front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” I’ll let you know how my project goes, and – if you have attempted anything similar – please tell me about it!
I have written before on keeping journals in old age, “Journaling in Old Age.” It’s not too late! I didn’t start doing it seriously until I was 53, but I am so glad I did. The benefits accrue not just in having a record, but in the very process of sorting out your thoughts every day, at transferring your experiences into words. Try it.
If you have been journaling, you might look at an old blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for ideas about how to mine your own words for life lessons. You might also look at my fanciful short story, “Nothing New.”
When I Come To Be Old 