Author: whenicometobeold

Does Everyone Die Young?

I just read an intriguing book by Marc Augé, entitled Everyone Dies Young. Augé is a distinguished and famous anthropologist; he was eighty-one in 2016 when he published this slim volume of essays about old age.  It starts with the story of Mounette, his first cat, who aged without the psychological constraints that human beings struggle with as they age, and this cat yet knew her own limitations.  As Mounette aged, she gave up leaping to the beloved mantel and contentedly spent days in the sunshine in a soft chair by the window. When she could not leap onto the chair, she lay on the floor.  The old cat was not perturbed.  Like the elderly human, it had time.  Unlike the human, it had no age: “Time is a freedom, age a constraint.  The cat, apparently, does not know this constraint.”

We all feel the “constraint” of age in various ways.  Aches and pains remind us.  Other people remind us.  And then there is the mirror.  In medieval literature (Langland, Gower), the mirror is the vehicle which confronts us with our own age.  In “The Uncanny,” Freud tells of his surprise that the reflection of the old man in the window is his self.  Robert Graves and Thomas Hardy write poignant poems about what they see in the mirror.  They are alternately puzzled and outraged.  And why does the mirror sometimes surprise us?  Because we feel young inside.  That continuing self, the “person” that we were at twenty, is still there somewhere, but now is enshrouded with a wrinkled and faded façade. 

It is a truism that “you are only as old as you feel.”  Nevertheless, one of the worse things that our culture can say about our older comrades is that “they are showing their age,” which usually means they are “acting old” (never a good thing).  Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, posited that feeling younger psychologically would have a positive effect on the physical body and did the famous “counterclockwise” experiment in which she moved a group of elders into an environment that mimicked (or maybe mocked) the world of 1959, the world of their youth.  They watched old television programs, read old magazines, discussed old headlines.  And there were no mirrors.  The staff treated them as if they were young; no one helped them with their luggage or condescended to them.  At the end of the week, they showed improvement in almost all measurable areas – cognitive, physical, perceptual.  Of course, there was no control group and perhaps the group just profited from attention, socialization, and respect from the staff.

We know this kind of thing works.  In this digital age, when our cell phone can design a radio program based on the music we listened to in our youth (and isn’t that the music we all love?), we get a lift as one old favorite after another conjures up scenes and emotions from the days when our whole life was in front of us.  We like talking about old times, particularly with someone who was there.  We enjoy re-reading the books and re-watching the movies that shaped our lives, and all of it is available to us with a few clicks.  We can bring 1959 back all by ourselves.

There is also the matter of memory.  Many old people have much better memories of fifty years ago then they do of last week.  True, we have had time to polish those memories, but they are there.  Augé says that “with regard to our pasts, we are all creators and artists.  We advance facing backward, forever observing and reconstructing the times gone by.”  We can remember the lyrics to a song we haven’t heard for decades and the name of the friend who bought us our first cigarette.  But, for dear life, we can’t remember the name of our neighbor’s husband.  We are youthful in memory.  Except in the face of physical ailments, we all feel young.

Augé ends with this from the title essay of Everyone Dies Young:

Time, as old age experiences it, is not the accumulated, ordered sum of the events of the past.  It is a palimpsest; everything inscribed there does not reappear, and sometimes the earliest inscriptions surface most easily.  Alzheimer’s disease is only an acceleration of the natural selection process of forgetting, at the end of which it seems that the most tenacious – if not the most faithful – images are often those of childhood.  Whether we delight in this fact or deplore it, because there is a share of cruelty in such an observation, we must nevertheless admit it:  everyone dies young.  (85)

I recommend Augé’s little book.  He approaches old age from the vantage point of being old and being trained as an anthropologist/ethnologist.  He encourages us to look at old age as a cultural as well as a biological construction. 

If you are interested in people and mirrors, you might try my old story, “Reflections.”  I don’t like looking in the mirror myself, but don’t seem to be able to avoid it.

 

The Old Lady Wonders: How Many Weeks Do I Have Left?

There is a recent book by Oliver Burkeman entitled: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.  Burkeman makes his calculation on the assumption that we will live until about 80, using weeks because he thinks we will find it more specific and alarming than the years we read off an actuarial table.  By Burkeman’s reckoning, I have about 10 years or 520 weeks left.  If I am lucky (or unlucky) enough to reach 90, you could double that.  Of course, you have to subtract years spent in dementia or visiting your in-laws (just kidding). 

In general, I hate self-help books of the newer ilk (ask me about Arnold Bennett or Lin Yutang though) – especially those that talk about reversing aging or ways to achieve “all that you can be.”  I’ve been duped one too many times, and thinking you can do the impossible is not a formula for a peaceful and contented life.  However, I heard an interview that Burkeman recorded with Krista Tippett, and decided this book might be interesting.

In any case, his point is to impress on us that we are mortal and our time is limited.  All men are mortal says the Greek syllogism – and indeed we are.  It is hard to get that fact firmly imprinted in our consciousness.  There is an old Buddhist saying that the mountain is heavy only if you try to lift it up.  This is meant to remind us that we don’t have to carry all our troubles around all the time.  Very good advice.  But I wonder a little if the advice about death should not be the opposite.  We are all too eager not to carry our mortality around.  Sartre said that our own death was unrealizable.  Freud said that it was “impossible to imagine our own death.” 

Freud admits that sometimes our guard slips and we are reminded of our mortality.  War, for instance, does this.  And Freud thought it was a good thing to remember our transience.  So did the Buddha.  Buddhism has five remembrances that I recite to myself at the end of my meditation time.  They are reminders that we are subject to illness, old age, impermanence, death and karma.  And still, the thought of just those 520 weeks left brings me up short.  Life has very real limits.

We all know the euphoria of close escapes with mortality – when we awake in the hospital after a dreaded operation, when the plane with the misfiring engine (safely) hits the tarmac, when we narrowly escape a head-on car crash on a country road.  In those foxhole moments we swear to appreciate every moment of our lives going forward, and yet the next morning we are complaining about lukewarm coffee.

Burkeman offers us some good but seemingly contradictory advice.  First, we have to do triage – establish the things that are the most important to us; he advises making a long list, prioritizing it, and crossing out everything after the first four.  This is hard.  Everyone these days is subject to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), a term most often related to news and gossip cycles.  But it also applies to our lives.  We do not want to give up hope of ever living long enough to learn to speak French or visit the Galapagos.  The fact is, we squander much time fretting about such things and distracting ourselves from the more important items on our list.  One of my favorite Shakespearean lines is his advice from Sonnet 146: “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross.”  That could be a life motto.

On the other hand, Burkeman bemoans “pathological productivity” – the number of weeks we have left hardly matter if we spend them racing toward our goals rather than enjoying them.  He especially bemoans the decline of hobbies – which he defines as “something that does not lead to something else, but is interesting and enjoyable on its own.”  It can’t be something we are professionally good at or which we hope will turn a profit.  I put both my writing and piano playing in the “hobby” category.  He tells a particularly heartwarming story about Rod Stewart and his hobby of building mediocre model railroads.   

So, we need both to do triage and to appreciate every moment.  Otherwise, we will have been pedaling so hard to get – where? – that it will hardly matter how many weeks we have.  And because, in case you have not noticed, you will never get there.  Even if you achieve the four main items on your bucket list, there will also be an unsatisfied desire.

So, we want to do the things that are meaningful to us, but we don’t want to “instrumentalize” time – as if it were just another resource to apply as efficiently and effectively as possible.  And you have to remember that you are mortal; your time is limited.  But, somehow, Burkeman ends on a hopeful note:

The average lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.  But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time.  It’s a cause for relief.  You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be.  Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start to work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

I only take exception to the word work in the last sentence.  If indeed the task is glorious, engagement with it will not be work. 

If you are interested in a story about hobbies and mortality, you might try an old one of mine, “A Spoonful of Sugar.”

 

 

 

 

A Grandmother’s Despair and the Need for a New Religion

I recently re-read an old essay (1967) by Lynn White, one of my favorite historians, entitled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Yes, people were talking about danger to our planet over 55 years ago.  Discouraging, isn’t it, that the trajectory is still so dismal?  That so little has been done?  In his essay, White details how the West and Christianity “defeated” paganism (wherein everything has a spirit – think of Native American culture) and put in its place the anthropocentric culture (check out Psalm 8:6 or Genesis 1:26) which is ruining the planet.

It is clear from reading their “documents of origin” that religions of the past evolved to solve or ameliorate the problems of their day.  The Old Testament lays out rules for neighbors (if not tribes) to live in peace and incentives for taking care of the poor and widows.  It prohibits foods likely to cause disease and provides for the quarantine of the contagious. It gives authority to an ordained leader to keep civilization on a stable footing.  But these sacred documents were spawned of the era out of which they were created.  When Genesis gave man dominion over the rest of the creation, no one in that era would have imagined where such ascendancy would lead.

In detailing Western religion’s complicity in the fouling of our planet, Lynn White makes one exception – St. Francis, “the greatest radical in human history.” The key was humility:

…the virtue of humility – not just for the individual but for man as a species.  Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures. With him the ant is no longer simply a homily for the lazy, flames a sign of the thrust of the soul toward union with God; now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in their own ways as Brother Man does in his.

According to White, Francis was lucky to have escaped the stake – maybe he should be the patron saint for ecologists.

We haven’t made much progress since White’s essay was written in 1967 – but we do now have a pope who chose the name of the humble saint. In his encyclical “Laudato Si” (“Be Praised), Pope Francis does address climate change and other threats to our planet: “These situations have caused sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world, to cry out, pleading that we take another course. Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.”  He is to be commended; I only wish he were heeded.

In any case, Lynn White thinks that “more science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion or rethink the old one.”  I agree.  “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.”

I don’t think that there is much help in “rethinking” the old religion.  But neither do I see where the new one will come from.  It needs to be entirely different.  Instead of “go forth and multiply,” we need to recognize the holiness of restraint and decrease.  Instead of giving man dominance over creation, man should get on his knees in gratitude for the creation that makes his life – all life – possible.

A whole segment of society has given up and assumes we will go through the hell with our environment and, hopefully, come out on the other side.  There is a popular (and good) website called Post Doom, which defines the “post doom” mind-set as “what opens up when we remember who we are, accept the inevitable, honor our grief, and prioritize what is pro-future and soul-nourishing.”  The site promotes “a fierce and fearless reverence for life and relative equanimity even in the midst of abrupt climate mayhem, a global pandemic, and collapse of both the health of the biosphere and business as usual.”  A variety of guests have interviews on the site; many (like Richard Rohr) come from a religious perspective.  It is fairly pessimistic, but it is also realistic.  We need to face the truth to even begin to cope with it.

For there is one more thing that any religion must do.  It must provide some level of assurance and comfort that “all will be well,” as Julian of Norwich put it.  Otherwise, as we have seen all to vividly and often of late, the fearful draw of anachronistic fundamentalism will continue.  Again, I am verbalizing a hope and not a prescription, projecting a possibility that I cannot quite imagine.  But if individual efforts have failed (and they have), if governments fail to act, if collective efforts seem noble but futile, a new religion, which starts a fervent crusade to save the planet and changes the cultural paradigm, seems the only hope.  Perhaps a desperate hope.

My story this week, “Baptismal Rights,” is about a grandmother who despairs for her grandchildren and wants to give them some method to cope with the damaged and threatening world they will grow up in.  She is grasping at straws, as are we all.

Old Folks and Tales of Climate Catastrophe

We watched Don’t Look Up last night, which led to some interesting discussions and dreams (nightmares?) at our house.  The movie would seem to be an allegory for the way the world is (or mostly isn’t) dealing with climate change.  Old characters – other than a pathetic old general who runs an abortive mission to save the world – do not have much of a role, but the movie got me thinking about some recent novels about our future and climate change in which the old are integral to the plot.

The character of old Grandy in High House by Jessie Greengrass is a good example.  Grandy is raising his granddaughter in a summer community; Grandy takes care of everyone’s cottages while they are away, knowing how to do almost everything from repairs to gardening. The climate scientist in the book seeks him out because she has a “high house” nearby – a house presumably safe for a while from storms and ocean elevation – and is preparing the property to harbor her young son and teenage stepdaughter when the apocalypse comes.   The scientist knows the house will eventually be surrounded by water, so the huge stockpiles she has amassed will (hopefully) not be stolen or plundered.  The scientist herself intends to stay in the battle until the end; she does not foresee herself surviving to get to the high house.  Close to the beginning of the major devastation, she convinces Grandy, now in a wheelchair from a broken hip, to move into the high house with his granddaughter and help her children survive.  Grandy complies; his house will flood. He has no choice.

So we are left with a high house, two teenage girls, a very young boy, and Grandy – who cannot do much but knows everything about how to get the generator going, feed the chickens, harvest the garden, thresh the wheat.   Grandy is the fountain of both wisdom and knowledge.  He delivers instructions patiently from a chair in the kitchen, as the younger folks tend livestock, plant vegetables, and salt fish.   At first their isolation and wholesome lifestyle at the high house seems idyllic, and then the generator stops working, the storms get worse, and the full impact hits.  It ends with the thoughts of one of the young women.  Caro says “the high house isn’t an ark.  We aren’t really saved.  We are only the last ones, waiting.”  There is no doubt, though, that they would not have lived as long as they had without Grandy.  There is also no doubt that had the world had Grandy’s wisdom, the predicament might have been averted.  I highly recommend The High House.

I do not recommend Joy Williams’ Harrow.  First is a hard book to read – although this in itself is not a reason to avoid it.  Sometimes hard books are needed to address hard topics – but not in this case.  The Atlantic calls Williams “the great prophet of nothingness.” Harrow gives us no such redeeming characters or situations as we have with Grandy and his charges at the high house.  We sometimes empathize, but we do not identify with these people, nor do we admire them.  The main character (Christen, nicknamed Lamb), in a search for her lost mother in a time of civil dissolution and “conservative” politics (meaning in this case actually waging war on what remains of nature), stumbles on a dilapidated resort/conference center full of old people who are, by turns, giving up their lives in what seem to be futile acts of ecoterrorism.  They cannot bear to live without doing something, but there is almost nothing they can do but die with great futility.  They fail to even comfort each other, and their acts of self-immolation are often misdirected.  If Grandy tried to help with his old-fashioned knowledge about how to live a primitive life, these folks are just trying to figure out the best way to die.

These two novels are climate dystopias, but they somehow reminded me of Margaret Drabble’s much more conventional book of a few years ago about ways to be old, The Dark Flood Rises.  Drabble’s book (highly recommended) touches on climate change only incidentally, with the main character being an older woman, Fran, who works on housing issues for the elderly, cares for her ailing ex-husband, and tries to make some sense out of what remains of her life.  Most of the other characters are also old, and we get an array of ways people arrange the ends of their lives – physically (much discussion of old age homes and such) and psychologically.

“Prepare your ship of death” Fran tells herself over and over – which is a phrase from “The Ship of Death” by D.H. Lawrence from whence Drabble got the book’s title:

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

Lawrence is talking about the “dark flood” of death; these books enable us to also read it as the dark flood of global warming.

I have written about old folks and environmental issues before (see “Failing Bodies and the Failing Planet“).  Our role is an open question that these books address – do we have wisdom to offer?  Should we risk death (so close anyway) to help in some way?  What to do? 

This week’s story, “Three Women,” does not seek to answer these questions, but just to look at some ways we pattern our lives and see (or fail to see) ourselves.

 

The Gift of Latter Rains – What Old Age Might Give Us

I have written about the rewards of old age from time to time.  It is sometimes hard to remember that – beyond Medicare – there are gifts for which we should be grateful.  T. S. Eliot lists the gifts of old age, but some of the “gifts” seem more like punishments (“the painful recollection of all we have done”).  Saint Benedict says that old age is a truce from God, in that it gives us a chance to “amend our misdeeds.”  These might be dubious gifts. 

But the Bible talks – in both the Old and New Testaments, about the “latter rains.”  There is this from Deuteronomy: “That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.”  And from the Epistle of James: “Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.”  The latter rain – in a dry country, rain is a gift; Jeremiah says that the happy soul is like a “watered garden.”   And the latter rain is particularly precious.  Apparently, in Israel, the early or first rains are called the Yoreh.  They soften the land and make it malleable for the plow.  The middle months, the months of summer, are dry, but the late rains, which are called the Malkosh, actually allow the crops to finally ripen for harvest.

What are the latter rains of life? What are the gifts of old age?  Paradoxically, many of them come from giving up on things.  How the relinquishment of ambition frees us!  Fantasies often fall away!  Bertrand Russell, in his wonderful essay “How to Grow Old,” asserts that the greatest gift is the ability to let “the walls of the ego recede.”  He warns, however, against two dangers that inhibit this gift: 1) “undue absorption in the past,” and 2) “Clinging to youth in the hope of sucking vigor from its virility.”  The latter involves his feeling that, while children and grandchildren may be gifts, they should not be emotional crutches.  Here is a quote to ponder:

When your children are grown up they want to live their own lives, and if you continue to be as interested in them as you were when they were young, you are likely to become a burden, unless they are unusually callous.  I do not mean that one should be without interest in them, but one’s interest should be contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic….

Many of us have children who wish we were slightly more contemplative and vastly more philanthropic, I would guess.

There are other gifts.  In old age, we find that much of what we worry about never comes to pass – or, if it does, it is not half as bad as we expected.  (Try making a list of the things you worried about when you were thirty-five!) If we have any sense, this teaches us to worry less.  Sometimes we find in old age, that seeds we planted long ago and had long since given up on, finally come to bud and flower.  Again, if we have any sense, this teaches us to wait, to bide our time.

Bide our time.  Maybe the greatest gift of old age is time.  The latter rain brings time to reflect.  Time to pursue things we did not have space for in our busy lives.  As time until the end shortens, time in the here and now expands.  We have time to water our gardens.

Back to Russell and the gift of descendants, this week’s story, “Boxing Day,” is a meditation of a group of adult children who are for the first time marking a holiday without parental supervision or obligation.  Enjoy. 

Father Time and Airport Security

I traveled over the holidays – probably not a wise decision, but it seemed like a necessary one at the time.  As I double-masked, waited in long lines, and prayed that our flight crew did not call in sick, I pondered why I was doing this at seventy years of age.  Open question.  But the question of age and its benefits and disadvantages kept coming back to me during this time as we approach the end of 2021 and the prospect of another year gone.

Nothing has changed in the past few decades as much as air travel.  So, I separated my liquids and made sure our fruit cake was not wrapped in aluminum foil.  When I came to the front of the airport security line, I asked a TSA employee if I needed to remove my shoes.  I tend to get dizzy bending down so I would have liked to avoid untying my sneakers, not to mention pattering around on my socks on a dirty airport floor.   The nice young man asked how old I was, and I told him (70).  He smiled and said that the limit was 75, but I should just lie next time because they never check.  Nevertheless, I make it a policy never to fib to people who can put me on a “no fly” list, so I guess I will keep taking my shoes off.  But the encounter got me thinking about uses of age – we want to be old to qualify for keeping our shoes on, for Social Security and Medicare (especially Medicare!), for early Covid vaccinations, for senior discounts, but we don’t want any age restrictions on driving, employment, credit, or any other parts of our lives.  I have a 95-year-old relative who says she is too old if confronted with something she doesn’t want to do, but alternately asserts that she is so old that she can do anything she wants to do in the face of any kind of limitations (regardless of protest from the near and dear).  Ahhh….  In a way, this is all of us.

Centuries ago, there was little concept of age restrictions on the old; neither was there much sympathy for retirement.   Pope Celestine became the first pope to “abdicate” at age 79 (in 1294) for which he was much maligned; he wanted to become a hermit.   Celestine even makes it into one of Dante’s circles of hell for his “great refusal.”  The whole point of King Lear seems to be (at least at first glance) that the old man let go of the rei(g)ns too soon.

Early modern times did make some allowances for the old.  At sixty, one could not be forced into military service and at seventy an elder was exempt from jury duty.  (The latter is of interest to me as I have a jury duty notice and, in my state, the automatic exemption age is 72 and I don’t quite make it.)

But, in general, the old were expected to carry on to the extent of their capabilities.  To be excused from service to the House of Lords, for example, age was generally not enough.  The important imperative to persevere, however, was more ethical than legal, and in it was embedded the assumption of the duty of the old to be wise and to impart that wisdom to the young.   When the Fool admonishes Lear that “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise,” he paraphrases the words that Lucrece addresses to Priam as she views a tapestry depicting the deception of Sinon (in the Bard’s “Rape of Lucrece”): “Priam, why art thou old, and yet not wise?” Regardless of her age, no one expected or wanted the Virgin Queen Elizabeth to retire in Shakespearean England (and the current Queen Elizabeth apparently assumes this is still the case).

Again, I am also focused on numbers because we are headed toward the countdown for a new year. (I will be asleep when the ball actually falls.)  What will 2022 bring besides making me another year older (if I live through it)?  I have a habit of making resolutions in my journal every year, but last year’s entry was mostly about my hope that Covid would disappear.  That has been a disappointment for us all.  I hope for more good days, more ordinary days.  I pray with the Psalmist that life will even out, and that God will “make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil” (Psalm 90), that there will be a return to normality, good days to make up for the bad, normal to balance the abnormal.  But maybe such strict accounting is not necessary; as Frost says, “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”   If Frost is right, numbers surely do not matter.

My new year story, “Amnesia at the Airport,” was prompted by memory and my recent air travel.  It compares the fantasies of youth with the realities of age, and I hope it also points out the advantages of each.  You might also take a look at my blog on Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  Cheers!

Holidays, Holy Days, and Old Saint Nick

 

The holidays are upon us, and – as usual – we will be traveling to see relatives.  I am looking forward to the family, but not the airports, highways, hotels and car rental firms.  I am getting too old for this, which means I spend December dreading the season when I should be celebrating the coming of the light. 

Christmas itself is a disappointing holiday in many ways.  One of the most awkward situations over the years as we have visited our children’s homes is the moment when we are about to leave for a Christmas Eve service at a church we have located on-line and ask if anyone – child or grandchild – would like to go with us.  The question clears the room rapidly.  So we go to church to try to feel what Christians and Druids felt as the dark days start to get light again, and everyone else remains home and dreams of the glories of capitalism that will appear under the tree in the morning.

I recently heard Rebecca Solnit use the term “the tyranny of the quantifiable” (which she attributed to Chip Ward).  What a wonderful description of the world we live in!  Democracy may be trouble – I am not quarreling with that.  But the biggest winner of all is capitalism.  For a holiday that celebrates the worth that can come out of a cow’s manger, the indoctrination of us all to a season of excess is pitiful.  And in an age when you can simulate sunlight and set your thermostat at 70 (no matter the weather outside), perhaps the turning of the year does not seem like such a miracle.

Don’t get me wrong, we looked forward to Christmas presents when I was a child.  Expectations were lower but ripping paper off packages was just as passionate as it is now.  But we had other memories of Christmas – church nativity pageants, family carol sings, the smells of cooking that went on and on.  I know that I sound like an old grump.  I will keep these thoughts to myself when I visit the grandkids and help them put batteries in the multitude of plastic that will emerge on Christmas morning.

Even Christmas decorations have gone downhill (says the grumpy old lady).  Our neighborhood is filled with those blow-up Santas and elves, which require a light and a noisy compressor to keep them inflated during the evening.  During the day, the deflated Saint Nicks look like piles of garbage bags on the lawn.  Our neighbors have an inflatable Holy Family, which is sad to see in its deflated daytime state.  It would be more of a “joy to the world” if we acknowledged global warming and cut down on the Snoopy Santas.

Santa, as you probably know, traces his origins to Saint Nicholas.  Saint Nicholas was the patron saint of – among other things –merchants and children.  So maybe he would not have disapproved of a holiday which made both children and merchants happy.  He died in the 4th century at the age of 73 – a ripe old age for those perilous times.  He is usually depicted with a white beard, but little body fat.  It was Coca Cola ads that originally made Santa chubby. (Of course, he does have to eat all those cookies.)  Santa is always depicted as old, but never as decrepit, never as tired, never as sick.  But think of all that traveling (magic reindeer or not)!  I only have to face air travel for a few hours, but it will age me.  It always does.  I am sure that my grandchildren wish that I were jollier and came with more presents that I can fit in my carry-on luggage.  I am definitely not aging as well as Santa.

Some of my grandchildren celebrate Three Kings Day on Epiphany.  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.  But it should be noted that the eldest brought the gold.

I am posting a new Christmas story – “Cookie Crumbs.”  The tale of a Santa for an old person.  There are other stories about Christmas here; you might try “Epiphany” if you are dealing with young adult children returning home for the holidays.  As we head to the New Year, there is also the post “Baby New Year and Old Father Time” from a couple of years ago.  Here’s to a meaningful holiday season and a peaceful and healthy new year. 

Uncertainty and Old Age

 

In his old age, Einstein was perplexed by quantum theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  “God does not play dice with the universe,” exclaimed the great genius.  Bohr, another great genius, answered (less famously) “It’s not our place to tell Him how to run the world.”  We want to believe that life is not subject to blind chance, that the world is reasonable and just.  If we live long enough, we learn otherwise.

I recently finished When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (highly recommended).  This somewhat strange book explores the scientists of the twentieth century and the consequences of their science.  It filled a gaping void in my education by detailing the development of quantum theory up to the point of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  Scientific advances have done wonderful things like cleaning our water and delivering us from polio, but science was also responsible for the atom bomb.  One of the first stories in the book concerns Fritz Haber, who both invented a way to fix nitrogen out of the air (making chemical fertilizer possible and warding off global famine) and also engineered Germany’s gas attacks during the first World War. 

Labatut eventually moves on to Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle – the theory that the underpinnings of the universe are based on chance, on odds, on probabilities.  How that threatens us!  How it threatened Einstein!

Labatut writes:

For Einstein, physics must speak of causes and effects, and not only of probabilities.  He refused to believe that the facts of the world obeyed a logic so contrary to common sense.  Chance could not be enthroned at the expense of the notion of natural laws.  There had to be something deeper.  Something not yet known.  A hidden variable that could dissipate the fog of Copenhagen [this refers to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Heisenberg and Bohr relating to quantum mechanics] and reveal the order that undergirded the randomness of the subatomic world. (167)

Einstein struggled with this proposed randomness for the rest of his life.

Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize in 1932.  In 1939 the Nazis asked him about the feasibility of an atom bomb – he said it was not possible within the duration of the war and was apparently surprised when one was dropped on Hiroshima.  One might hope he was lying to Hitler to stop him; my guess was that he was just wrong.

The reader should be aware that Labatut’s book is a mixture of fact and fiction, and I don’t know enough about the subject matter to differentiate.  But it is a good read.  And it forces us to think again about technology and science and what we know to be true.  And how much of life is pure chance.

Although our parents acknowledged that “life is not fair” (after our cries of “it’s not fair”), the subliminal message was always that life is not random, that we have some significant level of control. People who fared badly did something wrong (didn’t finish college, didn’t work hard enough, ate too much, etc.) – if we will only get that degree, get that job, find that husband, have that baby – everything will be okay.  And yet everyone has had the experience of watching bad things happen to good people.  Lung cancer sometimes comes to those who never smoked, husbands leave loving wives, and one wild child in a wonderful family causes endless grief.  Uncertainty principle indeed.  Shakespeare has the poor Earl of Gloucester acknowledge that “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport.” 

The world has never liked to think that the human life is based on probability, chance.  When in the 17th century “bills of mortality” were first used to create actuarial tables for such things as life insurance, people bridled at replacing individual providence with en masse reckonings.  Fate in the hands of mathematics is quite different from providence in the control of a deity.  Identical numbers/probabilities would be used for you or your neighbor or the sinner down the street; there is nothing individual or ethical about such calculations.   It might have been a scientific approach, an enlightened approach, but it was not comforting.

No one wants to hear about wanton boys and flies.  No one wants to think that life is random on some basic level.  No one wants to believe that technology gets away from us and has repercussions that we cannot predict.  But, those who have lived long, know that this is true.   

Old Age, Space Age

I had heard that there would be a lunar eclipse last night, so when I got up at 4:30, I looked for it.  The moon was about 2/3 covered and was opening up, but it did initially have a pink glow.  I was glad to see it –the night was cold but the sky was clear, and the stars (suns) were out.

It reminded me of other nocturnal sky events, most notably when I was 6 and we were living out in the woods. My father bundled us out of bed to see Sputnik as it moved like a living star across the sky.  Such excitement as he pointed upwards and told us we were seeing something that no one had ever seen before.  I don’t know if we saw Sputnik 1 or 2 – the second was launched about a month afterwards and contained the poor dog Laika, with whom I had much empathy as a child and later included in one of my stories.

Last night’s lunar viewing also reminded me of the first U.S. manned space flight, Alan Shepard in his Mercury capsule (Freedom 7), when I was 9 years old.  My mother had to pick me up at school that day and take me to the doctor because I had a bad earache and the nurse insisted on it.  She had been monitoring the news all day about the capsule’s progress and was not happy about being dragged away.  When we came out of the pediatrician’s office, Mom started waylaying people on the street asking them if Shepard had gotten back safely.   People were happy to tell her he had.  Of course, Freedom 7 did not even orbit the earth.  Shepard’s capsule went up and then down in a perfect parabola – the shape of our lives according to Dante.  A year later John Glenn would become the family hero when he achieved earth orbit in Friendship 7.

And now I have lived long enough to see rich people build their own spaceships in order to give other rich people the thrill that we all got vicariously and collectively through Alan Shepard and John Glenn.  President Kennedy hoped to replace the patriotism and energy of war with that of exploration, and it worked for a while.  But capitalism trumps all.  Young children used to want to be astronauts; now they want to be rich so they can be astronauts.  And instead of one satellite to look for in the sky, orbital space is so full of our discarded junk that it is becoming a hazard.

All of this from getting out of bed to see the eclipse.  I hope some daddies wrapped their kids in blankets and took them outside to see it.  Robert Frost told us that we needed to “choose something like a star” to look at because:

It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Sputnik was no star.  It was a piece of technology and a propaganda tool.  The American space program started with stellar ambitions and has ended as the plaything of the wealthiest men.  It was a different time.  Laika the dog was loved by children everywhere.  Heroes like Alan Shepard and John Glenn were not torn apart by the media as soon as the news cycle started to flag.  “Choose something like a star” Frost said.   Hard to do when light pollution almost blots out the night sky, but try anyway.  I had a beautiful view this morning.

Even after sixty-some years, I remembered Laika well enough to include her in a story, “What Crime is There in Error?” – part of my Metamorphoses  series.

Last Confessions – Waiting Until the End to Tell the Story

When Abulrazak Gunrah won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, I was somewhat abashed that I had read nothing by him.  I looked for something related to aging, and chose The Last Gift, which was published in 2011, when the author was 63. (The main character is also 63.)  It is the story of the last days of Abbas, a man who has kept the secrets of his youth for his whole life.  Even his children, born and raised in England, do not know where he came from.  We are English, his children tell people who ask about the source of their brown skin.  Abbas’s wife Maryam, much younger and the anchor that kept him on shore after a long period at sea, has an equally mystifying past.  She was a foundling whose parents were never identified, and she broke ties with her foster family when she ran away with Abbas.  Secrets all around.

When we enter the story, Abbas is getting old and suffering from diabetes.  The children of the family have grown and are successfully negotiating university and the working world.  They maintain ties with their parents, ties of obligation and guilt.  Soon, Abbas has a collapse from diabetes, and then a series of strokes, losing his speech and making him weak.  We find him working desperately to recover his voice because he finally feels compelled to tell his story before it is too late.  “He had left things for too long and there was no one to blame except himself.”  Abbas’s confession spills out in languages his family can and cannot understand; the substance of his story causes them all to re-evaluate their lives and the secrets they themselves are hiding.   Soon his wife is also telling her story, as to why she abandoned and has never communicated with her foster family.

It is a good book; I recommend it.  It is a tale of immigrants and parenthood, but I left it thinking mainly about the compulsion many of us have to tell our stories before we are gone.  Capitalism has even tapped into this – there are apps and websites (i.e. StoryWorth, Saga) that guide you through the process and print you out a glossy book with your picture on it in the end – something to be gifted to all the relatives (whether they want it or not).  There are ghost writers who will gladly do it for you (for a substantial fee) and will be less humble about your life than you might be.  Some  people write out their memories longhand and place them in an envelope with their will.  We all have secrets, but we are not quite sure that we want our secrets to die with us.

Of course, in these days of ancestry.com and DNA tests, family secrets are harder than ever to keep.  One reason to tell our own story might be to exert some control over the narrative.  But the urge to impart everything before you go is as old as man.  Classically, it takes the form of a last confession to a priest, but more often it is a plethora of tales told in one’s old age.  Even people with dementia seem to want to tell their stories; in her last years, my mother told hers over and over again, including many details of her young life that we had never heard before.

As I have said elsewhere, writing one’s life – present or past – is an enlightening and therapeutic experience.  To have to put words to the fearsome memory or that critical act is a good exercise, and the monster of memory is often tamed by calling it out by name.  And surely, if there are facts that someone is likely to unearth after you are gone, it might make sense to tell your story in context.  We all have such memories, I can assure you.  They are not necessarily secret, but they are not necessarily spoken either.  It makes no sense to pretend you are perfect.  Even if your family believed that, is that a good image to leave them with?  How will that make them feel about their own stumbles?

In Gunrah’s novel, Abbas’ family is stunned and then intrigued by his secrets (no spoilers here).  In the end, his son and daughter are happy to have both a past to investigate and a better feeling for their father as a real person.  It is, indeed, a “last gift.”

Truth is important, and communal truth is increasingly rare.  My latest story, “And Now, A Word from Dead Barry,” is a humorous look at the role of truth in life and the afterlife.  Meanwhile, I encourage you to write down your story and then think about who you need to share it with.  Or not.  But you might not be able to decide that until you can put your arms (and words) around what your story is.