Category: old age literature

“Something Good” – Wendell Berry and Remembering When We Made a Difference

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good. (from “Something Good,” The Sound of Music)

Last week, I wrote about the regrets that we all have about our pasts and wondered about the best way to handle them in our old age.  Reading Wendell Berry’s new book, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, made me think about the “good” things from the past.  If you’re like me, you spend much more time with your shames and regrets than you do with “worthy” acts.  What things in our lives have been for the good, what experiences have we had and stories have we told that made a positive difference, which resulted in “something good”?  The fortunate among us have had an old friend, student, or co-worker thank us years later for something we did not even remember doing for them or for kind words that we can’t even recall at all.  It would probably do us all good to dwell more often on the positive aspects of our lives and less often on our (numerous) regrets.

Berry’s book is narrated by Andy, the very elderly grandson of Marce Catlett.  Long ago, Marc stood up to the Duke Tobacco interests by sharing his experience with his neighbors.  His oft-repeated story of one day, told over and over, shaped the lives of all those around him in the wonderful world of Port William.  The day was devastating, but the main part of the story is about how Marce immediately picked up and carried on and worked with fellow farmers so that such a day would never happen to them again.

First, let me say that Wendell Berry just published this book at the age of 91, and it is a true gift for all of us.  Marce Catlett  is a spare book written with a sledgehammer, and not just a story about 1917.  Berry has a pretty good idea about not only what is wrong in Washington these days, but what is wrong with all of us.  And our children.    The novel can be read in a day, but it would take much longer than a day to forget it – and so it was with Marce Catlett’s story about coming home from a tobacco auction with less money in his pocket than it had taken him to grow the crop.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful writer about wonderful things; many of us know his poetry (think of “The Peace of Wild Things” or “How to be A Poet).   We also have read his essays, which go back to the 1960s and include gems like “Living in the Presence of Fear” and “Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer.”  But it is his fiction – the novels and stories of Port William – that future generations will look back on for a prophetic voice that was seldom heeded.  Marce Catlett is simply the culmination of this story.  You do not have to have read any of the others to appreciate this latest (but hopefully not last) work though; Berry fills us in.  I was greatly disappointed not to find it listed in this week’s NYTimes Book Review as among the best of 2025; they are wrong.  It is probably the very best of 2025.  And relevant to us elders – written by an elder, narrated by a very old man, and insistently recalling the valuable parts of a world gone by.

And I might add one more thing here.  In Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson we have two writers who give us alternative views (alternative to both evangelical and mainstream religion) of the place of Christianity in human life.  For those of us whose symbols, music, and history are steeped in the Christian faith, such alternatives are much needed and hard to come by.  I don’t know if this will be Berry’s last novel, but it is precious cargo, nevertheless.

Almost all of Berry’s fiction – like most of Faulkner’s – takes place in a well-defined place and gives priority to the work that is done in that place.  Like the descriptions of whaling in Moby-Dick, which ground us in the real and creates a community among the participants, in Berry’s latest book we get the details of raising a certain kind of tobacco.  We all spent much of our lives working – often in jobs that do not even exist anymore. Berry reminds us that the work was real. The lives were real.  At one point he catalogues the buildings and equipment on the old farms and says he is not writing a requiem for all that, but for “the way that once lived among them, the paths worn and wearing day by day, which connected them to one man’s effort and desire” (145).  This tribute to a careful kind of farming stands alongside a description of a careful kind of living that we don’t encounter very often these days.  It also reminds us that the memory of the old – for instance, about how to grow a crop or prepare a recipe – used to be greatly valued.  Now we are more likely to go to AI than Grandpa for such knowledge.

The book is also a diatribe against greed.  “Greed has passed to and fro over the whole earth, reducing life to matter and matter to price.  Though time and change bring sorrow, they belong to the seasons, to fecundity and health, and greed is a mortal disease” (150).  Indeed.  My guess is that was the reason Wendall Berry penned another book in his ninetieth year was to make precisely this point in a world that is sacrificing everything to… greed.

In the end, Andy comes “at last to see his grandfather Catlett, his father, and himself as three aged brothers.”  In his own old age, he now understands their old age.  I often think of my grandparents in this regard and wish I had appreciated them more.  They too had their stories of survival that come back to me – like the one about how, during the Depression, they rented out their house and lived in a neighbor’s garret in order to realize some desperately needed marginal income.  They laughed when they told the tale; they were proud that they had found a way to get through.  I see lessons there that I did not see when I was younger – including a lesson from the laughter.

I was very disappointed that Berry’s new book was not included in the NYTimes notable books for 2025, but there is a poem by Wendell Berry (“The Loved Ones”) in a recent New Yorker.  And, if you like Marce Catlett, there is reading for the rest of your lifetime in the stories of the people of Port William.  These books will change you.  They will inspire you.  And, hopefully, they will nudge you to recall the stories of your life that made a positive difference.  You “must have done something good.”  Yes.

In relation to old age, I would also particularly recommend Berry’s short stories “Fidelity” and “The Inheritors.”  The first is about the end of the life of one man and the effect on those who loved him.  It will get you thinking about technology and death and community.  The other is a portrait of an active man entering into the diminishments of old age and yet keeping his spirit whole.  Read them. 

Three Stories About Old People with Regrets

I read a couple of books and watched a movie lately about old people at the end of their lives who are trying to deal with a major regret.  I would recommend these stories highly – any of them are perfect for a cold winter’s evening.  The books are The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, and the movie is The Great Escaper (on Amazon). I’ll try to talk about these stories without spoiling the endings – and, in these cases, the endings are true endings.  They are all about elders trying to deal with regrets, mistakes, and profound guilt.  It seems to me that this is a prevalent and profound problem of old age; in old age we have a lot of time to think and a tendency to look back.  If you are exempt from major regrets, you are privileged indeed.  I surely have moments in my past that I regret, that I am still trying to deal with, and which flare up from the embers of my memories.  What to do with them?

Religion or AA might tell us that we need to atone, or, at least, apologize.  But the older we are the more likely it is that the actions are long buried along with many of the participants.  How do we deal with those regrets, guilts?  Make a deathbed confession?  Ask a priest or someone else we trust to absolve us?  Must we realize, finally, that they were the product of where we were at the time and chalk it up to karma – and assume we will pay or have paid for our transgressions one way or another?  I was recently thinking of Dryden’s riff on Horace – “Happy the Man” – but that speaker is “secure within” and satisfied that he has “had his hour.”  What if we regret the hour?  And how do we adjust the scales so everything comes out alright?  As the clerk at the Marigold Hotel reiterates, “Everything will be alright in the end, so if it is not alright, it is not the end.”

Each of these three stories concern an older person who sincerely regrets something in their past.  And, in at least two of the cases, they surely have committed (or given tacit approval to) a grievous act.  The third case is situational, where a soldier does what he has to do, but there are dire consequences.  All of these incidents happened many years ago, but shadow the rest of the lives of these characters. What to do?  What can be done?

Let me tell you how the characters in these stories deal with it.  The protagonist in The Correspondent, Sybil, (unsurprisingly) writes letters, letters she sends and letters she does not send.  Besides having mortality breathing down her back, she is dealing with the imminent loss of her sight.  This is a woman who is deeply attached to the written word in all its forms, and it is the word that keeps her going.  Sybil writes to famous people (like Joan Didion), some of whom even write back.  She writes to her children, old friends, and herself.  She writes to living people and dead people and, in the process, she slowly seems to sort things out.  It will make you mourn the lost art of letter writing; it will make you want to write letters.  Or a journal.  Do it.

Ian McEwan waited until he was in his mid-seventies to write one of his finest books.  Earlier in his life, of course, he wrote the classic Atonement, about guilt and absolution.  In Atonement, a woman spends a lifetime trying, at least partially by writing, to make sense of a youthful mistake.  In What We Can Know, there is an academic mystery being researched in the far future.  Where is the lost poem, the renowned corona of which there was only one copy?  The book sets itself up as a literary mystery, which is resolved by the “last testament” of the poet’s elderly wife – she has produced one piece of writing and destroyed another, in revenge and atonement.  The novel asks questions about the words and deeds we leave behind; the title morphs from What We Can Know to “what can we know?” This story got me thinking (again) about what to do with all my old journals.

(Incidentally, the novel looks backward, but it is framed in a time period a hundred years hence, and we get this caution from our narrator:  “I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them in the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.  Do not trust the keyboard and screen.  If you do, we’ll know everything.” Fair warning.)

The Great Escaper stars the very old Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson.  Jackson died shortly after the film was made.  Both stars were closing in on ninety when the filming was done, which was only appropriate as the story is about a 90-year-old man.  I have to admit that at first it is very hard to watch those very old bodies – much older than we usually see on the screen – but the film soon sweeps you away with both the love between the two oldsters and the heroic effort that Bernie makes to understand and atone for his actions at the beach at Normandy seventy years before. When I was young, I would not have believed someone could be so tormented by things that they did seven decades ago; now I know better.   And when Bernie gets to the 70th commemoration of the Normandy invasion, he finds that he is not the only one who is abashed to be treated as a hero when he feels like a traitor.  But, back on the beach and at the military cemetery, he faces his demons.  Those demons might not be completely vanquished, but they are at least acknowledged and shared.

These stories do not display miraculous cures for our trespasses; even if our sins are forgiven, we still cannot ever forget them.  Sybil, the letter-writer in The Correspondent, has made a pen pal of Joan Didion, and she quotes her: “What I have made for myself is personal, but it is not exactly peace.”  Stephen Crane put it more crudely: “But I like it/Because it is bitter, /And because it is my heart.”  Our regrets are personal, they are bitter, but when we at least acknowledge them, we might be able to accept them as part of who we are.

I’ll end with one of my favorite poems, “The Ideal,” by Paul Fenton.

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

For one of my stories about regret, you might try “Shrove Tuesday.“

Why Are We Avoiding Paradise?

This past weekend was full of endings and beginnings.  Friday was Halloween, which – of course – marks the end of my favorite month, but is also the Eve of All Saints Day, when we remember the saintly dead.  That is followed by All Souls Day, when we remember all the dead. And, of course, it was the beginning of a new month, and the time when we turned back the clocks.  A propitious time for self-reflection.  November is the time of year which corresponds (metaphorically) with my age.  I have a few challenges ahead of me in the next few weeks, but both the young trick-or-treating ghouls and the thoughts of lost souls remind me of how good it is to be alive.  We somehow left Paradise behind as we grew up; can we regain it in old age?

That we are already in Paradise is something that is hard to comprehend and easy to forget.  I think often of the words of Joko Beck in her wonderful Everyday Zen (where she seems to talk directly to John Milton!):

There is no paradise lost, none to be regained.  Why?  Because you cannot avoid this moment.  You may not be awake to it, but it is always here.  You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.

You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.   Can it be true that the pathetic work of our long lives has been to hold paradise at bay?

Did we have paradise once and lose it?  Or did we just push it into a corner and place a fierce angel to guard the gates?  James Baldwin is much taken with such thoughts of paradise.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. (Giovanni’s Room)

Wordsworth is sure that, as infants, we brought paradise (trailing clouds of glory) into the world with us, but lost it, forgot it, along the way:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

But why should we forget?  From “The Old Fools” by Philip Larkin, one of the most miserable and cynical poems about old age there is, comes this remarkable passage:

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here.

“The million-petalled flower of being here.”  If that is not paradise, if just the possibilities and potentialities of “being here” is not paradise, I do not know what is. And yet, I forget.  We all forget.  As Frederick Buechner puts it, we allow “Too good not be true” to turn into “too good to be true.”  In other words, paradise is all around us; we ourselves have put up the barriers, the angels with their shining swords are hired by us and paid a monthly wage to stop us from going back to where we belong.  Is that it? 

Beck implies that being old, being closer to death, should help us along with this process, if we let it.

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way they want it to.  Then they can see that the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below] – because that’s all there is, this very moment.

No one but we, ourselves, can dismiss the flaming swords. It is our paradise to take or to leave. No teacher needed, no secret key.  Here is some more advice from Joko Beck:

I’ll tell you how far I’d walk to see a new teacher: maybe across the room, no farther! It isn’t because I have no interest in this person; it’s just that there is no one who can tell me about my life except—who? There is no authority outside of my experience. There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn’t be anything else. Now life happens to be both a severe and an endlessly kind teacher. It’s the only authority that you need to trust. And this teacher, this authority, is everywhere.

Old people have seen a lot of life.  If there is one thing that we have, it is experience.  We need to trust ourselves, dismiss the shining swords, and enter the paradise that is ours by right.  What are the odds that we would even exist?  That we should persist over all these decades?  We beat those odds; we should be glad to collect the prize.  Or, at least, that is what I keep telling myself. 

I’ll end on this bright November day with a quote from Emerson:

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise; the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.  (from “New England Reformers”)

In our old age, let’s storm the gates of Paradise.   Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in your midst.  Beck and Emerson tell us all we have to do is to change our perspective.  Change is hard in old age, but perhaps we could at least try.  Time is short.

Several years ago, I wrote a story about a woman’s misguided attempts to create paradise on earth, rather than just opening her eyes to it.  You can find it here.  I also posted a strange story about one last trip “Back to the Garden,” about finding paradise at the very last minute. 

The Bhagavad Gita in Old Age

There are many reasons to study the Gita in our old age – just ask Gandhi.  Verse 36 of Chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita encourages us: “Even though thou be the most sinful of sinners, thou shalt cross the ocean of misery by the boat of knowledge.”  In Gandhi’s commentary (recommended), the Mahatma addresses this passage from the standpoint of old age:

For me, the Gita is the ship, not because it is a learned work but because I have liked it, it has appealed to me in my old age, and verses in it have been a great support to me.

I agree with Gandhi on this, but with caveats.  The Gita is a tricky document.  It would seem to be the story of a strange blue God (Krishna) exhorting a young warrior (Arjuna) to get out on the battlefield and kill people, and yet Gandhi found his doctrine of non-violence in it.  It is a war story that describes the war within us.

Again, the Gita is a little slippery, and many people have gotten it wrong.  There was a popular book a few years back that assumed that the Gita was telling us to follow our bliss.  That might be good advice, but it is not what the Gita is saying.  The Gita’s message is more complex; it is more nuanced; it is more like life.  I hope I can convey some of the complexity and the relevance of the Gita to aging – but, of course, you must read it for yourself.

I recently watched a golf movie that was based on the message of the Gita called The Legend of Bagger Vance.  Good movie (directed by Robert Redford), but it didn’t quite hit the mark.  However, the movie was close enough to get me to read the novel that it was based on, and that was indeed fortuitous.  The novel, by Steven Pressfield, is somewhat drenched in the intricacies of golf.  (I admit to skipping the long paragraphs in the sand traps.)  I noted, when I have written about the Gita before, that Krishna values devotion of any kind – perhaps even devotion to the game of golf?  The author has Bagger (the Krishna figure) tell us that “all sport is holy, for it embodies the objectified search for the subjective experience of yoga, meaning the union, union with the divine.”  But golf is even better because:

In other sports the opponent is regarded as the enemy.  We seek by our actions to disable him…This is not the way to salvation, or more accurately, it is at one remove.  The golfer on the other hand is never directly affected by his opponent’s actions.  He comes to realize that the game is not against the foe, but against himself.  His little self… (121)

Read The Legend of Bagger Vance, but please read the Gita first.

The Gita pops up in unexpected places.  Thoreau took Emerson’s copy with him to Walden.  Emerson’s poem “Brahma” is all but lifted from the Gita.  Whitman scribbled in his copy.  Philip Glass wrote an opera using only the words of the Gita.  Such references abound – there is even a Gita for the CEO.  And I recently found another interesting citation.

It is my daily practice to read the lectionary of the Episcopal Church, wherein are noted feast days for people of note.  Being curious, I often look up the souls honored there and thus came across the rather incredible Vida Dutton Scudder, whose feast day is on October 10.  An American scholar, philanthropist, sometime pacifist, and activist, she also wrote a book about old age called The Privilege of Age, which I have been unable to find.  I did, however, find her autobiography, On Journey, which was written in her seventies.  In it, Scudder chronicles how, born in India as a child of Christian missionaries, she returned to England as a toddler when her father died in a swimming accident.  He left her his books, among which was an early translation of the Gita.  In Scudder’s long memoir, we get much about her participation in the Christian church, her development of settlement houses and retreat centers and the teaching of the principles of social work – her exemplary life goes on for hundreds of pages.  But she reserves the precious last few paragraphs for the Gita.  Specifically, she talks about how the Gita has prepared her for old age (Scudder lived into her nineties), and how the Gita’s admonition to care about the work, but not the results of the work. has taught her to let go of what went before.  It also taught her courage:

…I turned to the Gita in the Great War, to dispel hesitant scruples.  Then it taught me fearlessness, and gave me courage to accept the moral risks in action.  Now the days of action are passed, does the somnolence of age creep over me?… The Gita shall say the last word; it is a word of comfort, it is still better, a word of hope:

“Following the Rule, cleansed of spirit, victorious over himself…his self becomes the Self of all born beings…. Putting away utterly all loves born of purpose, little by little, he shall win stillness [quoted from Gita 6].

The second chapter of the Gita famously tells us that “Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits.”  In old age, it is often hard not to live in mourning for the fruits of our actions – individually or collectively.  If we do so, we are not meeting the challenge of the moment, not facing the work that is before us of aging and death.  And we must use what energies we have left to do the work that is left to us, while not relinquishing the stillness and peace that is our right.

If you have never read the Gita, please read it.  Read it for the first time without many annotations.  If you want to go further, there are some wonderful commentaries out there, including those by Gandhi (based on his talks) and Eknath Easwaran.  Easwaran has a one volume translation with an excellent introduction, as well as a separate three-volume commentary.   And if anyone has a copy of Scudder’s Privilege of Age, please let me know!  She published an essay of that title in the Atlantic in 1933 which I have, but the full book was published in 1939.

Models for Aging?

The Baby Boomers were a generation that suffered from lack of models.  It wasn’t that our parents and grandparents were not admirable people, heroes even, but they did not live the lives that we lived in the times that we had to live them.  Many women who worked their entire adult lives grew up with stay-at-home moms.   Even if our moms worked, the model out there was the carefully coiffed young mother with an apron and a roast in the oven.  Think of June Cleaver or Lucy Ricardo.  Men of our generation did not learn what it meant to have a working wife, not to have dinner on the table when they got home from work, how to handle demands for assistance with domestic chores.  The result was that not only did we work ridiculously hard at home and at work (we did have models for a work ethic), but we were always feeling guilty about not being able to be the kind of parents, husbands, and wives that our parents were.

Then there were relationships.  When I was a child, divorce was never discussed – and even if it did happen, no one talked about it.  And yet, even today, baby boomers divorce more than any other age group: Another life event that we had no template for, and, again, that nagging guilt if it happened to us. 

We must remember that, as children, we soaked up so much unconsciously.  We learned the complexity of language – the words, the grammar, the pronunciation.  We absorbed social norms – ways of eating, sleeping, interacting.  And now we are getting old. We surely absorbed something about what it means to grow old, and – whether we are conscious of it or not – it is affecting us now that we ourselves are old.

When we were children, our models for growing old were our grandparents, who often did not live to be as old as we are now.  They might have been stern (my Dutch paternal grandmother) or doting (my maternal Nana and Papa).  I did not think much as a child about how they lived, but it surely had an influence.  There were other elderly relatives, most of whom seemed like another species.  Surely, we would never look like that!

And our culture provided few positive templates in our formative years for senescence.  Coming of age novels (Bildungsromans) and movies abounded – from Little Women to Catcher in the Rye – but coming of old age stories (Vollendungsromans) were scarce on the ground and rather scary.  There were tales like Heidi, in which an old person gets rescued from isolation and depression by a younger one.  But novels about old people who were interesting in themselves, potential models, were few.

Think of fairy tales.  The protagonists (often princes and princesses) were always young and beautiful.  The evil stepmother was old.  The witches were old.  Consider Arthur Rackham’s illustration from Hansel and Gretel with a very scary witch of advanced years (here).

The stories usually ended with the witch in the oven, the adventure complete, and a wedding, with no note about what happened as the characters aged.  The Grimms’ classic telling of Cinderella ends like this:

And now her two sisters found her to be that fine, beautiful lady whom they had seen at the ball. They threw themselves at her feet to beg pardon for all the ill-treatment they had made her undergo. Cinderella took them up, and, as she embraced them, cried:

That she forgave them with all her heart, and desired them always to love her.

She was conducted to the young prince, dressed as she was; he thought her more charming than ever, and, a few days after, married her. Cinderella, who was no less good than beautiful, gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and that very same day matched them with two great lords of the Court.

There are many things to be noted here, but generally, marriage is the end of the story.  Cinderella is always beautiful and bountiful and young in our imaginations.  We wanted to be Cinderella and have no model of an old Cinderella.

Songs of our youth assumed that “forever young” was the way to be.  Even songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game” or Peter Yarrow’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” assume that upon adulthood, all magic is gone.  Old folks make no appearances.  The movements of the sixties didn’t trust anyone over 30, and it never occurred to us that we would someday be old.

So here we are trying to work out the best way to be old.  The aged folks in Washington surely have not figured it out.  The drunk crowd in Margaritaville don’t seem to have the answer.  But there are clues out there.  And the first step might be to be more aware of our ingrained assumptions.

Around me, there are various models – positive and negative.  There’s the “let’s see the world and spend our money before we die” folks.  There are those kind souls who sacrifice their time and resources to take care of grandchildren so that their kids can avoid daycare and afford a house.  There are those who spend their time and resources in keeping fit mentally and physically, and have a weekly array of classes and therapy sessions.  There are those who secluded themselves during Covid and never fully emerged.  And everything in-between.

While I was writing this, I heard that Jane Goodall had died – at age 91 and while out on the road doing speaking engagements, active and with a project to the end.  An article about her in the NYTimes (What Jane Goodall Taught Us About Living a Long Life) which extols her for staying active, having a purpose, and having an optimistic view about things in general, including the afterlife.  Of course, Jane Goodall was no ordinary woman and we all need more relatable models.  Or, of course, we could structure our own.  I’m just trying to encourage myself and all of us to do it consciously.  Any suggestions are welcome.  And we must remember that – although they could not seem to care less – our grandchildren are watching.

For me, reading and writing are ways to explore alternatives. I have written several reviews of novels about old people (see here and here).  Many of my short stories involve older people trying to come to terms with where they are in life.    You might try my short stories “Closing Time” or “Snickerdoodles” – or write your own.

A Great Old Age Simile from Bertrand Russell – and Some Advice

Bertrand Russell lived to be very old, and – in his rational and philosophical way – was much interested in the best way to grow old. (I could have told him it was slowly!)  Russell starts by admitting that the best advice is to “choose your ancestors carefully” – his own parents died young, but his grandparents led long and productive lives.  (His paternal grandfather was prime minister of England well into his 70s and an active opposition leader long after that.)  Russell cautions us against expecting too much from our children and gives the realistic advice that they won’t abide much from their elders in the way of advice or society – but they will welcome any funds that might be forthcoming.  All true enough.

In fact, in his essay, “How to Grow Old,” Russell says there are two major mistakes that oldsters make.  The first is to cling to the younger generation, or even worse, to try to imitate them.  The other error is to cling to the past:

It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead.  One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done.  This is not always easy; one’s own past is a gradually increasing weight.

So, what does Mr. Russell suggest that we do? His great mind has pondered this, and his conclusion is much like that of his contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir (see here), both of whom think that we need “projects” in old age:

I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities.  It is in this sphere that experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere that the wisdom born of experience can be exercised without being oppressive.

In his 80s and 90s, Russell took on things like nuclear disarmament, opposition to the Vietnam War, and overpopulation.  I hope he would have also approved of less noble pursuits and projects – like playing the piano or cultivating a garden.  Russell himself was purported to dabble in birdwatching.

Russell acknowledges that fear of death is often an issue with the old, but he finds this somewhat “ignoble.”  It is in talking about the best way to overcome our mortal fear that he waxes the most poetic, as we can see in this passage:

The best way to overcome it—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

I love water metaphors for life.  Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity – all spiritual thought comes back to the symbol, the example, of water.  We are made of water, we need water, and – at our best – we are like water.  The Tao reminds us that, like the Tao, “water doesn’t strive or compete. It simply flows, finding its own path. [reaching its own level,] and adapting to the environment. This teaches the importance of letting go of ego and resistance, allowing things to unfold naturally.”

And, this brings me to Spinoza.  (I always come back to Spinoza.)  Many great geniuses – Russell and Einstein to name just two – were Spinozans.  Russell tells us that Spinoza was the “best example” of being able to view the world in this impersonal way as the end approached:

Spinoza, who was perhaps the best example of the way of feeling of which I am speaking remained completely calm at all times, and in the last days of his life preserved the same friendly interest in others as he had shown in his days of health.  To a man whose hopes and wishes extend widely beyond his personal life, there is not the same occasion for fear that there is for a man of more limited desires.

But, assuming we can transcend the personal, where does that leave us?  These are tough days. In my greener years, I protested the Vietnam War, signed petitions, marched for peace.  I was young, but things did not seem so overwhelming as they are today.  I was stronger and more resilient. I bellowed, but I did not despair.  Now I am tired, and I often despair.  I would urge the younger folks to get more involved, but we did not listen to our elders who told us to get less involved.  The tides rise and fall.  Tranquility in old age does not mean giving in; it means giving up neither our serenity nor our standards. And we must keep in mind that we are about to “merged in the sea.”  Russell is also famous for telling us, “The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”  These days the world is often horrible, and yet we must maintain our equanimity and “friendly interest.”  Not easy.

It is always interesting to look at how smart people have approached and lived their own old ages.  For more about the conjunction of old age and genius, you might look back on my blog, “Does Life Have Two Trajectories?”

“Here Be Dragons!” – AI and Old Folks

I have been trying (and failing) to stop thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  It is everywhere.  And it occurred to me that the replacement of our brain by silicon networks has ramifications that old people know something about.

But let’s start with an earlier usurpation by technology – that of replacing people power (physical work and transportation) with machines.  I am always amazed when reading Emerson or Thoreau to find that they thought nothing of a twenty-mile round trip walk to see a friend.  These guys were in great shape!  As was almost everyone in those days (except the filthy rich and they were fat).  Now we are all out of shape and spend hours doing Pilates or walking on the treadmill trying to regain some of the fitness that Thoreau had as a matter of the life he lived.  This only gets worse in old age, as we continue to try to persuade our bodies not to freeze up or flab up.  I, of course, am grateful for technology that allows us to replace or medicate arthritic joints and such, but we must also realize that as we delegated many physical activities to machines (machines that polluted the planet), we also handed over a natural way to stay fit. We have even convinced ourselves that going up and down stairs is bad for us, so we should live on one level or (better yet for the economy) invest in a stair lift.  While there is a time of life when stairs are not possible, study after study has shown that climbing stairs is good for old people.  I read once that when Paris put elevators in some senior residence buildings, the life expectancy actually declined!

Now we are accelerating a parallel process that had already been underway – that of replacing our minds.  If we don’t think our minds will decay from reduced use, we are deluding ourselves.  Anyone who has retired from a mentally challenging job knows that “use it or lose it” is true.  Old folks try to compensate by doing word and number puzzles – any group of elders often drifts to that day’s Wordle or the Jumble in the morning paper.  We take French classes, join book groups, tackle the myriads of math problems that show up on Facebook.  We are trying to maintain what is now not adequately used.

And, incidentally, there is AI designed just for old folks, including a monitor with the cute name of ElliQ which will help you take your pills, do your exercises, plan your meals – as well as giving you someone to talk to at any time!  If your younger relatives give you ElliQ for Christmas, you can be assured that they don’t want you looking to them for help!  And if we do not have to exercise our minds at all, what does that mean?  For the old and for the young?

Spinoza equated intelligence with virtue; Aristotle said that it was our ability to reason that makes us human.  Could farming out our intelligence rob us of both our virtue and our humanity?  I fear it might.  There is also something authoritarian about AI – it has the one true answer, the ability to tell us what we ought to do.  And if you think it doesn’t have its own biases, remember two things: it was created for profit, and it has no ethics. Already AI is biased toward capitalism and away from “wokeness.”  As its usefulness seduces us, we will be easy prey for collateral damage.

Earlier times were more skeptical about technology.  They warned us.  In the 19th century, as technology spread in the form of trains, gas light, and electrical power, there were many thoughtful discussions about whether it was good or bad.  Two major utopias of that period were set in worlds where the decision had been made to discard most technology.  One thinks of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).  These are “post-technology” narratives, where humans have taken life back into their own hands.  Here is Samuel Butler:

True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery whenever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of machines – they serve that they may rule.  (from Erewhon)

To avoid this despotism of technology, Erewhon destroyed all the machines created in the past three hundred years.

Similarly, William Morris created a world that has severely limited the invention and use of technology.   Both utopias were in stark contrast to Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1890), which more or less predicted that science and technology would solve all our problems by the year 2000 – albeit it had also replaced capitalism with socialism, so it wasn’t a profit-based technical utopia.  Hard to imagine.

But, again, as I said at the start, old folks know what happens to our mental and bodily functions if we don’t use them enough.  We also have a long view of the kind of change that technology engenders; we have watched the dumbing down of culture, the plague of obesity, the destruction of our attention span.  Elders are cautious folk, and we are worried.  In the Middle Ages and earlier, when cartographers had gotten to the end of their knowledge of geography, they labeled the unknown areas with warnings:  Hic Sunt Leones (Here Be Lions) or Hic Sunt Dragones (Here Be Dragons).  All warnings about AI and related technology seems to have disappeared – it is now blessed by the President, the media, higher education, and the venture capitalists.  But I, for one, will be looking for lions and dragons.

“Like Foreigners in Their Own Country”

I have been thinking a bit about language these days for at least four reasons.  First, I have been taking a French class at the local senior center.  I passed a French translation test for a graduate degree, but that was decades ago, and I never learned to speak it very well.  Second, I have been rereading my old journals, and realizing how much my memories diverge from the words that I wrote down at the time.   Third, I have been dealing with communicating with my grandchildren (ranging in age from five to sixteen) and recognizing that we are seldom speaking exactly the same language.  And, lastly, having embarked on my “rereading” project, I have realized how language changes in the context of its historical period and in the context of the age of the reader.

Learning a new language in old age is supposed to be good brain exercise.  OK – I hope that’s true.  More importantly, spending time with another language’s constructs and idioms makes you realize that all language is more arbitrary than we realize.  It is not only the words that are different, but the structure is also different.  In French, for example, the pronoun “ils” (meaning “they”) applies to groups of men or groups of men and women – even if women are in the majority.  Groups of women (only) are “elles.”  Even one male in the group changes the pronoun.  It makes me pause and consider more seriously the messages encoded in all language.

Reading old diary entries has reminded me of how slippery language and memory are.  It is not unlike the old game we used to call “Telephone” or “Gossip,” where a message whispered in ear after ear in a big circle comes out differently at the other end.   Words that were written down at the time and survive are intact, and I must believe they represent what I experienced at the time.  However, some memories have apparently morphed to become perhaps more interesting or easier to bear.  I have been amazed.

Language changes over time are nothing new.  My maternal grandmother, who never learned to drive, called their car “the machine.”  Movies were “the pictures,” and the radio was “the wireless.”  When her granddaughter took to wearing blue jeans in college, she insisted on calling them “dungarees” and elongated the word so it was clear what she thought about dungarees as female attire.  With my own grandchildren, I am struggling with my pronouns, my technological ignorance, and a lack of words to describe the kind of relationships teenagers have these days.  Some of their truisms drive me to distraction – like “it is what it is” or “whatever.”  And when did wait and sales staff begin to answer any question with “of course”?

Reading old books is a challenge; can we really understand the context – not just of the vocabulary – but of the situation? Of course, one can more properly understand Shakespeare or Chaucer with notes to explain what certain words meant at the time they were written. But can we realize what it might have felt like to be pregnant and unwed at the time of Tess or imprisoned in the England of Moll Flanders?  Also, the age at which we read a book matters.  As I re-read books that I first opened in my youth, I find that they are totally different – because I am totally different?

This is nothing new.  Montaigne (whose essays I have been rereading as part of my “nothing new” project) said that he realized his words were not eternal:

I write my book for few men and for few years.  If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now? It slips out of our hands every day, and has halfway changed since I have been alive.  We say that at this moment it is perfected.  Every century says as much of its own… (Essays, Book III)

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has his hero visit the eternal Struldbruggs, who – like poor mythical Tithonus – get old but never die.  After a number of years, however, they cannot communicate with those around them:

The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another . . . and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country.

One of the Buddhist daily reminders is that my body will age and decay.  So will my language.  AI wants to bring me up to date; it will gladly edit my work so it doesn’t seem so … old-fashioned.   Incidentally, it would also like to bring Montaigne up to date.  Cosmetic surgery for the written word.  Spare me.  What is all around me might be a “foreign” language, but, again, all the research shows me that struggling to understand a foreign language is good for old people.  And it doesn’t mean I have to give up my native tongue.

For one of my stories that thinks about language, you might try, “Why My Aunt Josie Has a Limited Vocabulary.”  If you want to surprise yourself, look at a diary entry or letter you might have sent about an event that happened a decade or more ago.  Does your memory fit the facts?  And what does that mean?  Should we school ourselves to accept reality or take refuge in our edited memories?

Old People as Their Own Best Teachers?

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.”

Picardy Thirds and the Need for a Happy Ending

If you are not a musician, you may not know what a Picardy Third is.  Put simply, it means that when a piece is in a minor key (think somewhat melancholy), it is the major third chord that the composer uses at the end of the piece to give it a … happy ending.  Bach did this all the time.  It is also often done in hymns: things may be sad, they may be tough, but it is all going to be alright (assuming you behave yourself and go to the right place when you die).

Humans have always wanted happy endings, even when they weren’t there.  Samuel Johnson famously lamented about Shakespeare’s King Lear that

I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.   

Because many agreed with this sentiment, Nahum Tate’s revision, The History of King Lear (1681), with a “happy ending” was amazingly successful.  Lear gets to be king again and Cordelia lives happily ever after.  Tate’s redaction was of negligible literary value as compared to the original; however, it was almost the only version produced for about 150 years.  As Samuel Johnson said in reference to the revision, “the publick has decided” for the version where Cordelia “retired with victory and felicity.”  Well, there is a victory for sentiment over great literature.

We’ve been groomed to want and expect a happy ending.  If you are my age, you might remember watching Lassie on Sunday nights.  Lassie always had a scary problem to solve (child and/or dog in trouble) but it always ended happily (rescue, reunion, smiles all around).  Lassie was followed by Disney, where even Grimm’s Fairy Tales were cleaned up enough for our innocent minds.

But we all do it, don’t we?  We want to end on a major third, a happy ending, a victory lap.  But life isn’t like that.  Life ends in death; we might accept the end, but making a victory out of it is something else.  (I won’t talk about religion here, but you can see the connection.)

We have always known that there is something inherently tragic about life: It ends in death.   Jonathan Swift once wrote to a bereaved acquaintance, “Life is a tragedy, where we sit as spectators a while and then act our own part in it.”  Spinoza characterized most of life as “vain and futile,” but admitted that he was looking for a system that would allow him “unending happiness.”

If life has always been tragic, it somehow seems more so these days.  Many decades ago, Aldous Huxley predicted our current situation: “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”  As I read this, I could not help but think that “planned obsolescence” applied not just to appliances, computers, and human bodies, but also to the planet that nurtures us.

We are looking for that Picardy Third to end on, but it seems more and more elusive.  As Kafka says, “There is infinite hope, only not for us.”

If you want to hear a short piece of music that ends on a Picardy Third, try listening here.  If you want a happy ending, you are going to miss a lot of great literature, great music, and the abundance of your life in its major and minor keys.  I would rather be living in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies than pretending in the worlds of Tate and Disney.

My short stories do not often end in a Picardy Third.  You might try “Closing Time” or “Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind.”