Category: old age literature

Projections of Old Age

Jenny Joseph was only in her twenties when she wrote her ubiquitous poem “Warning” (“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple”).  It projects a feisty version of old age; however, the poems she wrote in her own old age were much more credible.  This is from “A Patient Old Cripple” written when she was in her eighties:

I curse the world that blunders into me, and hurts

But know

Its bad fit is the best we can do.

When Jenny Joseph was very old, according to the BBC she found herself somewhat “annoyed” by the success of her early poem, which overshadowed her whole career.  So, the old ladies in purple dresses and red hats are really the projection of a young adult on how she would like her own old age to be.  What do we think about that?

This got me thinking about the difference between how we thought we would be in old age (or maybe how we hoped to be) and the actuality of our later years. Do our expectations of what it would be like to be old influence what kind of old person we become?  Old age was something I thought about even in middle age.  I was aware that I had been somewhat unconscious (sometimes downright comatose) during my earlier phases – youth, young adulthood, middle age – but I set out to craft a more conscious old age.  To help me think about that, I looked to literature.  And, representations of the old in literature include both those of the young imagining older characters, and old people writing about old characters like themselves.

When we are very lucky, we find authors and other artists who create over a full lifetime.  I find it particularly interesting to examine how their work has changed over the years and have written about that here and here.  Some writers have worked over the decades of a long life, consider the authors Wendell Berry or Marilynne Robinson, the poets Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver, and songwriters Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen.

In cases like that of Jenny Joseph, we even have the youthful projections of a young writer as to what old age will be like.  For example, we have Jonathan Swift’s list of life rules, “When I Come to Be Old” (hence the title of this blog), which were written when he was 32 and working as secretary to a much older man.  This old man’s habits are presumably inscribed as “thou shalt nots” on the list, and the notable and scary thing is that contemporary descriptions of Swift’s old age match the negative qualities Swift swears to avoid.  Swift did, however, recognize the futility of such rules in the last rule: “Not to set up for observing all these rules, for fear I should observe none.”  And, of course, Swift was a notoriously difficult old man – how much of his character as an old man was the result of his expectations?  Or out of his control?

Lately we’ve been finally watching Monk, so I’ve had Randy Newman (who does the theme song “It’s a Jungle Out There”) on my mind.  Newman, age 82, is still alive and has had an even longer and diverse career than I was aware of, having written the scores for several of the Pixar movies (which I haven’t seen).  I remember him most fondly for songs like “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” (1968), and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”  He wrote the wonderful “God’s Song” for the hilarious movie Cold Turkey in 1971.  And, of course, he spawned controversy.  Remember “Short People” or the mock xenophobic song “I’m Dreaming of a White President” that he wrote for Barak Obama?  It contains the prescient lyrics:

I’m dreaming of a white President
Just like the ones we’ve always had
A real live white man who knows the score
How to handle money
Or start a war
Wouldn’t even have to tell me
What we were fighting for
He’d be the right man…

Randy Newman wrote an early song (1972), when he was only 29, called “Old Man,” about a dying father – and then another in 2017, about an old man losing his wife: “Lost Without You.”  Newman’s lyrics are always worth paying attention to, and I will decline to post the full lyrics here.  (You can find them by clicking on the song titles above.)  The early song was the words of the young man trying to communicate with his dying old man.  “Can you hear me?” the younger singer repeats over and over again.  He is ruthless.  He assumes the old man does not want to die; he assumes that he could open his eyes if he wanted to.  He reminds the old man that there “Won’t be no God to comfort you / You taught me not to believe that lie” and that “You don’t need anybody, nobody needs you.”  Newman’s tongue might be in his cheek, as it often is, but it is a cruel song.  As an old person, I would have opened my eyes just to tell this impertinent young person to leave my side.  “Don’t cry, everybody dies.”  Yes, everybody dies but almost everyone also cries.

The second song (written when Newman was about 71) is narrated by an old man (perhaps the young man from the earlier song grown old?) who is sitting by his wife’s deathbed.  The children are apparently complaining about their father and the mother rebukes them:

“Make sure he sleeps in his bed at night
Don’t let him sleep in that chair
If he holds out his hand to you, hold it tight
If that makes you uncomfortable
Or if it embarrasses you
I don’t care.”

And the old man speaks of his fears:

Even if I knew which way the wind was blowing
Even if I knew this road would lead me home
Even if I knew for once where I was going
I’m lost out here
Baby, I’m lost out here
I’m lost out here without you…

The older Newman is definitely on the side of the old folks – the old dying woman who wants to make sure someone will take care of the love of her life and the old man who is “lost out here without you.”  Newman has come a long way from “You don’t need anybody.”  These are real people who are really dying, and they are not afraid of dying – they are just afraid they will not be able to take care of each other anymore.  And we feel that now he knows what it feels like to be the elder.

I encourage you to read the books of the old – not just about old people but written by the old themselves.  I will try to create a list of recommendations and post it.  I would also recommend an article that appeared in 2015 in the NYTimes, “What Old Age is Really Like,” written by a young author trying to write about old people, and to whom I owe the credit for steering me to the poetry of Jenny Joseph’s old age.  For a fairy tale of how we project and stereotype old age, try my story “Tale of Two Grannies.”

The Old Age of Odysseus

Everywhere I go, people are talking about Nolan’s The Odyssey.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I have a deep love for the text and wonder how many people realize that it is a book about old age?

Of course, Homer’s epic is about many things.  Most obviously, it is about a man trying to get home.  When I first read it, it reminded me of a recurring dream where I am trying to get somewhere and obstacles keep stopping me.  When I was a student, I was trying to get to class to take an exam in the dream.  As a young mother, I was trying to get home to feed some starving animals in my dream.  I think this interrupted journey is a kind of universal dream theme.  But in reading The Odyssey in my old age, it is evident to me that this is also a story of old age, a dream of… what?

Everyone agrees that Odysseus is an old man for his time (between 55 and 60) when he finally arrives back in Ithaca after many storms and seductions to impede his progress.  He is obviously still a strong and vital man, especially when contrasted with his wonderful old dog and his ancient father – who must have been about 80.  He battles the suitors, and then the relatives of the slain, until the gods negotiate a peace, and finally… what?  Well, it depends on whom you ask.

The text itself gives one answer.  When Odysseus is in the underworld he converses with the prophet Tiresias, who tells him exactly what will and should happen:

But once you have killed those suitors in your halls – /by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze – /go forth once more, you must … /carry your well-planed oar until you come /to a race of people who know nothing of the sea…. And here is your sign –/ unmistakable, dear, so clear you cannot miss it: /When another traveler falls in with you and calls /that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,/ then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, Poseidon…/ And at last your own death will steal upon you … /a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age /with all your people there in blessed peace around you. (Book XI, Fagles translation)

Toward the end of the Odyssey (Book 23), Odysseus repeats Tiresias’s entire prophesy to Penelope, including the manner of his death.  His wife takes it as a good omen:

“And so,” Penelope said, in her great wisdom,

“If the gods will really grant a happier old age,

There’s hope that we’ll escape our trials at last. (Fagles translation)

But the Western world was not content for Odysseus to fade into a peaceful old age.  In the Inferno, Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell for his “horse’s fraud that caused a breach” and other deceptions, and out of the burning flame where he is locked for eternity, he tells Dante and Virgil that he couldn’t stand a peaceful old age in Ithaca:

Neither my fondness for my son nor pity

For my old father nor the love I owed

Penelope, which would have gladdened her,

Was able to defeat me in the longing I had… (Mandelbaum translation)

So, Dante’s Odysseus gathered up his old comrades (the few that were left) and told them they were “not made to give your lives as brutes” but to follow a higher calling – and they followed him right out of the Mediterranean, into the southern hemisphere, and to their death in an eddy of the deep sea.  And what is the lesson there?

The lesson for Tennyson, when he penned his great poem “Ulysses” was that old men should be adventurers.  He starts his poem with Ulysses being bored with a peaceful life in Ithaca:

It little profits an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren craigs,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws to a savage race…

And so he riles up the old guys to take to the sea again:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of our heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There is a contradiction – the old men are to acknowledge what they “are,” but to override their age and weakness to strive and “not to yield.”  There is no acceptance here.  The deceptive Odysseus thinks he can somehow put one over on the natural order of things.  In our world of old men who seem determined “not to yield,” to fight one last war, and to build monuments of many kinds to themselves, Tennyson’s poem leaves a sour taste in my mouth.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  If some of these old men went a little gentler, whole civilizations might be saved.

I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s movie – I am waiting for it to come to my small screen where the violence will be less overwhelming.  It is my understanding that Nolan’s version has it’s very own ending, perhaps a little softened and de-misogynized for the modern viewer.  I will continue to believe that Tiresias knew what would and should happen.  Odysseus would turn his back on the sea, make sacrifices to appease the gods that haunted with him, and rule in Ithaca.  And then, like all men he would die.  And, like lucky men and women, he would die at peace with his family and the world.

For an excellent supplement to any reading of The Odyssey, try Helen Luke’s essay in Old Age: Journey Into Simplicity.   For reading about how The Odyssey can affect your life, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic and Norman Fischer’s Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life are both highly recommended.  Keep a copy of The Odyssey close at hand when you are reading, of course!

 

 

 

 

 

Constructive Forgetting

I’m still thinking about single-pointedness and the mass of things we need to “unlearn” in our old age.  As Philip Larkin said in a poem of his own old age, left unpublished at his death:

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints… (“The Winter Palace”)

“Unlearning” sounds like something bad, a sin against progress – and yet it is probably the only way to comprehend and accept old age and death.  And one of the things we have to unlearn is both the ability and the desire to multitask.

Our generation learned to multitask with a vengeance.  Women (like me) were trying to figure out how to raise kids and have a career, while dealing with cascading technology – all at the same time.  Men were discovering that they weren’t married to their mothers and that they had no models for the new family life.  Frequent divorces amongst the baby boomers (the highest rate of any generation) meant that single parents had to figure out yet another set of staggering complexities.  Radios and televisions were constantly on – radios in the car and TVs at home – adding a level of input to already frenetic lives.  We were (at the same time) proud of our ability to talk to the babysitter on the phone while writing a report at work, yet increasingly frantic about coping.

When the kids left home (if they did), life got a little easier, but not much.  There was always a new computer system to learn at work, social media emerged as a distraction, and life was still messy.  And finally, we retired.  Time to meditate, concentrate on the important things – except we had forgotten how.

I don’t know about you, but my ability to be single-minded, one-pointed, to concentrate over long periods of time was shot.  I am fine doing Wordle, making supper, or doing other “short” tasks, but even with lots of quiet time on my hands, I have trouble sustaining “long” concentration. and I am not the only one.  Elizabeth Bishop bemoaned the “Art of Losing” as one grew older, but I put my hat in Larkin’s ring.  There are many things I would like to lose.

Many elders do continue to proudly multitask, as we keep ourselves busy juggling our pickleball, travel schedule, volunteer jobs, and Botox appointments.  Or we throw ourselves into the lives of our children and grandchildren. And remember that even having the TV on in the background puts you in multi-tasking mode! There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but I’m not sure that it really helps us to “know more as [we] get older.”

In his Convivio, Dante pictures the course of life as a parabola. We go up and we come down.  The “high point” of the parabola is around age thirty-five, a date Dante arrives at based on Christ’s death in this thirty-fourth year. “It was not fitting that his divinity should be present in something that was in decline.”  What, exactly, is “in decline” in the latter part of life?  What is “diminishing”?  I can give you a long list: teeth, endurance, bone density, strength – and you may add your own infirmities.  But, is there something waxing that compensates for that which is waning?  There is nothing very positive about losing your hair or teeth, but in losing reflexive multi-tasking, I think there is a gain.

My grandparents were wary of new technology; they finally bought a black and white TV, but it wasn’t on often and they spent hours just sitting on the back porch.  Papa often smoked his pipe and Nana picked at some knitting or embroidery, but for long periods of time the pipe and the needles just sat on their laps.  As a child, I couldn’t begin to imagine what they were thinking about.  Now I wish I could ask them.

Looking back over experience is one thing that time and concentration allow.  In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the “slow” review of experience is extolled:

The compensation of growing old…was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

And in Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, Lady Slane calls “looking back on the girl she had once been” as the “last, supreme luxury…. She could lie back against death and examine life.”

There is more than memory than one-pointedness allows, but it is hard to get there.  For reading, it is recommended that longer and more difficult books be tried in stages.  And so it is with concentration.  It is not a matter of fighting distractions.  It is a matter of acknowledging them and putting them away as no longer needed, I think.  But any suggestions are welcome.  I’ll leave you with this excerpt from “New Year’s Resolve” by May Sarton:

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

I am in constant search of “still water.”

For a story about remembering and forgetting, you might try my “Amnesia at the Airport.”

 

 

 

 

“No More Dying Then” – Resurrections of All Kinds

 

Spring is full of resurrections.  We watch trees come back to life and flowers peek through the dead leaves.  Spring brings Easter, of course, with its stories and promises of resurrection.  This Easter, I reread D.H. Lawrence’s novella, The Man Who Died, an alternate spin on the empty tomb, a lovely counter-tale about the missing body of Jesus.  In its way, it is as sacramental as the Biblical version.  Lawrence’s Jesus lies in a farmer’s yard, healing and thinking about his second chance at life, about the trap of language (“The Word is the midge that bites at evening”), and about the release of being reborn (“How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and be beyond it.  Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig-tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich”).  As Jesus hides in the farmyard, he befriends a feisty cock (rooster) that throbs with life – and he heads out for his next chapter with the cock under his arm.  (A little symbolism there!)  Another kind of resurrection.

And there are resurrections closer to home.  After the close call of a cardiac arrest this winter, my husband has taken to calling this his “bonus time.”  Unlike many heart attack victims, he has not seemed to suffer depression, but rather seems to bask in this resurrection time with gratitude.  One more spring.  His appreciation of life has rubbed off on me.

Of course, resurrection does not always happen.  Our granddaughter had the hard experience this year of working over the body of a fellow choir member when he fell beside her as they processed down the aisle. She had been trained in CPR, and if he had survived it might have been a wonderful experience for her.  As it happened, he did not and the death was very hard to process.  But isn’t that why resurrections are so joyful – because they might not have happened?

There are many kinds of resurrections.  In his autobiography, G. K. Chesterton said that he became a Roman Catholic because he adored the rites of confession, penitence, and the washing away of sin, a weekly process for the resurrection of the soul:

Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning ….  He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in his own image.  He is now a new experiment of the Creator.  He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old…. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.

That last bit is lovely with the vision of an oldster facing the world anew, feisty as a young lamb.

Shakespeare, as usual, has his own take on resurrection and immortality.  We think of his sonnets as love letters, but there are a very few that tackle other challenges of life.  I think most often in this regard of Sonnett 146, one of my favorites:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Fooled by] these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

I like Shakespeare’s form of “resurrection” because it is an awakening to a new way of life, that not only frees us from the hold of the body and other earthly possessions, but simultaneously frees us from fear of death.  The imperative, “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross,” could be a touchstone for one’s entire life! I love the way the final couplet takes a sharp turn from fear of death (“that feeds on men”) to a kind of immortality where death has no sting (“no more dying then”).  I might note that there was an error in the second line of the original printing of this poem, so we are left to guess what the Bard meant to say.  You will see many versions out there, but I prefer this one.

So, may we all have a resurrection of sorts this spring.  May we value properly our “hours of dross” and wash away our sins and cares.  Do you remember, as Chesterton seems to, what it felt like to be five years old in a field full of daisies and dandelions?

For perhaps real resurrection – enlightenment, peace, whatever you want to call it – comes not from rising from the dead, but from escaping from the fear of death and all the death-like things – past mistakes, regrets, losses and future fears of all kinds.   Old age brings us both closer to the brink and possibly closer to acceptance. Once we get past our terror of the end, we are the (resurrected) fearless five-year-old again.  May it be so for you.

For other kinds of resurrection, you might try my tales, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse” or “A Balm in Gilead.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“When Will They (We) Ever Learn?”

In these dark days, when the moral compass of this country has gone amok, I keep remembering the words of a hero of my hippy days.  “When will they ever learn?” was the chorus of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Dolly Parton, with the most iconic version being that of Peter, Paul and Mary.

And now my generation is in charge (although some of them should have long since segued into assisted living) and, clearly, we have never learned.  We were angry in the 1960s, but we were also hopeful.  I am no longer hopeful.  It is our generation that comprises Fox News’ largest audience segment, with the median viewing age being in their late 60s.  An impressive majority of those over 65 voted for Trump.  When will we ever learn?  And here we go – blundering into Iran, killing people and bulldozing flowers, while the entire world holds its breath and hopes there are not radioactive repercussions in addition to the disastrous economic impacts.

Seeger’s question can be looked at in two ways.  We could refer to each individual one of us.  We have all had the experience of watching someone in our lives make the same mistake (the friend who marries the same kind of man) over and over again. We do it ourselves.  We say, after the fact, that we should have known better – and yet.

But the we is also collective.  Our country has made the same mistakes over and over again.  Viet Nam apparently didn’t teach us anything; nor did the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Despite extensive postmortems after these initiatives… we do it again.  Off we march with optimistic hopes to spread democracy and make the world safer for mankind.  But there is no democracy and the world is less and less safe.  And we kill our own as well as theirs – the difference is that they kill our soldiers, while we kill men, women, children – whoever is in our way.  And now we are saying that even the most rudimentary (and humane) rules of war do not apply to us.

S. Eliot wrote a wonderful play about the death of Thomas Becket called Death in the Cathedral. In a key moment, as his death approaches, we get these lines from Beckett:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns.  Sever

The cord, shed the scale.  Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

“Men learn little from others’ experience.”  A depressingly true statement.

And then there are the last lines, which seem to sum up the whole problem: “The fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheels on which he turns.”  It seems to me that we have become more and more foolish.  Washington thinks it can fix our problems by killing people.  Silicon Valley thinks they can overcome aging and death.  And here we sit as children are bombed, people die for lack of health insurance, and innocent children go to detention camps.

One more example.  Scientists have had a pretty good idea that global warming was happening and what was causing it since at least 1938 when Guy Callendar assembled statistics going back into the 19th century.  And even if we didn’t believe in global warming, we knew that the availability of oil and gas was a disruptive factor, particularly when the gas shortages of the 1970s (1973 kicked off by an Arab embargo after the Yom Kippur war, and 1979 set off by the Iranian Revolution) Our generation sat in line for enough fuel to at least get us to work. (We were hippies no longer.)  There was much talk about alternative energy sources at that point – over 40 years ago!  Clearly no lessons were learned.  And the planet, indeed, has suffered.  Where have all the flowers gone?

Our generation did learn some things.  We stopped smoking, we learned to use a PC (and a cell phone, a tablet, and a smart TV).  We learned how to support ourselves (more or less), and we learned to exercise – and we learned that a little discipline is not always a bad thing.  But we didn’t learn how to stop wars, greed, and amoral leadership.

In her book about aging (The Last Gift of Time), Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the young can learn little from the old, but the old can learn from the young.  I am not ready to learn from Generation Z, but maybe we could all profit from learning from our younger selves.  We thought we could change things.  Perhaps we need to tap into our long-gone hippie selves and see what is left of a generation that genuinely thought that the answer to “when will we ever learn?” was “when our generation is in charge.”  Oh, the pity!  And surely our generation is in charge.  Old people rule our country, elders who have not gotten wise like the ancient Yoda, but only wrinkled and bald like him.  (Of course, Yoda had 900 years to learn what he knew, a luxury of time neither we nor our planet has.)

As Eliot has the chorus say at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, “Lord, have mercy on us.”

 

 

 

 

Spinoza of Market Street – “Forgive Me, I Have Become a Fool”

A week or so ago, I was googling a Spinoza citation (regular readers know I’m a big Spinoza fan), and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Spinoza of Market Street” popped up in my search results.  Now, I vaguely remember reading that story sometime in my distant past, but had no real recollection of it.   So, I pulled it up and was glad I did.

A digression here.  I am constantly amazed at how little I remember of things I read decades ago.  Unless I have reread or thoroughly studied the texts, I might be able to recall some themes, whether I liked the piece or not, a few memorable scenes or tidbits, who wrote it, but that’s about it.  It is a mixed blessing, as I can enjoy some really fine works as if for the first time.  I can even reread classic mystery writers like Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh.  But really – where did it all go?  What else has been lost over the years besides the knowledge of “who done it”?

Needless to say, the Singer story was “new” to me, and it made an overwhelming impression this time.  Truthfully, besides the memory problem, when I read it for the first time, I was not old and surely did not appreciate old age (or Spinoza) as I do now.  The story is about an elderly and impoverished man, Dr. Fischelson, who has spent his whole life studying Spinoza.  He has written notes and stupendous amounts of commentary, but – at the end of his life – he cloisters himself in a small attic room in Warsaw trying to make ends meet.  He has dedicated his life to trying to live the kind of life Spinoza recommended, to be the “free man” that Spinoza describes in his Ethics.  He has forgone marriage, children, regular employment for this ideal. 

Spinoza does not protect the aging scholar from the vagaries of life, however.  Dr. Fischelson gets deathly ill in his attic room, and would have succumbed had not his neighbor, an old crone called “Black Dobe,” suddenly needed someone to translate a letter she got from a relative in America.  Black Dobe is an aging spinster, described as “tall and lean, and black as a baker’s shovel.  She had a broken nose and there was a mustache on her upper lip.  She spoke with the hoarse voice of a man and she wore men’s shoes.”  And yet, this old crone nurses the Spinoza scholar back to health.  They talk to each other about their lives – for the first time in many years somebody is interested in what they have to say. Black Dobe knows nothing about Spinoza, but she cares about Fischelson’s childhood, about his thoughts.  And he reciprocates.  Eventually, they visit the Rabbi and say that they want to get married.  The people on Market Street are amazed and pack into the Rabbi’s chamber for the wedding.  The wedding night is better than expected.   “What happened that night could be called a miracle.  If Dr. Fischelson hadn’t been convinced that every occurrence is in accordance with the laws of nature, he would have thought that Black Dobe had bewitched him.”  Good for them.

But here’s the thing.  Dr. Fischelson thinks he has broken faith with Spinoza.  He has failed to lead the kind of “life based on reason” that Spinoza has recommended.  As the sun rises on the morning after his wedding night, the old, old man looks up at the sky and pleads, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me.  I have become a fool.” Is rationality really the answer or do the fools really have the answer in the end?  Does one preclude the other?  One thinks of the Death of Ivan Ilych and the happiness of the servant Gerasim as opposed to the severe angst of his dying master.  Is being in love with (or at least comforted by) an old ugly spinster a sin against Spinoza?  Surely not.

While Spinoza himself led a solitary life, it does not seem to have been lonely.   Spinoza boarded with a family, he had friends, he had a large correspondence with other philosophers.   And one point that Dr. Fischelson seems to have missed in modeling his life after Spinoza’s precepts, is that – above all – Spinoza believed in cheerfulness.  Other emotions could be tolerated as long as they were not in excess, but “of cheerfulness, there could be no excess.”

Fundamentalists, zealots of all kinds, tend to squeeze the joy out of life. There is no room for frivolous emotions in a single-issue mind. Dr. Fischelson was a zealot of Spinoza, but led a cheerless life.  He thinks he has failed in the end, but perhaps – for the first time – he has gotten it right.  Marrying Black Dobe was both a rational and joyful act.  One does not preclude the other.

And here’s the thing that got me.  When Black Dobe asks Fischelson why he doesn’t go to temple, he tells her that “God is everywhere.  In the synagogue, in this very room.  We ourselves are part of God.”  This completely frightens the old lady.  “Don’t say such things,” she tells him.  The odd thing is that he says them but does not act as if they are true, and Black Dobe is frightened by the very thought and yet treats even a dirty old man as if he were sacred.  Amen.

T. S. Eliot said it well in “East Coker”: “Do not let me hear /Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.”  Ah, yes.  And let us find reasons to be cheerful in our old age.

For a humorous look at love in old age, you might look at my stories, “Livability” or “The Case of the Missing Husband.”  For more of Spinoza, you could try an earlier blog, “Smile for Spinoza.” Be of good cheer.

An Old Gorilla Talks to An Old Lady

If you are close to my age, you might remember reading Ishmael when you were in your 30s or 40s.  The novel by Daniel Quinn won the Tomorrow Fellowship in 1992, a prize created by Ted Turner and awarded (only once) for fiction offering “creative and positive solutions to global problems.”  It is a readable book and lovely in its conception.

Ishmael is an elderly gorilla who communicates through telepathy and has a novel way of looking at human history and where “it all went wrong.”  He posits that mankind took a fatal turn when they turned into “Takers” rather than “Leavers,” several thousand years ago in the fertile crescent.  He retells the Genesis story as a prophecy of how humans started on a trajectory that would end up destroying humankind and much of the world around us.  He never mentions Faust, but it is definitely the story of a Faustian bargain – according to which we are granted the knowledge and mastery of our lives and of the earth.  Anything is permitted if it makes life easier for humans.  But, as in any Faustian bargain, there is a cost.

I was impressed with Ishmael in my 40s and am still intrigued and impressed in my 70s.  While you can argue with many of Quinn’s conclusions, Ishmael is a rare phenomenon – a totally fresh look at what humans call “progress.”  In these days of AI and a return to a nuclear arms race, I am thinking about this more and more.

The whole notion of progress is different when you are old.  At the time I first read Ishmael – still in my prime, raising kids, building a career, learning new technologies – my world was progressing and I was progressing too.  We all jogged, took up Pilates and yoga, ate yogurt, and were convinced that ours was the generation that would never age or turn into shrunken old people. In my 70s, I realize that – from a bodily standpoint and notwithstanding all our efforts to the contrary – progress is eventually replaced by regress. One hopes for plateaus rather than higher and higher levels of function – and one fears for the abyss. Whether or not the world around us is “progressing,” we are doing something else.

For the past few decades, we elders told ourselves that while we aren’t keeping up with technology (partly because we might not want to), we still had some basic skills and experience which had some worth – experience, verbal and mathematical literacy, a developed sense for human interaction.  Artificial intelligence seeks to replace those things, and while I still believe it cannot, there is some heavy betting that it can.

Our faith in the progress of the world around us has likewise been undermined by reality; “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”  That is what Quinn’s book is about.  And when I read Ishmael again, I saw his argument from a much different standpoint.  I had gotten old and the world had gotten damaged.

Here is his argument (but please read the book).  At some point (and Quinn places that point ten millennia ago), humanity took a step in the wrong direction, mostly through the growth of what he calls aggressive agriculturalism – which led to one culture replacing other more sustainable cultures through the seizure of lands and spectacular population growth.  (There is much more to the story, of course.) And now the greatest threat we have as a species is…ourselves.  I would hardly call that progress.

Even for us Sputnik kids, science no longer looks like a source of unqualified progress – is AI an achievement or a threat?  Ecological damage which, truthfully, we were pretty blind to in the 1950s and 60s, has become so obvious that it is amazing that so many people are still resisting the facts.  The world population has progressed in numbers – from about 2.5 billion when I was born to over 8.3 billion (think about it!), but this can hardly be called progress by the millions scrambling for sustenance on this planet. But every time the notion of progress (as we have defined it since the Enlightenment) is challenged, our culture just doubles down.  Think of the denial of climate change or the recent disagreement between the Pentagon and Anthropic over whether there should be any guardrails on AI.

Chesterton complained that “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”  Do we even have a vision? Is it a sustainable vision?  Are emotion and commerce (or more specifically commerce using the impetus of emotion) changing the goal to meet the product?  Spinoza said that progress happened when we went from being dominated by the emotions and were guided by the rational, by the thing that makes us human.  I have seen little sign of this lately.  And a couple of days ago we all woke up to the news of yet another war in the Middle East.  No matter how you define progress, it does not feel like this is it.

Early in Ishmael, there is this exchange between Ishmael (who speaks telepathically because, of course, gorillas can’t talk) and the unnamed narrator.  It is worth thinking about.

“Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”
“As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don’t you stop?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

Our “civilization system” is looking rocky from the perch of old age.  Our generation is grappling with its deeply rooted faith in progress in ways that previous generations maybe did not.

Once we could console ourselves with the thought that we had left our progeny a better world, even though our personal world and body were falling apart.  Our generation has no such consolation.  And we cannot comfort ourselves that it will be better for our children.  Our children are not doing as well as we were at their age, and it looks even worse for our grandchildren.  In general, they are not as well educated – language and math scores are at their lowest point in two decades – and their prospects for good jobs, home ownership, debt relief, and eventually a comfortable retirement, seem dim indeed.

And it is made worse by our cultish attachment to the concept of “progress.”  The stock market goes up, Silicone Valley comes out with a new gadget, we can stream anything anytime – we follow the breadcrumbs and never think that we might end up at the witch’s house.

Anyway, these were all things I thought about when I reread Ishmael in my old age, and I am pretty sure they were more coherent thoughts than I had when I first read it in my forties.  So maybe I have made some kind of progress.

 

 

Golden Years?

We have come to talk about old age and retirement as the “golden years.”  The current use of this term is relatively recent (1959) and usually dated to advertisements by Del Webb for the new “Sun Cities” sprouting up in Arizona and elsewhere.  In the past, however, the “Golden Age” referred to earlier and better times of men. Things were perfect in the Garden of Eden – and it was all downhill from there.

According to Ovid and the mythology of even earlier civilizations, including the Hindu and Judaic (Book of Daniel), the first age of man was the Golden Age, from which we have degenerated through the Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages.  Over time, according to ancient law, things got worse instead of better (as in the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

This was, in part, because early man hadn’t developed the cult of progress.  Until the Age of “Enlightenment,” there was no assumption that the world was “progressing.”  In fact, there had been an accepted notion that culture was deteriorating from an earlier “golden” time as noted above.  The Enlightenment changed that; progress was real, progress was good, progress became a god.  But, for the aged, this reversal also produced the paradox of a cultural ideology of progress juxtaposed with the reality of the aging body. (Think about that!)  But back to the “golden years.”

Of course, golden also has connotations of wealth.  And we often conflate a good old age with a financially rich one.  Theo of Golden, a recent bestseller, is a good read about an admirable elder, yes, but Theo is an old man with endless riches at his disposal.  And while it is true that Theo often uses his riches to help others, it is also true that he is not on a budget, nor does he worry about what happens if the cost of heating his house goes up dramatically.  Is money necessary for a good old age?  Do you need to have enough to buy friends and a house in Sun City?  “Better to go down dignified/With boughten friendship at your side/Than none at all. Provide, provide!” says the hag of Frost’s poem.

In years past, old people with money were generally depicted as misers.  One might think of Silas Marner, Scrooge, Uriah Heap, or Mr. Potter of It’s a Wonderful Life.  Now, gold is looked on as a necessity and not a flaw in old age.  Of course, capitalism has encouraged such a change – don’t hoard your money, spend it!

The highly underrated G. K. Chesterton had more naturalistic take (long before 1959) on the golden glow of old age:

Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.

Here, gold is a matter of perception, specifically a change in appreciation that comes with age – or so we would hope.  And the notion of progress is meaningless in the face of the cycles of nature.

Of course, we might also nod to Robert Frost again, who brings us back to the golden age being at the beginning of life and reminds us that the true gold is nothing that we can grasp:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Our memories of early days are often golden.  We are nostalgic for our past, but our childhood Edens cannot stay nor be re-created.  They can only be recognized and remembered.  But it might be the wisdom of old age that makes us remember and finally realize that the real gold is in all Chesterton’s leaves and faces.  And that, perhaps, for us and for our planet, progress is overrated.

For other of my posts about the golden autumn of old age, you might try “Accepting the Season” or “Bare Ruin’d Choirs.”

Scrooge or Quixote

First, happy holidays and a hopeful winter solstice to all of my readers.  I recently got a notice that I have posted over 200 blogs and scores of stories, lists, and miscellanea.  Amazing.  I particularly appreciate those of you who have been with me from the beginning.  To paraphrase Tiny Tim, bless you, every one!

And so Christmas brings up that quintessential old person of holiday fiction – Scrooge.  His name has entered the English language as probably the most common word used to describe someone who is mean and miserly and … old.  In the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Dickens describes Scrooge this way:

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

The original Grinch.  Scrooge is surely not the only elderly miser in literature – think of Ethan Frome, for example.  Miserliness is a trait that has been commonly used for the aged for millenniums.  Horace, in around 20 BCE, describes old men as having “desire for gain, miserliness, lack of energy, greediness for a longer life, quarrelsomeness, praise of the good old days when he was a boy, and condemnation of the younger generation.”  Of course, in days before social security and pensions, old people had every reason to be miserly – even in the face of impatient heirs.  King Lear is surely a lesson about distributing our assets before we are dead!  Scrooge has been the model for many old tightwads, including a Disney duck.  But, of course, Scrooge is not just miserly – he is mean and cautious and compassionless.  Nevertheless, he is certainly one of the stereotypes of old age – in his pre-conversion state.

But there are many oldsters in literature.  If Dickens gave us one commonly-used word for old men, Cervantes’ Don Quixote gave us another and somewhat opposite one – quixotic.  Here is how the Don is described in the beginning of Don Quixote:

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame….  and so it was that with these exceedingly agreeable thoughts, and carried away by the extraordinary pleasure he took in them, he hastened to put into effect what he so fervently desired.  (Grossman translation)

If Scrooge was mean and “Bah Humbug,” Quixote was magnanimous and “Let’s go!”  Both got more than slightly in their own way – Scrooge saw ghosts and Quixote tilted at windmills.  One was rich and one was foolish.  Scrooge learned his lesson, and – although Quixote goes home in the end – the Don never really regrets anything.  In honesty, both men end up often making life fairly miserable for those around them, until, of course, Scrooge sees the light and Quixote turns his horse homeward.

So where is the lesson in all this from these two old men?  First, let’s admit that the elderly are entitled to some level of avarice, caution, and retrospection.  We are planning to support ourselves for a lifetime of unknown length and quality.  Our bones are fragile, our energy is limited, and our earning-power is defunct.  We may want to be Quixote, but, in all honesty, we usually wind up acting more like Scrooge.

But here’s what is admirable about Scrooge.  Albeit with the help of Christmas ghosts, he looks at the past and present honestly.  Quixote is deluded in his romantic idea of being a knight, but Scrooge has been deluded too about the results of his actions and what his money can really do for him – until the ghosts arrive. Scrooge is scared into opening up, Quixote is stuck in his delusions.

And there is this.  What Scrooge goes through during the course of A Christmas Carol is a life review.  It is a model for what the angel Clarence takes George Bailey through in It’s a Wonderful Life – albeit George needs to recall all the good he has done, while Scrooge needs to face his bad deeds. Life review is surely one of the tasks of old age.  Indeed, there seems to be an instinct that makes people want to make sense of things – to unravel the themes (not plots) of their lives.  Like miserliness, looking to the past is a trait commonly criticized in the elderly.  But, our experience may be our most valuable possession.  And I find that thinking about it is not enough.  Talking to someone else is good, but even better is to try to concisely relate what happened on paper, read it over, and determine what we have learned.  So, Scrooge does have something to teach us.  However, if you are already quixotic and out meeting the world with an open heart, more power to you!  I myself am more like Scrooge, and probably still need the assistance of ghosts.

“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.