Category: old age literature

“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.”

Very Old People, Vollendungsromans,  and Lore Segal

When I was young, I devoured “coming of age” novels.  These works are often classified as Bildungsromans – bildung meaning “education” and romans, “novel.”  Think of Catcher in the Rye, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or Little Women – you surely had your own favorites.  I clung to such books because I was looking for a chart for navigating my changing world.  Now, I suppose, YA (Young Adult) novels fill this niche – although I would guess there might be a good reason to read an adult-level book if an adult is what you are trying to become (grumbles the old lady).

As I approach old age or move from a “greener” old age to a drier, more fragile, old age, I look for books about the coming of an even older age.  There is also a term for books about the “winding down” of life: Vollendungsroman.  And, while it is important to me that such books be written by someone who has experienced the last vestiges of life, there are not a whole lot of people who are still writing at the outer limits, into their 90s or beyond.  I have written about some of them here, but we just lost a master in this regard, and it is Lore Segal whom I want to talk about today.

Last October, there was an article entitled “A Master Storyteller at the End of Her Story” in the NYTimes Sunday magazine about Lore Segal’s last days.  It was published in the same month that she died at age 96 and noted that she wrote (sometimes dictating) until the very end. In the article was this notation from an author-friend of Segal’s:

“With writers who survive into their old age my sense is that sometimes the spirit is willing, but the ability to get it onto the page starts to wane,” says the critic and author James Marcus, a close friend of Lore’s. “It’s just not true for Lore.”

He goes on to say that he was struck by her late writings’ “unsparing depiction of a period of life – namely the end – that is typically rendered with a gauzy wistfulness, if it’s ever rendered at all.”   Segal herself says this:

The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words.  And being old is being old.  Dying is dying.  You must not be scared to say it.

No euphemisms for this old lady.  She wrote a series of stories about a group of old ladies who have met periodically for lunch over the decades.  Many of the stories were collected in Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories, but the last one was published in the New Yorker just as Segal died; it was a series of vignettes about her ladies and was entitled “Stories About Us.”

When I was newly married, I talked to other young women about keeping house (how often do you wash your sheets?), furnishings, saving up to buy a house.  When I was a young mother, I queried my friends about how to get babies to sleep through the night.  As a working woman, I had lunch with my friends and talked about our bosses, chances for promotion, what to wear to the office, and whether to divorce our husbands.  Later, when we were all middle-aged, we talked about retirement – where, when, how much did we need?  Newly retired people talk about travel, classes, investments, hobbies.  Slightly older people seem to discuss physical therapists, dental work, cruises, and fears for our grandchildren.  All of this is familiar I am sure – but what do really old people talk about?  Lore Segal gives this to us. Her ladies are done with trivial topics.  Together, they are looking into the face of the death, and it is refreshing.

Segal’s ladies have rules.  They take a full twenty minutes (and no more) to chronicle their latest ailments; they keep up with each other’s families, but also with a limit.  They strategize with each other about how to stay in their own apartments (despite the machinations of their desperate families). They think out loud about the end of life.  How will it happen?  Who will go next?  They have conversations that they could not have with their children or grandchildren.  “Our children would not believe how calmly we look around the table wondering which one of us will be next,” says one of the ladies.  They are proud of being “commonsensical.”

They talk about all the things they have resolved never to do again – travel, see movies in the theater, driving – and then they talk about reneging on their resolutions.  They bond against their common enemies – who are often their own children.  They support each other, while realizing that holding on forever is a losing cause.  And they are brave.  Oedipus at Colonus walks into the sacred grove to meet his fate; these ladies face the ambulances and nursing homes with the same grace. (By the way, Oedipus at Colonus was written when Sophocles was over 90.)

Many of the ladies in the stories are Holocaust survivors; Lore Segal was one.  She came to England on the Kindertransport, and later to New York with her mother.  In the end, these ladies come back to that early experience of knowing death was just outside the door.  “There are no happy endings,” one of the characters reminds us.  They reminisce that they have spent their busy, intellectual lives asking “why?” and “what is it all about?”  with few answers.  And still the end comes knocking at the door.  Reading Segal reminds us that this is the human condition.  And the attitude toward the human condition should be sharing, acceptance, and the noticing of how the “fuchsia blooms” on our way out.  Lore Segal’s stories are highly recommended.

The Good Life in Old Age

Unlike the obscure and nitpicking scholastics of our time, classical philosophers spent more of their efforts in trying to define what makes a good life. Eudaimonia is a Greek word, meaning well-being, or, perhaps, something akin to personal happiness.  These earlier philosophers were interested in discovering and sharing the best ways to live, and how to hold those standards up against the reality of our own existence.  What could be more important?  And they were not just talking to other academics; they knew everyone was facing this challenge.  I have been thinking about these guys (and unfortunately, they are all guys) lately in regard to old age.  What makes a good old age?

The modern answer would seem to be: enough money to live and travel, enough energy to party and play pickleball, and children who are self-sufficient but ready to take care of us when we need them.  Our independence is of the greatest importance – we don’t want to be alone but we don’t want anyone else telling us what to do. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but having experienced the personal trauma of moving this year and the collective trauma of what is going on with the economy and the government, I am grasping for something a little less material, a little more stable than finances, climate or personal health.

And there is some agreement among the philosophers about the good life.  Aristotle says that the exercise of our rationality and virtue will lead us to a good life.  So does Spinoza.  What would this look like in old age?  What would it mean to live rationally and virtuously in old age?

The Stoics (and I am thinking mainly of Epictetus) say that in old age, or at any time, to be happy, to live a good life, is to free ourselves from expectations:

The only way to a happy life (keep this rule at hand morning, noon, and night) is to stand aloof from things that lie outside the sphere of choice, to regard nothing as your own, and to surrender everything to the deity and fortune… and to devote yourself to one thing only, that which is your own and free from all hindrances.  (from The Discourses of Epictetus)

This is akin to the Buddhist exhortation not to be attached to things: to be attentive but not reliant, to do the right thing without concern for the consequences.  This is advice that we could all use, but probably a lesson we all should have learned by now.  If you haven’t experienced the disappointments of the plans of mice and men by now, you are fortunate indeed.  Nevertheless, true detachment is hard to come by.  And in old age, things we are attached to fall away at an alarming rate, so we had better be good at renunciation.

Then there is the matter of remorse, regret and atonement in old age.  (I have written about this previously in “Old Karma, Instant Karma.”)  Cicero warns us that the mistakes of our youth will follow us into old age.  Yes, we all know that.  Spinoza gives the best advice in this regard (as in most regards): “Repentance is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason; instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched, or lacking in power.”  “Twice wretched” reminds me of Nietzsche’s caution that remorse was like “adding to the first act of stupidity a second.” The Buddha calls remorse “the second arrow.”  Something outside us wounds us the first time; our remorse keeps opening the wound.  Some religions have rites and rituals to help us to atone and erase. Again, if you have reached old age without remorse, you are blessed.

So, we should be rational, ethical, and at peace with our past.  What does this mean?  Cicero is very specific about a good old age: “the tranquil and serene evening of a life spent in peaceful, blameless, enlightened pursuits.”  I agree with the aim, but the methodology often eludes me.  Each of us can only define it for ourselves. We must try; we must work at it.  As Spinoza says at the end of the Ethics:

If the way I have shown to lead to these things [peace of mind] seems very hard, still, it can be found.  And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard.  For if salvation [the ethical and intellectual state of freedom] were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it?  But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

 I recently read Florida Scott-Maxwell’s memoir of old age (recommended), written when she was in her 80s and in a nursing home:

I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery.  If they say, “Of what?” I can only answer “We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery.”

In these times when the stock market is being undermined, when mores are changing, and the known is disappearing into the maw of the suspect, what better time for an internal “excellent adventure.”  Spinoza pursued this question while he was ostracized from his community and dying of spoiled lungs.  Florida Scott-Maxwell did it in a nursing home.  Epictetus did it as a slave.  We should be able to do this. I can give you no more than encouragement and reading lists (more on that in another blog).

You won’t hear the answers from Cicero or Epictetus or Spinoza or Aristotle.  Or me. That would be too easy.  But you might hear some of the right questions to ask yourself.

On a lighter note, I long ago drafted a story (“It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) on the use of music to improve our mood – one way to a good life, at least in the moment. It’s something I pay attention to, and I know exactly what old songs will temporarily soothe my beast.  But, as the story points out, it is a band-aid and not a remedy.  The remedy would seem to be much harder.

How Do You “Mask Despair”? How Do You Handle a “November of the Soul”?

As my regular readers know, I have been mulling over Moby-Dick after a recent re-reading.  (Re-reading is highly recommended; see my blog here.)  In the very beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tells us that when he is starting to despair, when he feels the “November of the soul,” he goes to sea.  Ishmael thinks that this is a universal solution, and the reason that all over “Manhattoes” (Manhattan) people in despair migrate to the shore, to the docks, and gaze upon the ocean: “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”  The ocean does help me when I am in the doldrums.   Perhaps it is the immensity and power of the ocean in relation to the paltriness of one human life.  I recently had a welcome dose of the sea, but it is not readily available to us all and is only a temporary antidote.

Thoreau reminds us that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” so we know we are not alone.  There are others, many others, in the clutches of despair.  Old age may or may not be more liable to this condition, but it definitely provides less distraction from our own minds.  In our younger days, when we had jobs, children, obligations and a hectic schedule all around, there was still despair, but perhaps little time to consider it.  Now, it descends during quiet late afternoons and the wee hours of the morning.  And, lately, every time we turn on the news.

The ocean helps, but so does nature in all its forms.  Wendell Berry finds relief (not alleviation) from despair in wild things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

Berry finds “grace,” but only “for a time.”

There are other ways, additional ways, that we handle despair.  Niall Williams’ latest novel, Time of the Child, is about an older doctor who has lost his wife and also lost his faith.  Yet Doctor Troy attends mass, in an effort to ward off despair and order his life with the comfort of a schedule, a routine:

The doctor attended Mass, but without devotion.  After his wife Regina was taken by a cancer he hadn’t seen coming, he had lost the relic of faith he once had.  To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more or less than how to get through another day.

Oh, the things that we do to “mask despair”!  Is this perhaps the reason that we old people cling to habits, our houses, our ways of life? Rituals, habits, and repetitions paper over despair.  In a world and a body that are failing us, they are something that is ours – built up over a lifetime.

In an earlier book, This is Happiness, Williams talks about how an old woman has braced herself against despair:

As a shield against despair, she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived.

Again, we know pessimistic people like this, we know times when we are like this ourselves (practically every day in the political realm, I am finding).  Not a pleasant way to live though, but, for some, expecting the worst is often a partial armor against despair.   

 So, what do we do with this despair in relation to our fellow elders: should we share it to make others know that they are not alone?  I remember, as a young woman, the first time I read Virgina Woolf’s admission that life “is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength.”  Someone was finally admitting to me what I thought was obvious, but I had never heard anyone articulate.   Mary Oliver says, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”  Yes.  The alternative is to buck up and, in our bravado, give others the hope that despair can be overcome.   Later in Walden, Thoreau exhorts us: “We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.”  I think I’m with the ladies on this one.

And there is another reason that we should share.  Our fears and worries, spoken out loud, are seldom as scary as when whispered silently through our minds.  When we expose our fears to the light, they do not disappear, but they often seem to shrink – or, at least, stop growing.  Also, remedies can be shared, as noted above.  Go to the sea, go to the woods, find comfort in ritual or habit.  And discovering that others have survived despair is the best encouragement we can find.

For anyone who came to this page by googling “despair,” and is in its clutches, please remember that you can talk to someone by texting or calling 988 for the suicide hotline.  Despair is a fact of life for all of us at times, but if there is no relief, please get some help.  You are not alone.

When I was young, I often used fantasy to counter despair.  I find it doesn’t work so well in old age.  I wrote a story in order to think about that: “Amnesia at the Airport.”  Try it.  Better yet, write your own story.  And share it.

Golden Nuggets From Melville

I have been re-reading Moby-Dick lately – very slowly and not for the plot.  An early critic of the novel (in a very negative review, of which there were many) said that Melville tried to combine two books – a work of tragic fiction and an informational text about whales and whaling.  I would suggest that Melville actually gives us three books and I’m grateful for it: 1) the fictional, 2) the informational, and 3) the philosophical.  Almost every chapter contains some nugget of wisdom, some spiritual musings, some explanation of the inexplicable, that makes rereading worthwhile.

Contrary to general belief, Moby-Dick does not start with the narrator saying, “Call me Ishmael.”  It begins with a brief section on etymology and a longer section entitled “extracts,” wherein Melville gives us a multitude of passages that he says were provided by a “Sub-Sub-Librarian.”  In this spirit, I will share some “extracts” from Melville over the next few months.  In the days before digital books and search engines, readers often kept a “commonplace book, wherein they wrote ‘extracts’ of anything they read that they wanted to remember, and thoughts about the same.”  So, here are some notations relating to old age from by commonplace book on Moby-Dick.

The first “golden nugget” is from Chapter 11, “Nightgown,” wherein Queequeg and Ishmael are cuddled up in bed trying to keep warm; it is December in New Bedford and there is no central heating.  Having just moved back to New England after many years, I can sympathize.  At least I have a mattress warmer (and central heating!).  Anyway, buried among the bed clothes was this little explanation of why we need to have a point of hardship to enjoy pleasure:

The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.  Nothing exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason, a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.

“There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”  Is this why assisted living homes cloy?  Why retirement isn’t always the unmitigated joy that we thought it would be?  Is this why many people look at the poverty of their youth as a “good time”?  Oh, to have wandered the Berkshire Hills with Melville and Hawthorne (to whom Moby-Dick was dedicated) and discuss such subjects!

Here is a second little gleaning from Moby-Dick.  This one comes from Chapter 29, “Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb.”  (Note that the chapter titles sometimes read as stage directions – Melville thinks he is writing a Shakespearean tragedy, and he is right.) This one is about Ahab’s age and sleeplessness:

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.  Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into one’s tomb,” – he would mutter to himself, – “for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle [hatchway], to go to my grave-dug berth.”

Do we resist sleep in old age because it is too much like its “near enemy” death?  Or is it just that we are not living so hard during the day, not wrung out by the pace of life?  For myself, going to bed is not the biggest problem.  After dinner, an hour of television, and a couple of chapters of a good book, I turn into protoplasm.  But I cannot stay asleep, and those early morning hours are brutal. (If this is you, try reading Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” to know that you are not alone.)  Soon I am up and roaming the decks like Ahab, and congratulating myself that the night is over, and I have made it to another day.

As a last note, Melville wrote a whole chapter on whiteness: “The Whiteness of the Whale.”  He talks about whiteness as a source of horror (think ghosts and albino monsters like the whale), purity (think brides), beauty (think pearls), and as a symbol of the “benignity of old age.”  This got me thinking about the “white hairs” among us.

White hair used to carry the air of wisdom or power; white wigs were worn by powerful men during the 17th and 18th centuries. “White hairs” is also sometimes used as a derogatory term, a term of generational resentment. Our politicians (I refrain from calling them statesmen) have gotten old and older – but often blonder rather than whiter.  When I go to church or classical music concerts, I am often amazed at the sea of white hair and pale skin.  Melville did, later in his life, write a poem about old age in which the last image compares the white of skim milk (old age), with the rich color of cream (youth):

Old Age in his ailing
At youth will be railing
It scorns youth’s regaling
Pooh-pooh it does, silly dream;
But me, the fool, save
From waxing so grave
As, reduced to skimmed milk, to slander the cream.

I guess it just matters where you are in time’s continuum.  Melville only lived to 72; he is fairly white-haired in his last portrait, taken at the time of his retirement from the custom house at age 66.   Like Hardy, he mostly abandoned novels for poetry in his old age, and the reading public almost completely abandoned him.  It was their loss, but it doesn’t have to be ours. Pick up Moby-Dick (you probably have a copy in the house!) and open it anywhere.  You will be rewarded.

Shakespeare’s Lessons in How to Get Old – King Lear and The Tempest

Shakespeare seems to have started seriously thinking about old age when he was just over 40 and writing King Lear.  Forty was the “old” sixty or seventy; in 1606, when Lear was produced, Shakespeare had already substantially outlived his life expectancy and would retire and die within the next ten years.  He continued to ponder the problems of aging and mortality. Six years later, he wrote The Tempest.  I would argue that Lear showed us how not to get old, and The Tempest gave us a template for a better way.  And I am always looking for a better way.

First, let me make a plug for the BBC versions of the Shakespeare plays made in the late seventies through the eighties.  Watch them with the subtitles on – not because the sound quality is bad, but because the language is so dense that you don’t want to miss anything.  View both the ones you know well and the ones you don’t remember; from our altered/aged perspective, they will not be the same plays we studied in college.

Back to Shakespeare’s old men.  Lear claims that he is ready for retirement: “And ‘tis our fast intent / To share all cares and business from our age, / conferring them on younger strengths while we/ Unburdened crawl toward death.”  But Lear does not mean what he says.  He wants to distribute his kingdom to his heirs, but with strings attached.  He wants to be unburdened, but don’t take his horses or his men or his status away from him.  Good luck with that.  He also wants pledges of love from his daughters – and, as one learns in life, those quickest to promise are the one who take their promises the least seriously.  Lear loses his daughters, his horses, his kingdom, and, of course, becomes a broken old man.  Even in the end, he wants to take Cordelia off to prison with him, “Come, let’s away to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.”  Lear still wants to control his daughter, to have her to himself.  When Lear dies, the loyal Kent says, “the wonder is that he hath endured so long. / He but usurped his life.”  What does “usurping his life” mean?  If usurp means to take something one has no right to, does this imply that Lear was somehow interfering with the natural flow of life?

Many have read the lesson here as being that one should never retire, never distribute one’s assets, never trust the younger generation.  The real lesson is that we should never renunciate (more on this word below) until we can do it fully.  We cannot take the gifts of old age without giving up the advantages of youth. And thus we move to The Tempest.

The Tempest, written in 1612 when Shakespeare was 48 and about to go back home to rest and die, is thought of as the author’s farewell play, with the epilogue being Shakespeare’s last words to his audience.

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have ’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now ’tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.

Applause please!  The Bard wants recognition from his audience for his past contributions, but then he wants to step aside.  And here we have a completely different view of old age.  Prospero is determined to tie up loose ends – get off the island, get his kingdom back – but he is also willing to give up everything: his spirit Ariel, his slave Caliban, the exclusive love of his daughter, his books, his magic, and even his vengeance toward his brother and others who have done him wrong.  His magic causes the shipwreck that brings his former enemies to the island, but he is determined not to hurt them.  Prospero fully expects his daughter to transfer her loyalty to her husband, Ariel to fly away to live their own life, Caliban to pursue whatever kind of existence he can manage, for his own days of power to come to an end.

In deciding whether to act, Hamlet says “Readiness is all.”  In Lear, Edgar is sure that “Men must endure /Their going hence, even as their coming thither;/ Ripeness is all.”  In The Tempest, the aging Shakespeare realizes that there must be both readiness and ripeness. (See an old blog on ripeness and readiness here.)

Buddhism has the concept of a renunciant, and particularly a tradition of elders “going forth” and becoming renunciants in their old age.  These old folks take nothing with them and have no expectations.

Who so has turned to renunciation,
Turned to detachment of the mind,
Is filled with all-embracing love
And freed from thirsting after life. (AN 5.55)

If you still have expectations, need adulation, need control – you are not ready.  There is a tragedy when one is ripe (very old) but not ready, and an equal tragedy in being ready but not ripe.  But, make the right decision, and be “filled with all-embracing love.”

I am not just talking about retirement decisions here; old age is full of questions of renunciation.  Some are forced on us as we lose abilities and resources; some are moral issues. Medical treatment decisions are a good example. But we must both know what to do and have the mindset to do it gracefully.

In an earlier play, As You Like It, Shakespeare has his character Jacques list the seven ages of man.  I am probably in stage 6 as I still have (more or less) control of my faculties, and have not reached the point of “mere oblivion, /Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”  But this is the rub, isn’t it?  We need “control of our faculties” to judge when to take the next step, before we enter into “mere oblivion.”  Otherwise, we are in an eternal loop – trying to be old without giving up anything.  Not only is that hard, but it is silly. And, as we in the United States are learning, there is a price for such foolishness.

For a fanciful piece of fiction about different ways to grow old, you might try “Tale of Two Grannies.”

Happy Holidays

A few years ago, someone referred me to the opinion pieces of Richard Groves.  His column for Christmas (found here or here) is entitled “In the Beginning, There Were Stories.”  Christmas is surely the time for stories – some of our finest literature is in the form of Christmas stories.  One thinks of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales or Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory.  There is, of course, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and my favorite – Little Women, where we begin with Jo moaning that “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”  As I age, stories are the Christmas presents that I most want – to remember them, to create them.

I love Christmas movies too, but over the last couple of weeks we have had some really bad luck with recent Christmas movies.  Last night, however, we watched “Christmas in Connecticut” from 1945 and enjoyed it thoroughly.  It was silly, sentimental, and predictable – just like Christmas should be.  I also recommend “The Bishop’s Wife.”

I have posted holiday blogs and stories over the years.  Three years ago, I posted “Holidays, Holy Days, and Old Saint Nick.”  For the new year, you might try “Baby New Year and Old Father Time,” or “New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age.”  If you are in the mood for fictional stories (or perhaps quasi-fictional), you might look at “Epiphany,” “Cookie Crumbs,” or “Boxing Day.”  “A Tale of Two Grannies” is not, strictly speaking, a Christmas story, but it is in the mood of the season.

However, if you want the best of all holiday treats in this hectic and over-commercialized season, read Robert Frost’s little poem, “Christmas Trees.”

I wish all the best to my readers this holiday season.  It is our first Christmas back up north, and with the temperature in single digits and a slight snow covering, it looks like it will be a white Christmas for us.  Here’s to a meaningful holiday season and a peaceful and healthy new year – “may your days be merry and bright.”  Thanks for sharing this space with me for another year.

Reading in Old Age, Reading About Old Age

As you are aware, I like to read about old age – in poetry, novels, biography, memoir, history, and science.  This recently brought me to a fairly obscure book by Luis Sepulveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories.  Who could resist that title?  It is a slim volume and well worth your time.  The “old man” lives deep in the Amazon.  Old Antonio had minimal education as a boy, never reads, and can write only to sign his name.  But, upon being presented with some documents in relation to a forced voting registration, he realizes that he can understand them:

He could read!

It was the most important discovery of his whole life.  He could read.  He possessed the antidote to the deadly poison of old age.  He could read.

What a reminder that we have the gift of reading!

Antonio had “forgotten” he could read, so when he rediscovers this gift, he has no idea what to read and, with the assistance of a local schoolteacher, tries everything. He decides that history books were just a “string of lies” and that tragic stories made him suffer. (There was enough misery in his life already.)  So, living deep in the Amazon – in the forest and on the shore of the river – Antonio buries himself in tales of lust and love and happy endings.  This is also a novel about the environment and the rape of the land, about the criminals who “whored on his [Antonio’s] virgin Amazonia.”  The old man is outraged at mankind, its governments, and its ignorance.  He fights as long as he can, and finally escapes to his reading:

…he set off in the direction of El Idilio, his hut, and his novels that spoke of love in such beautiful words they sometimes made him forget the barbarity of man.

I, too, would like to forget “the barbarity of man,” but the news keeps reminding me.

Young people are purported to have largely lost the skill of immersive reading, of attention, of transference.  How my young self used to love to hide in my room and get lost in Little Women or The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. It was a respite from the nagging of my parents, the perceived disdain of my peers, the boredom in the days when instant distraction was not available.  Except in a book.  As an old lady, reading is still my greatest pleasure.

In Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time – Life Beyond Sixty¸ there is an entire chapter on reading, entitled “Unmet Friends” – unmet friends being those people and characters we know through books and not in person.  Heilbrun extols this gift of the written word.  She does, however, doubt that one can develop the skill of reading late in life if one hasn’t been reading right along:

Reading – like those more frivolous lifelong pursuits, singing in tune, or driving, or roller-blading – is either an early acquired passion or not:  there is no in-between about it, no catching up in one’s later years.

Heilbrun has a point and makes me glad that I have been a lifelong reader of eclectic taste and interest.  However, I do not think that she is entirely correct.  It is true that “new” recreational readers may not be able to start with Dostoevsky, but they can certainly start with murder mysteries or love stories.  And they might find their way to Anna Karenina.   At least I hope so.

In my old age, I’ve developed a bunker mentality about books.  I am deathly afraid of being stranded somewhere with nothing to read.  I fondly remember reading an autobiographical piece by the philosophical longshoreman Eric Hoffer, who lost his sight for seven years while he was young and vowed to read everything he could once he could see.  And so he did.  He used to take the thickest book he could find when he went on a train, and once read all of Montaigne’s essays in this way while stranded in a snowstorm.

I have the luxury of having a Kindle to take on trips, and always have my phone to read on if I get desperate in unexpected situations.  I also always have at least twice the number of books out of the library than I can possibly read.  In my new (old) abode, I can walk to the library – a great incentive to keep up with my exercise. But even having to lug a heavy bag to and fro has not dampened my need to have a full array of unread books under the bed!

I struggle with how much to challenge myself with my reading.  I am a lover of murder mysteries, and have discovered that mysteries read over twenty years ago are new again!  Such a joy to re-read Christie, Tey, Marsh, and Allington!  But, I do realize that if I do not challenge myself a little, I will lose the ability to read complex books with complex sentences.  There has been much research showing that increased computer time has decreased our ability to follow more profound texts, and more profound texts are what nurture my soul (while mysteries put it to sleep – sometimes also a desired outcome).  So, I almost always have three books going – one mystery, one literary novel (old or new), and one work of non-fiction.  Although the mysteries are only one third of that array, I go through them quicker and surely read more.  Strangely, in these dark days, they help.  While mysteries are full of the “barbarities of man,” those barbarities are acknowledged as barbarities.  They are usually exposed and punished.  I have my fantasies.

Lastly, I am currently reading a book about how old women have written about themselves: The Lioness in Winter: Writing an Old Woman’s Life by Ann Burack-Weiss.  It contains selections from female authors who wrote memoirs well into later life.  Besides enjoying the excerpts and commentary, it is helping me compile a list for further reading, which I will share at some point. Meanwhile I recommend the book, which has much to say on the reading and writing of old people.

If you want to visit one of my stories about reading, you might try “By the Book.”  And one last word of advice about the Sepulveda book: don’t read the second dedication until after you finish the book. Then read it and weep.  Our poor planet.