Category: The good life in old age

“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. 

An Old Lady’s Take on the True Danger of AI

Sunday’s NYTimes was full of articles about the economic danger of the AI bubble, and I am sure that it is a possible economic hazard for the companies involved. But I am much more concerned with the moral hazard, the risk that will be passed on to others, to us.  I think the danger is substantial, and so let me unpack it a little.

Every time I think about why AI scares me, I end up pondering what it means to be human. Human beings have always been greatly invested in proving that we are more than animals (think Scopes trial). The Bible spends a lot of time making sure we know we are in charge – and a step above the animals.  This of course has blessed us in using animals any way we wish. But, is there really such a difference between us and the animals?  Or is it just a great chain of being with a slight dotted line between man and apes?

Aristotle says that the difference is that humans are rational.  But surely AI is more rational than we are!  Descartes said that animals are akin to automatons or robots – merely mechanical, but that humans had souls.  Does the computer have a soul?  How would we know?  Another commonly repeated differentiation between men and animal is that animals adapt to their environments or die, while human beings are capable of changing their environment.  But, these days, it looks like changing our environment might be killing us, so maybe it all comes to the same thing. Maybe all we can say about all of this is that human beings need to feel special, we need to feel superior to animals, and we really haven’t worked out our relationship to a really smart machine.

The further I explored this issue, the more I intuited that the true danger of AI was the loss of any sense of worth or efficacy that we could do things ourselves.  I could, for example, have AI write my blogs.  I could just give AI a topic and set it loose. You might not even notice the difference.  You might even think that my writing has improved. But.  I would have abandoned the maintenance of a discipline, a sense of self-worth, a lifeline of true connection with those who read it.  And so it is with other things in our lives.  I play Bach rather badly, but I continue doing it, although I could listen Glenn Gould’s magic through my earphones. My husband and I still do almost all our cooking from scratch, including bread and desserts.  Not long ago, my son told me that he couldn’t imagine spending the time that we spend planning, shopping for, cooking, and cleaning up after meals, as if those were worthless things that should be discarded as soon as possible.  Surely the project of feeding ourselves could be outsourced in some way?  Yes, we could order takeout or go out to eat.  We would save time, perhaps, and some mental energy (but not money).   What would we replace those hours with?  Word games, news feeds, slick TV comedies and soapy dramas?  No thank you.  I understand that people will succumb.  I sometimes succumb, and, as I grow older, I may yet totally capitulate.  But it is not just about self-esteem and good home cooking.  It is about a sense of discipline. A sense of being in control of our selves – could this be what is meant by soul?

Let me just begin by saying that we have allowed discipline to become a bad word.  Michael Foucault and other modern thinkers helped in this regard, with the emphasis on discipline from without rather than Benjamin Franklin’s stress on self-discipline.  Discipline used to be valued, prized.  Discipline used to be seen as a way of living a better life.  Monasteries had disciplines, so did the Methodist Church.  Jesus had disciples.  Buddhism has a discipline called the Vinaya.  I never made much of my life until I learned a certain level of discipline, and I am sure most of us would say the same.

It is always hard to explain to younger folks that we study some things not in order to learn them, but to learn discipline.  I have never used calculus in my adult life, but I learned a lot about logic and determination by studying it when I was young.  I am currently studying French – not because Google Translate can’t meet all of my meager translation needs, but because the study itself keeps my mind active and teaches me something about the very nature of words and language.  Similarly, I write a blog not just for my readers (although I thoroughly appreciate you!), but for the discipline of having to read and think a little more deeply.  The process forces me to actually sit at my computer a few times a month to organize my thoughts.

Sloth and torpor are sins in most religions.  We might be reminded that we have given animals we eat a life of sloth and torpor – we feed them, house them, make all their decisions for them.  And then we see a picture of someone who has “liberated” a cow or pig and it is cavorting in the pasture.  Do we think it misses its sense of security? Do we think it preferred to have us doing its thinking for it?  “Taking care” of it?

AI wants to take our work, particularly our mental work, away from us.  For some, it is taking real work away.  We already have two middle-aged adults in our family who have lost jobs in which it is very likely that they will be replaced by some version of AI.  And such losses have only begun – why would businesses invest big money in AI if they don’t anticipate that it will save them money elsewhere (salaries)?

This is not the first time that our generation has seen technology replace our work. We went to school in the days of blue book exams and math without a calculator (except for the trusty slide rule).  But then things started to change rapidly, and my generation accepted those changes willingly.  I remember when dishwashers became common, and when I used my first garage door opener.  So much of the work-replacement seemed common sense – we didn’t even think about it.  Who wouldn’t want to replace the drudgery of cloth diapers with disposable ones?  But now we need to think, and thinking is exactly what AI is trying to take away from us.  It wants to program our reading and listening (it knows what we like!) and rescue us from the messy business of… living.

I am as lazy as the next person.  I know that, and I know it is a problem.  Much of the meaning of my life involves fighting inertia.  I used to be my own worst enemy, but now I think I’ve got a more formidable one.

I do not think that the danger is that AI will get rid of pesky humans; I think that we will become less human all on our own.  I will fight my personal battle on this, but it will take all the discipline I have – discipline I learned doing calc by hand and hanging cloth diapers on the line.

One of my favorite stories about technology is Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.”  He got his title from Sara Teasdale’s poem (also relevant), “There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time).”   And, Happy Thanksgiving!  For all my old lady grumbling, I am exceedingly grateful for my life and my loyal readers.  And this message was not brought to you by AI!

Why Are We Avoiding Paradise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Old in the Time of Trump

From the outside, one might think that seniority is in ascendancy.  One might even think we are living in a gerontocracy.  For the last decade or so, we have had elderly presidents and elderly leaders in congress.  We have one of the oldest senates in history, with an average age of sixty-four.  At seventy-nine, Trump is even older than I am; one might expect that this senior president would have more compassion and respect for the elderly.  One might, of course, wish that Trump would have more compassion and respect for everyone.

Before I lay out some of the problems with growing old in the age of Trump, let me acknowledge that there was a senior tax cut in the “Big Beautiful Bill.”  Beginning this year and ending in 2028, it increases the standard deduction for individual seniors by $6,000.   Thank you, Donald, but it hardly makes up for the angst you have caused in other areas.

Elders have a long list of things to worry about these days.  Relentless and inhuman immigration enforcement has meant that nursing homes and seniors who need home care are having more and more trouble finding caregivers.  Lack of immigrant help on the farms (along with tariff increases) has meant that food prices have increased.  With the war on alternative energy, there are predictions that energy costs will rise and air quality will decline.  Medicaid cuts mean that the impoverished elderly have become more vulnerable as benefits – including potentially nursing home care – disappear.  Medicare and Social Security seem vulnerable in ways that we have not seen for many years.  And we feel we have to defend ourselves against things we don’t really understand, but which the government is letting loose on us – like AI and cryptocurrency.

Senior citizens worry about the increased dissension in the country and within our families.  Trump loves a good fight, and he surely doesn’t mind turning us all against one another.  There seems to be little common ground between Trumpers and liberals, and this dissension has invaded Thanksgiving dinners, weddings, even memorial services.  Seniors fret about children who don’t speak to each other, holiday dinners that are no longer events to be looked forward to. We all fret over family members who can’t be pried away from the particular biases of Fox News.

One of the saddest stories in this regard was the one that the wonderful author Marilynne Robinson told about her own mother, who had moved into an assisted living center and was soon spending her days watching conservative television with her new friends, and bemoaning that her daughter was receiving awards from Obama, who she was sure was a Muslim.

“With a little difficulty we [her mother and herself] finally reached an accommodation, an adult friendship,” she writes. “Then she started watching Fox News.” Her mother and her fellow retirees began to share “salacious dread over coffee cake,” fretting over the rumored “war against Christmas.” “My mother lived out the end of her fortunate life in a state of bitterness and panic, never having had the slightest brush with any experience that would confirm her in these emotions, except, of course, Fox News,” Robinson writes (quoted from a review of Robinson’s What Are We Doing Here? in the NYTimes).

Elders worry about their children or grandchildren who are losing their jobs (even those formerly “safe” federal jobs) and those who might get sent to fight in our own cities. Grandparents (who lived through most of the relevant diseases and know whereof they speak) decry the parents who refuse to vaccinate their grandchildren.    Mostly this is  because they worry about the grandchildren, but it is also because we are afraid of catching the flu, Covid, and other bugs that the children will now be more likely to bring with them when they come to visit.

Old folks with fixed incomes and limited resources know well how the volatility in prices, the stock market, and national mood can make a good day into a fretful one.  The news relays one crisis after another to our fearful ears.   The current shutdown is making travel worrisome; we have a family wedding next month which involves air travel, and we can only hope things will be more normalized by then.

But none of these things is the worst of it.  The worst of it is that Trump displays the stereotypical idiosyncrasies of the elderly – radical conservatism, miserliness, covetousness, blind willfulness, vengefulness.  There are many fine and thoughtful old people; there are many seventy-nine-year-olds that I would trust with my life.  Last week I talked about models for getting old.  The worst thing for old people about Trump is that, in my opinion, he is the very worst of models – both for us elders and for all the younger people behind us who are getting older every day!

And there is one more thing.  He makes us afraid.  As I finished this blog entry, I waffled about whether to publish such outright criticism of our president – not because one shouldn’t criticize the president, but because he is also the very model of vindictiveness.  There, I have said my piece on this No Kings Day.

One last reminder, the negative stereotypes of old age that Trump represents go back to Horace and beyond.  We might compare Saint Benedict’s more positive view of aging as a gift to be properly used.  In the Prologue to his Rule, Benedict tells us that if we grow old it is by way of a truce with God, so that we may have time to “amend our misdeeds” and “to safeguard love.”  Just sending that out there.

“Let Them,” Self-Reliance, and Old Age

Sometimes, it seems that life just wants to teach you a lesson. You know this because synchronicities abound.   Driving around doing errands a few days ago, I happened to listen to an interview with the self-help guru Mel Robbins, who was expounding on her “Let Them” theory.  As I understood it, she was exhorting us to pay no attention to what other people do or say – and to just follow our wisdom.  There was a drop of stoicism in the message, and more than a little new-age me-ism.  Nevertheless, I got to thinking about how often what I think (or do) is related to how I perceive and anticipate the reactions of other people.  Once, a few years ago, I was explaining how I was doing something I didn’t want to do to satisfy a neighbor, when a wise friend of mine stopped the conversation to ask, “Don’t tell me at your age you’re still caring what other people think!”  Good question. Why do we still care?

 Later in the day, I was looking for a half-remembered passage in Spinoza and ran across Spinoza’s definition of ambition. Spinoza describes ambition as the “effort to do or omit something, solely in order that we may please men.”   Spinoza’s definition of being free – the highest good – is for something to exist “solely by the necessity of its own nature and determined to action by itself alone.”  In other words, the opposite of ambition. I thought I had turned in my ambition with my retirement papers, but maybe not.  

And that got me thinking about Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star:”

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

Of course, Frost’s poem includes a reference [“Keats’ eremite”] to Keats’ “Bright Star,” which begins: “Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—.”  Keats is talking about love, but he could also be exhorting us to be steadfast to our own mind and not pulled or pushed by the last book we read or our intimations of how others feel. 

Later, after meditating, I listened to a dharma talk by Gil Fronsdal, the theme of which was: “Don’t Make It Worse.”  Life is full of dukkha (suffering), but we do not need to shoot the second arrow (blame, regret, fear, etc.) and make it worse. And, of course, when things are bad, one of the ways we make it worse is by worrying about what people will think.  Buddhism talks about pairs of opposing winds that buffet our lives, one of which is praise and blame.  The goal is to steady ourselves in the storm.

My more rational mind (the mind that Spinoza exhorts me to consult more often) tells me that my friend was right.  Why should old people care what other people think?  And “other people” includes neighbors, books, internet gurus, friends, or that critical-looking woman in my yoga class. We’ve lived through enough bad decisions, taken enough bad advice, and mistakenly followed the crowd enough times that we should certainly have learned our lesson. This does not mean that we do not care about anything – it just means that we should know better than to give our equanimity away to the whims of others.  We should look inward for the answers. 

Which brought me to this from Emerson and his essay on self-reliance, which is really what we are talking about here:

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles…

I think that one of the reasons so many older people are drawn to write memoirs of one kind or another is to explore what it is that we have learned, what we know.  And it is a worthwhile exercise if only for that purpose.  I have given myself the task of reviewing my old journals for the same reason.

Being old means often looking weak and vulnerable to the outside world, and we often reflect that view back on ourselves.  Lately, these is a ubiquitous meme on the net with post-menopausal women talking about how they “don’t care” about one thing or another.  There are a lot of things I do care about, but it seems that outside approval should not be one of them.  It is easier however to look for answers in a book or from someone else.  But, we can do it.  After all these years, we’re still here and we’ve got to trust that we have learned something.  And that our own opinion is infinitely superior (at least for ourselves) than the person’s next door or the latest new-age guru.

Often, old folks have to stand up to the consternation and advice of their younger relatives.  Holding our own is not easy, but it is often necessary.  You might try my story, “Again and Again and Again,” for an example of this.

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.”

Monadnock, Emerson, and the Need for a Still Point

I love Mount Monadnock.  I lived near it for about a decade and climbed it more than once. We could not see the mountain from our house, but its bald peak would surprise me as I drove over hills or around corners; it was a presence in my life. I also love Walden Pond, where I often went to walk and read when I lived closer.  What I did not know until recently was that Emerson bought his forty acres on the shores of Walden Pond in order to build a house with a view of Monadnock.  This, of course, was the “woodlot” on which Henry David Thoreau later built his cabin.  During my walks around Walden Pond, I have never glimpsed Mount Monadnock, but perhaps, when the trees had been mostly cleared, it was possible.  Maybe.

A monadnock is a particular geologic formation; it is an isolated area of harder rock that perseveres as the plain around it gets eroded and washed away.  Mount Monadnock is a monadnock, as is Stone Mountain in Georgia.  As I was thinking about monadnocks, I saw an analogy between a monadnock and an old person – perhaps we are what is left after the more ephemeral parts of life wash away.  Craggy.

But, back to Emerson and his desire to live with a view of the mountain.  Emerson actually wrote an ode to Monadnock, in which he says that the very presence of the stable mountain “Recallest us/ And makes us sane.”  Yes – that stabilizing influence we all need.  “Stand like a mountain,” say the meditation instructors.  T. S. Eliot exhorted us to look for the “still point of the turning world.”

Shelley and Robert Frost had a similar sentiment, albeit about stars.  “Bright star, would I were stedfast [sic] as thou art—” laments Shelley.  Frost describes the function of that steadfastness in “Choose Something Like a Star:”

It asks of us a certain height,

So when at times the mob is swayed

To carry praise or blame too far,

We may choose something like a star

To stay our minds on and be staid.

The idea is that we human beings need a center to keep us from going… nuts.  And it would appear that nuts is where we have been going lately.  Yeats, in “Second Coming,” says “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”   The last few months have surely seemed uncentered.  Without a “center”… anything goes.  Anything goes.  What sounded like a terrific motto for life when I was a young hippie seems, in old age, to pale in the face of reality.  (Our other motto was not to trust anyone over thirty, and now we find ourselves at the wrong end of that imperative!)

What is the solution?  Is our loss of moorings as a society owing to the decline in religious belief?  Some posit that this is so.  I recently read a piece by Arthur Brooke, the “happiness guy,” that said that after Brooke spent time a lot of time looking into what makes people happy, he decided to practice religion – in his case, Catholicism.  I will say that, for many people, this does not work.  Either they have a tough time working up enough faith to go through the motions or they become so fanatical that they create their own kind of anarchy.  But one must remember (and I am not trying to be flippant) that Dumbo’s feather enabled him to fly, even though he learned later that there was no magic in it at all.

If all standards are relative and all ethics situational – if lenience is the utmost good and rigidity always condemned, how could we not end up in this terrible place in our national life?  Flexibility is highly prized and yet it leaves us unanchored.  When new technologies like AI come along, we are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  But this leniency leaves us vulnerable in ways both obvious and insidious.

My husband and I recently re-read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and then watched the BBC version.  Julius Caesar is surely a story of humans manipulating each other, but it is also a story of self-justification on all sides. Everyone saw the situation from the viewpoint of themselves.  Perhaps [a bad word here!], we need a non-negotiable standard.  I don’t have an answer, but I know an important question when I see it.

On the subject of Walden Pond, you might try my story, “Again and Again and Again.” For a story inspired by Mount Monadnock, you could try “Going Down Is the Most Dangerous Part.” For further discussion of Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star,” you can look at an old post, “Old Age, Space Age.”

Anxiety in Old Age and the Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments of Second Mate Stubbs

I suffer from anxiety (ask anyone around me), but so do most old people.  And, of course, these are troubling times in every way.  I had always hoped that old age – assuming sufficient income and reasonable health – would be a time when I could finally relax; it is disappointing to find myself so anxious. I feel I should be old enough to know better, and surely old enough to realize that worry and anxiety (and one might throw in remorse) are useless states of mind.

There are things to worry about – I can give you lists of my concerns on the personal, national, and cosmic levels.  Of course we must try, as Niebuhr says, to “change the things that we can.” But worry and anxiety, in themselves, are ineffective against everything from tariff chaos to aging disorders. After we have done “what we can,” it is a matter of acceptance and control.  Some people find this through religion (Julian of Norwich assures us that “all things shall be well”), but that doesn’t work always or for everyone.  I tend to turn to Spinoza, who cautions us to rely on our rational capacities to keep ourselves on a calm and optimistic path (more on that here.)  Recently I found echoes of Spinoza in a self-help book by Judson Brewer: Unwinding Anxiety.  Brewer asserts that anxiety is a habit (I agree), and as old people we have had a long time to make sure that our habits are firmly entrenched.  How much of our day is unsettled by worry?  How much of our life?  My days are dwindling down to “those precious few.”  I don’t want “She Worried” sandblasted on my tombstone or on the memories of those I leave behind.

Brewer suggests breaking down anxiety into steps – Trigger, Behavior, Result.  In my case, the trigger is often a random thought, something that has just drifted through my poor brain to worry about.  My memory may be going, but my imagination has never been more ferocious.  So, one might say that most of my anxiety is self-inflicted.  No surprises there.  Of course, the trigger can be external: the stock market, an unexpected expense, or a change in health.  Whatever the trigger, the behavior is incessant worrying and generalized anxiety.  And the result is rumination, sleeplessness, inattentiveness, a mad search for distraction, and a generally bad day.  Brewer’s contention is that just by realizing what is going on, by stopping to identify each step in the process, we can be smart and inventive enough to change it.

It all sounds good, but it necessitates changing some pretty well-entrenched habits, habits written on our minds like wrinkles written on our faces.  Habits might have started in childhood as coping mechanisms and never got discarded.  But I am trying.  I have the time and the will, and I certainly have the triggers.

As you all know by now, I have been wallowing a bit in Moby-Dick lately.  I am reminded of the easy-going Stubbs, second mate of the Pequod, stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a dangerously fanatical captain (sound familiar?).  How does Stubbs keep smiling?  For one thing, he greatly enjoys the little pleasures of life, like eating the first steak cut from a killed whale:

Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.

“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!”

But one might wonder how Stubbs keeps his appetite for such pleasures amid the challenges around him.  Melville knew we would wonder and, after an unfortunate encounter with Ahab, Stubbs gives us his rules of life:

“Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth — ”

Of course, we should think.  I read Stubbs’ 11th commandment as “worry not.”  And I am firmly in favor of his twelfth; although, as I age, I find going to sleep much easier than staying asleep, for if worry and anxiety are not useful, are not good for you, they are even deadlier in the wee hours.

Brewer and Spinoza both exhort us to use our rational powers to counter anxiety.  Again, I try.  I guess the most effective rational argument for me is this reflection:  How many of the things that I worried about have come to pass?  Almost none.  The tree never fell on the house, the stock market rebounded, I was never fired.  Did worrying help prevent any of these things?  It did not.  Most of the calamities that have affected my life could not have been anticipated.  I am old and I know all this.  Now I just have to convince my habit-chained brain to recognize the truth and listen to Stubbs.

I recently saw an old video clip of Huston Smith interviewing Mark Van Doren (here).  I recommend it.  In the course of the interview, Van Doren asserts that we have a duty to be happy.  (Again, I am reminded of Spinoza and his exhortation to be cheerful.)  Van Doren insists that we realize and accept the nature of the world around us.  In fact, he says that this is the function of literature: simply to lay out the world as it is, so that we have no illusions.  Literature should not be didactic, he says; but it should be true.  I will never accept everything, but I also know that I am often tilting at windmills, at things that cannot be changed.  And I suffer for it.  Stubbs and Spinoza help.

Meanwhile, we all deal with anxiety in our own way.  You might try my story, “A Spoonful of Sugar,” to see one way that some of us cope (or distract ourselves).

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.