Category: The good life in old age

Late Style – Two Approaches to Aging

There are basically two approaches to aging.  The first seeks a deep acceptance of the changes wrought by decay and death; the other prizes fighting until the end.  I think you know which camp I am in, but I have had reason to examine this topic again recently, both in relation to myself and to the larger world.

In his posthumous book, On Late Style, Edward Said differentiates between two artistic approaches at the end of creative lives.  He proposes that one group of aging literary and musical artists reflects “a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of miraculous transformation of common reality;” he puts the Shakespeare of the late romances and the Sophocles of Oedipus at Colonus in this category.  However, Said is more interested in those creative minds that struggle with the “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction” of “age and ill health.”  He references Beethoven (I disagree with him on this) and Ibsen as artists who “fight until the end.”  One might think of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”  There is an article in last week’s NYTimes magazine written by a woman whose father rushed through his last months and last dime trying every new treatment, leaving no chance to say goodbye or to experience the end of his life.

In the same year (2006) that Said’s book was published, David Galenson published a classic account of old age and genius.  Old Masters and Young Geniuses divides artists into conceptual geniuses who do innovative work early, and experimentalists, whose best work is the product of the slow accretion of learning, experience, and reflection, and often occurs in the later years.

If we continue to struggle, when will we have time for the reflection and “the slow accretion of learning”?  Do we really want to heed Dylan Thomas in his exhortation to combat the inevitable?  Do we want the screaming and resistant death of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich, the bitter death of Eliot’s Peter Featherstone – or the serene death of Alcott’s Beth March, Cather’s Archbishop?  I know which one I would choose.

But even if we choose a peaceful old age, it is not easy in our culture.  Capitalism sees no profit in a serene old age.  There is more money in sending old folks out on pilgrimages to the fountain of youth – hawking cosmetics, plastic surgery, cruises, lifestyle “enhancements.”  In theory, technology should be the best friend of elders, allowing them to shop, listen to music, order books from the library – even when driving is no longer possible.  However, the internet is a capitalist production these days and even what it is good in it (think Wikipedia) has been co-opted to feed the AI engines.

As usual, we can be our own worst enemy.  New retirees often feel the need to excel at something to get back the respect (situational though it might have been) that they had in the office.  They want to write their first book and they want it to be a bestseller.  They take up art and enter juried shows with their first watercolors.  That is all fine if you can step back and realize what is going on.  I had a friend who fell into this pit so often that she posted a reminder on the top of her computer screen: “You’ve already done that.”

I have recently been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han.  It is the first of his books that I have read, but it won’t be the last.  I recommend this slim volume.  I don’t always think that Han is right, but he definitely gets me thinking.  In any case, he talks about the old systems of narrative (religious stories, heroic sagas, legends) with endings.  Capitalism wants no closure – there is always another way to spend your money.  A sense of endings gives way to what Han calls the “endless conjunction [and].” Capitalism thinks we always need one more thing.  Rituals are stopping places:

Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life.  They are forms of closure.  Without them, we slip through.  Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults.  The discontinuity of autonomous time gives way to the continuity of production and consumption.

I am not trying to tell anyone how to handle their own old age, but I am cautioning all of us to think about it consciously.  As one who plowed through her childhood and young adulthood with more energy than consciousness, I know that I want to carefully consider how to spend the time left to me.  It is hard to battle the latest cruise ad, bestseller list, fashion, or medical fad.  I have written both a story and a blog about someone who determined on “nothing new” in their old age.  No reading new books, no going new places, replacement purchases only.  It is not a prescription for life, but it is a worthwhile exercise.  (Ann Patchett tried it and wrote about the results here.)  But, again, there are at least two ways to spend our waning days.  Let’s at least choose somewhat deliberately.

Even if we believe in wringing the last drop out of life, we should consider how to do that.  I think of Thoreau:

…nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden)

Lastly, it often seems like our world, our culture, is in its old age, even in its death throes.  And it is fighting against it, although not in any logical way.  It is fighting for oil, for supreme intelligence, for control, for the way it used to be – and the fires rage, the coral dies, and there is constant action but no real progress, and surely no peace.  Just a thought.

 

 

 

 

Ways to Parse Our Lives

As I am writing this, it is the Autumnal Equinox, that moment when day and night are the same length, a pause in the steady progression to shorter and shorter days and the long night of the Winter Solstice.  One metaphor that poets and philosophers have used for our life journey is that of the seasons – Spring for youth, Summer for adulthood, Fall for aging, and Winter for the end of life.  Poets like these metaphors.  I think of Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves”:

In youth I sought the golden flower

Hidden in wood or wold,

But I am come to autumn,

When all the leaves are gold.

 And then there is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (one of my favorites):

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

If fall is the beginning of old age, what does the equinox represent?  An equanimous acceptance of aging headed for the final solstice of death?  I just learned that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – a time for reflection – was celebrated yesterday and always falls around the time of the Autumnal Equinox.

And that all got me pondering how we make sense of the stages and division of our lives.  I have talked about this before in relation to writing a life review (“Feast on Your Life”).  Such a pause can be a useful tool with which to try to make sense of our past (or to realize it makes no sense).  What were the moments in your life that marked a new path?  A birthday, a graduation, a birth, a death?  Or was it something more mundane – when you started meditating, learned to play bridge, or went blonde?

How do we divide up our lives to make sense of them?  By decades, seven-year spans, seasons, locations, occupations? Or are such divisions just arbitrary?

Augustine defined seven stages (famously reiterated by Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It), which corresponded to the known planets, each life stage taking some of its characteristics from the planet under which it was situated.  Old age was influenced by the distant Saturn, which was responsible for its being “cold and dry.”  In literature and legend, there are examples of three, four, five, six and seven divisions of life.  (Note: AI says that there are eight stages because it includes gestation as a stage – apparently, AI is a believer in personhood at conception.)

As I look back at my life from the age of 75, I can make all sorts of divisions.  Moving always felt like a “new” stage, as did graduations, marriages, divorces, birth of children, major illnesses and surgeries, retirement – but these are circumstantial.  Is there some kind of deeper division?  Are the real makers far more private, more interior?

Are all such divisions artificial?  Did they make more sense when we had more rituals to note and understand the transitions?  Transitions are hard.  Even if they are eagerly anticipated.

I recently read about the Fibonacci sequence in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before, a formula that makes a graceful spiral and is found over and over again in nature.  The ratio of two consecutive numbers in the sequence gets closer and closer to something called “The Golden Ratio” or about 1.618.  It turns out that many flowers have petals that correspond to such a number and it is a frequent descriptor of tree branching, water flow, and many more natural processes.   Could we apply it to the stages of our lives?  The sequence within the framework of any life would be 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 – since the next number would be far above current longevity records, we will have to assume that the last stage begins at 89!  In some ways this works for me – at 1, I learned to walk, to talk at 2, to read at 5, to swim at 8 – you see the possibilities.  And I would also note that while the average lifespan in the US is in the high seventies, the median is in the low eighties, and the mode (the age at which the most people die) is close to that last Fibonacci number of 89.

But almost any sequence (7 years, 3 ages, 4 seasons) is worth using if it gets us thinking about what went on in our lives, what changed, what stayed the same.  And in relation to my serenity project – when were we most calm, most content?  And why?  Was it circumstances that mattered or attitude?  Such reflections are, I am told, where wisdom comes from.

Change both gives and requires wisdom; the world is changing at a frightening rate these days.  It is important that our reactions be conscious, and looking at the past intersections of life might help.

The Old Age of Odysseus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither my fondness for my son nor pity

For my old father nor the love I owed

Penelope, which would have gladdened her,

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

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

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

It little profits an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren craigs,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws to a savage race…

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

We are not now that strength which in old days

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

One equal temper of our heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

Constructive Forgetting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am in constant search of “still water.”

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

 

 

 

 

What’s the Point? Where is the Perspective of Old Age?

In conjunction with my old age “serenity project,” I have been working more diligently on my meditation, trying to get to a “one-pointed” concentration.  I am actually very disciplined about meditation – an hour in the morning and another forty-five minutes in the afternoon, but “showing up” does not always mean progress.  To meditate, one can start by focusing on almost anything – your breath, the sound of the birds, bodily sensations – but the key is to limit intrusions of memories, worries, plans – and this is a challenge for me.  T. S. Eliot reminds us that it is the “still point of the turning earth,” where “the dance is.” This sounds surprisingly similar to what the Taoists say about a “single-pointed” mind: “A mind that is clearly focused, however, receives all things and can abide in utter tranquility. It is no exaggeration to say that its world revolves around it.”   If we could only get our minds down to that one, still point.

Pinhole cameras are a good metaphor for one-pointedness.  Such cameras were widely used in the 19th century, but even before that, artists used pinhole mechanisms to reflect subjects and scenes onto paper for tracing.  The principle is the same as that of a camera obscura, in which a pinhole lets in a sliver of light which opens into an upside-down image of whatever it is pointed at.  A few years ago I visited one of the world’s oldest camera obscuras in a windmill in Dumphries, Scotland.  That camera projects inverted images of the whole city in a darkened room and has been in continuous operation since 1836.

For our metaphor, it is relevant that the images from a pinhole are upside down.  In old age, aren’t we looking at life from an upside-down and backward position?  We are remembering  more than planning, we are trying to distill sense out of what has already happened rather than struggling to make things happen. To do this, we need to get down to that single point, and after a lifetime of striving to multi-task, this is not easy.

For pinhole cameras or camera obscuras, the smaller the pinhole, the sharper the image.  And so it seems to be with concentration.  To really look at life, we need to narrow our gaze steadily until things come into focus, to be prepared to look at things from a whole different perspective.  Upside down and backwards.

Here’s a secret that I discovered about meditation, from Ayya Khema via Leigh Brasington.  One-pointedness will not only result in better concentration, but if the “pinhole” is small enough, one may enter the first jhana.  This state includes a kind of physical and mental rapture or pīti. The fact that our body gives us this pleasing sensation in exchange for finally centering our mind is proof enough that there is much to be gained by making our attention a steady lens on one particular thing.  Such are the rewards of focusing.  When I first encountered pīti, I described it as the tingling sensation after sneezing – but stronger.  Others have compared it to a runner’s high.

The purpose of the first jhana is not the bliss, though. Bliss is just the carrot. The purpose is to focus and steady the mind in preparation for insight, to eventually understand one’s own mind, to glimpse… nirvana.  There is a whole series of jhanas, which become more abstract, but knowing about the first one is enough to realize that any serenity project must begin with steering the mind to single-pointedness.  And if you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know that your mind doesn’t think that you are its master.  It’s hard.  How do we have any hope of avoiding the aggressive distractions of Capitalism 2.0 when we can’t even limit the distractions manufactured by our own minds?

My point is not that everyone needs to meditate.  But everyone does need a point from which to focus on their lives.  Euclid started his Elements with the definition of a point:  “that which has no part,” something without width, length, or breadth, but with an indivisible location.

When Spinoza (you didn’t think you would escape without a dose of Spinoza, did you?) constructed his philosophical system (based on the methodology of Euclid), he reasoned that he first had to find:

…some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else; whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness.

Perhaps, almost anything we can concentrate on “singly” can be the start to Spinoza’s extravagant goals. If we are trying to make sense of life, come to terms with life, live with serenity – we need to identify a single point on which to build our understanding.  Though not easy, it is worthy of trial and consideration.  As Spinoza says at the end of his Ethics, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

By the way, if you go to Dumphries for the camera obscura or any of a number of other good reasons, eat at Bruno’s.  You will not be disappointed.

You might also look at my short story “Nothing New” for an alternative way to help limit distractions and narrow the aperture into the mind.

 

Can Music Sooth the Savage Old Breast (Beast)?

The other day while I was baking cookies, I put on the greatest hits of Donovan.  Remember him?  I hadn’t listened to “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” or “Mellow Yellow” for years, but I found that I could remember all the lyrics.  Soon the baking was done and I was still humming.  And I was in a great mood.

Congreve coined the line “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast” in a seventeenth-century play.   Somewhere along the line, breast morphed into beast – but the quote works either way.  This all got me thinking about my “serenity in old age” project and about the uses of music in summoning memory (“Blue Velvet” puts me right back to “slow dancing” in a Junior High gym), or quickening the blood (Country Joe’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” makes me want to challenge the “man”), or motivating (“I Am Woman Hear Me Roar” propelled me through my early career) and, especially, music’s power to soothe.  Think of lullabies.  Or hymns.  When I am really upset, nothing soothes me like belting out old hymns on the piano.  When I just need some peace, I put on Gregorian chants.  In my working days, I often played chanting as background music in my office, giving me an undeserved reputation for being very religious.  I might not have the serenity of the monks or nuns who are singing, but their calm certitude washed over me and often seemed to defuse the kind of angry people my position sometimes exposed me to.

The songs of the baby boomers’ youth were not, largely, soothing songs.  They tended to be about unrequited love, break-ups of all kinds, the frustrations of growing up, and the obtuseness of adults. Yet, we still cling to them.  Psychologists and marketing experts know that there is a “reminiscence bump” for music that we listened to when we were between ages ten and thirty.  Grocery stores play oldies in the morning when the retirees are in the market and switch to newer and newer music as the day goes on.  Automobile manufacturers’ ads feature songs from the youths of their target audiences.  Do these old songs work because they make us feel young again or just because they are so familiar?  Surely a little of both.

Music also helps to prevent dementia.  In 2025, the National Endowment for the Arts published a study, Strength in Numbers: Large Study Suggests Role for Music in Preventing Dementia, came to the following (quoted) conclusions of how music helps us elders:

  • The greatest benefit was experienced by older adults who “always” listened to music. Their risk for dementia was 39 percent lower than that of adults who “never,” “rarely,” or “sometimes” listened to music. They also had 17 percent lower risk for other types of cognitive impairment, and better cognition and memory scores overall.
  • Playing a musical instrument “often or always” was linked with a 35 percent lower risk for dementia, though there were no associations with reduced risk of cognitive impairment, and no changes in cognitive test scores over time.
  • Frequently listening to music and playing an instrument was associated not only with a 33 percent lower incidence of dementia, but also with a 22 percent lower incidence of other types of cognitive impairment.

In this study, “voice” counted as an instrument.  And, in my opinion, singing or humming along to whatever music you are listening to helps – even if you’re out of tune.  Growing up, everyone in my family sang – even when they couldn’t hit the right notes.  When large groups of my relatives got together, they sang. For hours.  And I have no doubt that they were happier and got along better than families who discussed politics!

So, it would seem that music is a tool that we could use – for both serenity and brain exercise.  In these days of 24-hour news cycles, it is hard to remember to turn off the news or the podcast and turn on the music, but it is a worthwhile practice.  And think of all the music that is at our disposal.  What calms you?  What makes you feel alert but not agitated?  For myself, it is Bach, Gregorian chants, and Leonard Cohen.  For you, it might be a Disney soundtrack. (Did you know that much of the music in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty  came from Tchaikovsky’s ballet music?)  Just like the other things that lead to serenity, the point is to make a conscious choice.  Proactive rather than reactive. More on that later, because I have found that do be an important mantra for my serenity project.

I once posted a story (“It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) about the effect of music on a young woman.  The story’s sad ending reminds us that music is not a panacea; it is not reality.  But it can, perhaps, put us on an even keel so that we can cope with confronting the real challenges to our enjoyment of these precious days.

 

 

 

Heart Appreciation

I am still on my “serenity or die” project.  (Maybe it should be called my “last chance for peace project?”) In any case, rather than my usual course of examining those things that steal my serenity, I have tried to focus on those few moments when I do feel… serene (or something akin to it).  I got this idea from Marion Milner’s wonderful book, A Life of One’s Own, which I have written about before.  Milner uses journaling as an instructional path to serenity, a tool for examining what makes her happy in life.  One of the things that Milner says about her own search for happiness is that it somehow helped if she put her awareness in her heart rather than her head.  She calls it an internal gesture.  “I began to understand that my powers of perceiving could be altered, not by directly trying to look, or trying to listen, but by this special internal gesture.”  Sounds silly, but I encourage you to try this change in perspective.

In ancient times (Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew), people thought the seat of the soul was in the heart rather than the head – the Egyptians even threw out the useless brain during mummification, but left the heart as the departed would have need of it.  Hippocrates thought it was the brain where consciousness occurred, but Aristotle was sure that it was the heart.  Science agreed with Hippocrates.  Descartes even “identified” the soul in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain.  Yet, Pascal reminded us that “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”

Of course, my husband’s recent heart attack has us thinking of that vital organ, of heart rates and blood pressure (which we measure every other day).  And surely the heart responds to our mental moods.  I recalled how, when I first was learning to meditate, an instructor had us hold the bulb of a “hand thermometer” to demonstrate how blood flow increased to the skin as heart rate decreased when we were deep within ourselves.  A calm mind helps the heart function.  Is the reverse also true?

Grace Paley wrote a good and true story about old age called “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” in which the father gives the following advice:

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say—maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

Of course, talk of the heart leads me back to the mind/body connection, and the fact that I read over and over again that stress is a killer. “Stress can wreak havoc on your mind and body” says the Mayo Clinic.   It is not great for serenity either.  Stress can be caused by real challenges, but the body reacts just as strongly to the imagined ones – including all our catastrophic thinking.  I have spent a lot of useless time trying to change the nature of my thinking – but after reading how Milner cast her consciousness into her heart (metaphorically), I was ready to try circumventing the brain.  As a frequent victim of migraines, I don’t need to be reminded that the brain can be the enemy.

We all know that our brain cannot reason ourselves out of fear.  Camus told us that, in the eyes of reason, being alive is an absurd project. Reason does not help.  (And for that reason, AI probably isn’t going to help either.)  Hard as my brain has tried, it has been unable to think itself into serenity. Milner’s trick of casting our awareness into the heart is one way to side-step the mind and its Gestapo tactics.  Casting your awareness into another part of your body provides a new focus.  My heart is the part of the body that works best for me in that regard.  It is not a permanent solution, but it is a motivating foretaste of what I am after.

Maybe it’s time to give our head a rest.  “When you get up in the morning you need to take your heart into your two hands.”  And once you have done that, cast your mind into your heart.  It is easier than you think.

For a story about leading with the heart, you might try “The More Loving One.”

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death Cleaning of the Soul

We have had a major medical challenge.  My husband had a bad fall, which turned out to have been precipitated by a heart attack.  We came home after surgery and a few days in the hospital, only to have to rush back a week later.  Things are better now (which is why I can post this blog), but they are not the same.  I am buffeted between my feelings of gratitude that the love of my life has survived, and my mourning for the way our life used to be.

In the midst of all this and during long hours in the hospital, I finally read the two books on my list by Margareta Magnusson, one about Swedish death cleaning and one about old age.  Both are worth reading, and both insist on the need to peel things away as we get older – tangible things (belongings) and intangible things (beliefs and rituals).  They were good books to turn to as I strove for a way to deal with the hard realities in front of me.  Downsizing of the household is almost impossible, as we all know.  In my case, further physical downsizing is for some later time. Downsizing the soul is harder yet, but necessary in the present moment.  Parting with roles, rituals, and habits is harder than parting with Grandma’s china.  I like to think, however, that it could also be more rewarding in the long run.

We are not used to thinking of losing things as good.  I recently read a book by James Clear about how to use our habits for big gains, how to accrete knowledge and success into our lives a little at a time.  Like most self-help books, it focuses on increases and ignores the possibility that loss could be a good thing. For the latter proposition, one has to look at wisdom literature of all kinds, where renunciation is often seen as a positive thing, a necessary step toward contentment, happiness, and peace.

For example, Joko Beck said that Zen was a process of “wearing away,” or erosion rather than accretion.  We have to let go what we think we know, habits of mind we have acquired. The Tao reminds us:  “Learning consists in adding to one’s stock day by day.  The practice of Tao consists in subtracting.”  Christianity has a similar message.  Jesus told the rich man that “if you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”  At other points in the Gospel, he tells his followers to give up their adult ways and become like children.

The poets have much to teach us in this regard too.  Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” purports to teach us how easy it is to lose things – homes, keys, people:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

But Bishop ends up admitting that loss can also be catastrophic:

 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Philip Larkin, in “The Winter Palace” says that he is done with learning:

Most people know more as they get older:

I give all that the cold shoulder.

Larkin’s tongue is firmly in his cheek, but he bounces off a truth about the value of discarding what we have, what we know, and what we think we know:

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

 

Both poems are worth reading frequently – one to remind us that loss is inevitable but not easy, and the other to affirm that loss is not all bad.

In reading Magnusson, it also occurred to me that our whole culture could use a Swedish death cleaning, that the Earth might have a chance if we stripped down and lived within limits.  In a recent article (“The Cross and the Machine”) about technology and religion, the wonderful Paul Kingsnorth puts it well:

Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits – limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries – is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative.  There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one that we’re living in.

We’re human beings with limits in a culture that recognizes no limits.  No wonder it is so hard.

So these are just some musings about loss from a new caregiver and a rapidly aging person, who is coming up against the limits of her situation.  I know that limits can be good, less is often more, and worrying is almost useless, but I sometimes still succumb to despair.  I have to read poetry, write in my journal, contemplate Spinoza, talk to others, and take heart.  And I do these things, but – as Elizabeth Bishop says in the end – it is not always easy.  Slowly my husband is improving, and we are getting used to our new limits.

I have written elsewhere about paring life down.  You might look at my blog, “A Diminished Thing?” from several years ago, and my short story “Nothing New.”  Needless to say, any advice is welcome.

 

Golden Years?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

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

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