Category: Uncategorized

No One Wants Our China, Recipes, or Habits

I ran across these lines from Psalm 19 this morning and got thinking about just how “one day tells a story to the next”:

2 One day tells a story to the next.
One night shares knowledge with the next
3 without talking,
without words,
without their voices being heard.

What knowledge is our day “sharing with the next”?  What traditions have we passed down?  What has been accepted?  The next generation clearly don’t want our good china or best recipes, while they might be happy to inherit our jewelry and silverware if the items can be readily converted to cash. The NYTimes recently dealt with this issue in relation to the family china: “Younger people are just not interested” says the article. “The dishes are frequently one of the items left over at estate sales. Storage units and landfills are brimming with it.”  No one is to blame; it is just that the world has changed so much.  Between us and our grandparents, a big break.  Between us and our grandchildren, a chasm.  They don’t have our habits, our concerns, our way of doing things, our sense of history.  So says the old lady.

Our generation greatly widened this divergence from tradition, so we can’t exempt ourselves from blame.  We bridled (no pun intended) at registering for wedding china and silver; we were the first generation of women to regularly wear slacks and then – blue jeans.  My grandparents, with their Depression/WWII era thrift and discipline, were completely flummoxed by their grandchildren approaching adulthood in the late 1960s.  For good reason. But we at least had lives that looked a little like theirs.   We ate meals together, celebrated holidays in traditional ways, and wore pajamas and robes.

But the change is almost absolute at this point – this generation has kitchens, yes, and many of them are very pretty kitchens because they are seldom used.  This generation celebrates the more consumer-related holidays in grand gift-giving fashion, but skip church services and big sit-down family dinners. Either they never wear pajamas or maybe I just can’t differentiate between their daywear and their nightwear.  They are much kinder to their children than we were, but their children are not kinder to them.  Would I have gotten out of cooking or going to church on Christmas Eve if I thought I could?  Maybe.  But I was always glad that I had not. 

Of course, there are many more differences from our generation.  No planning menus a week in advance, no Christmas Clubs, no new hats for Easter.   All gone by the board, along with top sheets on the bed.  Again, I don’t know if the new generation is right or wrong, but they don’t seem any happier.  And there is surely no room in their lives for the family china or our string of pearls or the workaday cookbooks stuffed with recipes clipped from newspapers that were actually printed on paper.

One note here: I have almost nothing in common with the Conservative Right in this country (more on that another time), but I can understand (although not sympathize with) their extreme last-gasp effort to roll back the tide.  I might have a little more empathy if they were concentrating on the worst of it – improving slipping education levels, decreasing recidivism, working to curb and cure drug abuse, and limiting the power of technology in our lives.  But they would rather spend their efforts sweeping away those things in which life really is better – civil rights, women’s rights, vast improvements in public health, tolerance of all kinds.  And all this in the name of returning to the glory of the past.  Enough on that for now.

I realize that “things” like dishes are not important in any ultimate sense, but they are part of our lives.  As Borges notes about his possessions in his wonderful poem, “Things”: “They’ll long outlast our oblivion; And never know that we are gone.” 

The china and the pajamas and the recipes are only symbols; but I do care about the loss of communal family things – like leisurely dinners together or the games and sing-a-longs of car trips before everyone had their own source of entertainment under their thumbs.  I miss sitting in a pew in church candlelight and just being quiet together.  But when you change some things, others follow.  We can write a will, but we cannot control our real legacy.  Things like china are only reminders, placeholders.  I will hold onto my china (for now) and my values, but I cannot force them on anyone else.  And as for the things, they’ll “never know that we are gone.”

If you want to read a story about coming to terms with the loss of valued items in our lives, you might try “The Mustard Seed.”  For loss of rituals, you might try “Baptismal Rights.”  Regarding the rituals and habits of old folks, you might try “Routine is the Housekeeper of Inspiration.” And just know that the next time we move – whether to assisted living or the nursing home or the cemetery – the china is not going with us.

 

The Aging Buddha and the Aging-Resistant Tech Boys

The news in the Sunday NYTimes last weekend was challenging, to say the least.  To make it worse, there was an article on the front page entitled “Gilgamesh, Ponce and the Quest to Live Forever.”  Besides the lack of an Oxford comma, the article was just a reminder how hard the tech boys out in Silicon Valley are working to make 90 the new 50, to make their minds outlive their bodies, to challenge nature.  There was an even more alarming article in the New Yorker a few years ago appropriately entitled “The God Pill.”  The tech boys (and this group is mostly male) are treating old age as a disease to be eradicated.  You might think about that.

The death and aging-resistant tech boys seem to be divided into two camps: the Meat Puppets (who think that we can “fix” the biology and thus stay in our bodies) and the Robocops (who think that our “essence” will move to mechanical bodies/brains).  Both methodologies are attracting huge investment from rich people, presumably in lieu of donating money to soup kitchens.

The technology and the money are new (the article says that “any scientific breakthrough that added another decade to global life expectancy would be worth $367 trillion”), but the sentiments are not.  People (again, mostly men like Gilgamesh, Ponce de Leon, and Isaac Newton) have been fighting old age for centuries.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  But does warring against the inevitable really change anything?  And at what cost?

The Buddha, that truly enlightened being, grew to be very old – into his eighties we think.  He made adjustments: he taught while lying down because he had a bad back, he had disciples deliver his talks when he wasn’t up to it.  Here is an exchange between the Buddha and his bumbling but lovable assistant Ananda:

Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One, massaged the Blessed One’s limbs with his hand and said, “It’s amazing, lord. It’s astounding, how the Blessed One’s complexion is no longer so clear & bright; his limbs are flabby & wrinkled; his back, bent forward; there’s a discernible change in his faculties — the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body.”  

“That’s the way it is, Ananda. When young, one is subject to aging; when healthy, subject to illness; when alive, subject to death…” (translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

Acceptance that things will change is what the Buddha is preaching.  I recently read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

“The really annoying part of the aging process is not what happens externally—one has plenty of time to get prepared for that—but what happens internally,” he says. “One knows one isn’t quite as good. One’s energies are lower. When I was writing my major books, I would do between 3,000 and 4,000 words in the morning, between 8 and 11:30. Now I’m very happy to do 1,500 or 2,000 words.”

“Now I’m very happy to …”  This is an acceptance of reality that is graceful and wise.

The Buddha and Mumford have learned one of the most important lessons of life – to live with and adapt to reality.  I have recommended the Buddha’s five daily recollections before, but one of them is that the body is “of the nature to grow old and decay.”  I would guess that the Silicon Valley boys might delay the inevitable, but they are going to be pretty miserable if they don’t accept it at some point.  And even if they manage to live long, they will still outlive their time – think of Swift’s Struldbruggs, who outlived the language and culture around them and became “foreigners in their own country.”  Trying to talk to my grandchildren, I know what that feels like.

None of this means we have to like everything or anything about old age.  The Buddha spoke the following poem (memorized by the monks and later transcribed):

I spit on you, old age —

old age that makes for ugliness.

The bodily image, so charming,

is trampled by old age.

Even those who live to a hundred

are headed — all — to an end in death,

which spares no one,

which tramples all.

And, as for the tech boys, they might want longevity, but they don’t necessarily want everyone to have it (link here): 

“I don’t think we should have people live for a very long time,” Musk says (in a WELT Documentary interview). “It would cause ossification of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind; they just die. And so, if they don’t die, we’ll be stuck with old ideas, and society won’t advance. I think we already have quite a serious issue with the gerontocracy, where the leaders of so many countries are extremely old. Look at the U.S.—its very ancient leadership. It’s just impossible to stay in touch with the people if you’re many generations older than them.”

Like the Struldbruggs.  Or maybe like some of the people Musk has been hanging around with lately.

If you want to know more about the Struldbruggs, try Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X), and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”  I also wrote about them in my blog from a few years ago, “Covid-19 and the Generational Wars.”

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The Afterlife and Psychic Hygiene

Old folks have a reputation for worrying, for longing for the good old days, for catastrophic thinking.  I don’t think I am an overly negative person (my kids might disagree), but these are surely times to try an old lady’s optimism.  I know the stereotype is that elders are backward-looking, but I don’t want to return to the days before vaccines and the Civil Rights Act.  I am, however, searching for something positive to look forward to.

For years, parents could look forward to a better life for our children; upward mobility is not so easy anymore, for economic, environment, and political reasons.  At the founding of the UN, there were hopes for world peace.  We could find comfort that we would leave the world and our loved ones in better shape than we found them.  But no more.   So how can we alleviate our worries, calm our psyches, have the courage to soon leave life behind?

In “The Stages of Life” (recommended), Carl Jung acknowledged that old people needed something good to anticipate, and he suggested that the notion of the “afterlife” could have therapeutic value for us elders, particularly as it could take away some of the fear we face as we begin “transitioning” to death:

I therefore consider that all religions with a supramundane goal are eminently reasonable from the point of view of psychic hygiene.  When I live in a house which I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if on the contrary I feel myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way.  From the standpoint of psychotherapy, it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition, as part of a life process whose extent and duration are beyond our knowledge.

Death as placebo, you say.  Maybe.

It is interesting to note that in the medieval period in Europe there was a general belief that life was getting worse, that mankind was declining from a golden age (Eden?) through silver and brass to iron.   Even earlier, Ovid gave a clear delineation of the ages in the Metamorphoses, from the Golden Age, which “still retained some seed of the celestial force,” through the Age of Silver, when constant springtime was compromised with the addition of the other seasons, to the Age of Bronze, and finally the corrupt Iron Age, when humanity let loose to “Violence and the damned desire of having.”  After this cycle of decline, the population is destroyed in a flood and new men are created out of the earth, and presumably the cycle starts again.  I don’t really know where we are in the current cycle, but “violence and the damned desire of having” sound familiar.  Any rewards or punishments were to be found in another life, in a very real heaven or a very scary hell.  The assumption of “progress” only became common after the Enlightenment.

Americans tend to believe (or say they believe) in an afterlife of some sort (reincarnation counts).  According to a Pew study in 2021, about 73% of Americans believe in heaven but only 62% believe in hell.  There’s optimism for you. More people over 50 believe in heaven and hell than younger people (no surprise there) and more Republicans believe than Democrats.  Maybe that’s why they are not so afraid of an earthly future of global warming and increasing warfare – as they say, “there will be pie in the sky when you die.”

But back to Jung and the idea that believing in an afterlife is an act of psychic hygiene.  Can we make ourselves do it?  As John Lennon inferred, we are past that.   “Imagine there’s no heaven/It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us, only sky.”  Not believing in heaven is “easy;” believing has become very difficult – a little like trying to believe in Santa Claus again.  And yet I understand where Jung is coming from.  In his memoir (recommended) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung has a chapter entitled “Life After Death,” in which he recalls glimpses of eternity that he got as a child and again cautions against ridiculing the therapeutic comfort that believers receive:

Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence.  They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries. One has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal.  What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

This led me to think about Herman Melville.  In a little-read book Melville titled The Confidence Man (written by the master just after Moby-Dick), one of the characters cautions against forcing old people up against the truth:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you.  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

And that is what facing the truths of our world reminds me of – “a supper too hearty.”  Is a belief in an afterlife an answer?  Simone de Beauvoir suggested in The Coming of Age that we all needed a project in old age, we must continue the good fight. Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.  In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.”  Yes.  But.  She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) that it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.”  And where does that leave us?

In this, as in most things, I land in Spinoza’s camp. Spinoza said that we were thinking about eternity in the wrong way; he says that we think of eternity as a matter of time rather than a matter of the moment, of awareness:

If we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse it with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory, which they believe remains after death. (Ethics V)

Reminding myself of my own mortality (try the Buddhist Five Recollections daily), helps me do this.  William Blake puts it more poetically:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

For an example of a very old lady’s momentary heaven, you might try my short story, “Like Heaven.”  For a blog on another aspect of this subject, try, “Retirement, Death, and the Land of Cockaigne.”  And try to put into words what it is you do believe.

Happy Holidays

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

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

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

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

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

An Old Lady Thinks About Population Statistics

One of the “constructive hobbies” that I have taken up in old age is reviving my French.  I have never (despite years of instruction in high school and college) been able to speak it, but I once learned to read it well enough to pass a language requirement for a graduate degree. However, I had long forgotten even the basics, and it has taken Duolingo a couple of years to get me to the point of trying to read/translate texts which interest me.  I started with Candide (a little too challenging), and have stepped back to The Little Prince (just my level).  Reading/translating the text slowly has given me a new appreciation of an old book – but more on that in another blog.

I get distracted easily (you might have noticed), and when the aviator is describing the Earth to the little prince, he says that there are about 2 billion grande personnes (adults) on the planet.  That got me looking up population statistics.  Now, The Little Prince was written in 1943, and there were no good demographic numbers during WWII, but the UN started keeping records after the war, and in 1951, the year I was born, the world population was estimated at 2.5 billion (presumably including children).  In 2024, the same organization estimated the population at 8.1 billion – an increase of 224% in my lifetime.  Compare this with the world population estimates for the nineteenth century, when over 100 years the population only increased by 60%.

The increase in the USA has not been quite that dramatic.  In 1951, there were about 150 million people in the United States; in 2024 the population was hitting 342 million – an increase of 128%.  There seem to be more people everywhere, though the increases are not evenly distributed.  Florida, for example, grew by almost 700% in my lifetime.  Massachusetts, where I currently reside, has only grown about 52% over the same duration.  In our rich country, populations have migrated to warmer climates, shorelines, desirable suburbs.  We all know this.  When I was growing up, my family had a summer place on a large island in Rhode Island.  It was almost a shack – no insulation, no telephone, plywood flooring.  The island was dotted with summer people like us and local fishermen (who lived in stouter dwellings).  Most of the island was shrubs (bayberry and blueberry) and small freshwater ponds.  Now there is not a vacant lot, shacks have been replaced by McMansions, and the freshwater ponds and their diverse habitats have been overrun by invasive species fed by the runoff from lawn treatments.  It is crowded, and it is so very different than it was.  You all know places like this.  It breaks my heart.

Almost nowhere is exempt.  Roads are crowded, tourist destinations are often unbearably swarming, and resources of all kinds are challenged.  Old people feel this particularly, as they can remember when it was otherwise.  Childhood must be very different when there are no wild places to explore.  Along with the increase in population of course, we have also seen an increase in the resources required to fuel a rising standard of living.  And poor Mother Earth is moaning under the weight of so many people. (Disclosure here – my own family is contributing to this problem; we have three children and eight grandchildren.  We are more than replacing ourselves.)

And yet, we have a cohort of people moving into Washington who think that a decrease in the rate of population growth is a problem.  One of them recently tweeted, “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”  This sidesteps the probability that population increases are a major reason for global warming, and also the facts of science, which contradict the hypothesis of “population collapse.”  But these are people who never let science get in the way of fearmongering.

The fact that life expectancy has increased by about 11 years since I was born has contributed not only to the population increases, but also to major changes to age distributions, which create problems in themselves.  Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that burdening our society, our planet, with an ever-increasing population would have beneficial results.  And if we really want more people in this country, why don’t we let in more immigrants?

Left alone, Nature takes care of overpopulation.  On that island in RI – severed from the mainland except for one small bridge – the rabbit population sometimes grew tremendously fast.  Rabbits everywhere.  Then the foxes would arrive, and the next year we would have no rabbits.  Soon the foxes – without prey – would presumably trot over the bridge and go elsewhere.  Within a year or two, the rabbits would return, and the cycle would continue.  It is not at all clear that Nature will take care of the human overpopulation problem, however.  Or that she will not be thwarted if she tries.

To many of the old, myself included, the world seems too full of people and yet devoid of any real human beings to interact with.  Try calling your doctor’s office.  Real trees have been replaced by phone trees; real people have been replaced by AI.  Housing is scarce and therefore expensive; driving has become onerous – don’t attempt to navigate the highways on either coast of Florida in the winter.  I am not a scientist, but it does not seem to me that we should be worried about increasing our population; I think we should be worrying about the quality of life (not lifestyle) of the people we already have.

Most of my statistics either came from the US census or the UN.  A very good site that compiles these statistics and is considered to be accurate is Worldometer.com.  I apologize for any inaccuracies and will gladly accept any corrections!

Reading in Old Age, Reading About Old Age

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

He could read!

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

What a reminder that we have the gift of reading!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What Abides (Into Old Age)?

What makes the 73-year-old me that I see in the mirror, that I identify as “me,” the same as the four-year-old in the picture on my desk?  No one would recognize me in the four-year-old.  Even I have trouble identifying what remains of her.  As we age, “what abides?” is a question worth pondering.  People try to answer it in different ways – some look up old friends, some write memoirs.  We all dread the loss of what we think of as our “selves;” I watched my mother turn into a different person in her late eighties, and yet she retained many early memories.  In fact, she seemed to live in her earliest memories.  What of her self was lost, and what remained?

These questions made me think of that old word: abide.  In old age, what abides?  What stays and makes us us until the very end?  Or is the concept of a constant being just fallacious?  In “Ulysses,” Tennyson posits that “much abides” in old age – that while the body fades and weakens, the will is strong:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” when he was a young man; I would posit that the admonition “not to yield” would not be the advice of an old man.

On the other hand, Thomas Hardy was around sixty when he addressed “abiding” into old age in “I Look Into My Glass:”

But Time, to make me grieve.
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

While Tennyson wants to concentrate on the value of what abides, Hardy finds it a form of torture, as his spirit wants to do what his body cannot do.  And then there is Robert Graves and his poem about looking in the mirror, written when he was about 72:

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.

For Graves, what abides is “presumption.”  And more specifically, “a boy’s presumption.”

In its intransitive form (as used by Tennyson and Hardy above), abide means “to remain stable or fixed in a state;” this is the same as the meaning it takes in the great hymn, “Abide with Me.”  The tale is that the author of the hymn wrote it at the deathbed of a friend, a friend who asked him to abide with him until the end.  The Biblical reference is Luke 24:29. The disciples (after they had met the risen Christ) plead with Jesus: “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.”  This is from the lovely King James Version; I would note that some later versions use the word stay rather than abide.   I prefer abide, which is related to the word “abode.”

This is an old problem.  The ancient Greeks pondered the problem of the Ship of Theseus.  As told by Plutarch in the first century, Theseus’s original ship was used for a ceremony commemorating his defeat of the Minotaur; over the centuries, almost every part of the ship had to be replaced, as it rotted and rusted.  A thousand years later, was it still really the Ship of Theseus?  Sixty-nine years later am I still my four-year-old self?

So, the question still is: What abides?  What abides when we walk with a limp, when we can’t remember the librarian’s name or where we put the library book?  What abides that can reassure us of who we are?  Tennyson would leave us with the impetuosity of youth; Hardy would have us the prisoner of passions we can’t act on; Graves chides us for presumption.  I firmly believe that something of value abides, and I spend a bit of time trying to winnow out the chaff to find it.

The Threat of Singularity and the Promise of Perennial Philosophy

As I have aged. the pace of technology has surely surpassed my interest in “keeping up.”  I have been intrigued, however, by the notion of the singularity, which is defined in many ways, but often as “a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.” Technology already feels “uncontrollable.”  It forces me to deal with chatbots and answer yes/no questions.  It fights to supplant me.   Even as I write this. Microsoft is pestering me to let its AI “Copilot” help me; it wants to co-opt my place at the keyboard, convinced (and trying to convince me) that it can do whatever it is better than I can.  What AI fails to recognize that it is the doing that matters, not a uniformly “perfect” product.

As I was thinking about this, I was strangely reminded of Aldous Huxley and his “perennial philosophy,” which represents a different kind of quest for doing things in the best way, for improving ourselves, or – more specifically – for living life well.  Seekers for the perennial philosophy pursued ageless universal truths, laws, dharmas, which might enable mankind, individually and communally, to reach their utmost potential.  There was no place in this philosophy for technology or even much science.  It had more to do with getting to know the nature of the kind of beasts we are, the kind of world we live in, and how the two interrelate.  “Know thyself,” said Socrates. 

Huxley’s book was a bestseller in 1945, as shocked and tired people were emerging from the nightmare of WWII.  Reviews were good, with the New York Times noting: “Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.”  Perhaps, after Hiroshima and the gas chambers, no one was looking to technology to solve our problems.  In the last 70 years things have changed; we have become beguiled by technology.  As Wordsworth predicted, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, / Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  Indeed.  Our hearts, our minds, and maybe our souls.  We are apparently far more interested in knowing what machines can do for us than knowing ourselves.  Why? It’s easier.

The machines enticed us, seduced us, slowly. Old folks are very much aware of this. When I was a child, technology (in the guise of Western Auto) gave us a big TV with a tiny screen and one to three channels.  It stood in the heart of the house, and we watched it together.  Step by step, it led us to the internet and streaming, and now watching anything is seldom a communal experience.  In my youth, technology gave us one telephone in the center of the house, so that communications were communal (hard on teen-age girls). Now cell phones are stopping any sort of real face-to-face communication.  The internet has made information easier to find, but harder to verify; common wisdom is no longer looked for or found. No wonder they call it the singularity; in wisdom, as in most things these days, we are “bowling alone.”

I think that Huxley’s perennial philosophy is probably the opposite of singularity; it assumes that the answers lie in the truths of the past and not the unknowns of the future, that we can both formulate the questions and find the answers without mechanical help.  The singularity assumes that machines will find the answers, machines which will soon be smarter than us, and that is a scary thought – unless you think that we will always be in control.  Have we ever been in control?  Did we consciously end up with children in their bedrooms sending pictures to strangers and old folks entranced by online “friends” who are trying to scam them?

Literature has long worried over the ascendency of technology.  RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was written by Karel Capek in 1920.  The play warned us not to turn our back on a robot.  Arthur Clark wrote the novel and screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, based on stories he started in 1948.  HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) was definitely the enemy by the end.  Technology was much cruder in those days, but people were already concerned. As creatures being slowly ingested by technology, we seem to be less worried now than we were then.  It would seem that HAL has made us fat and happy.  And what is the alternative?  A recent bill putting limits on AI development in California was vetoed by the governor after Silicon Valley got incensed.  There is no hope for such legislation on the federal level. 

The perennial philosophy was defined by Aldous Huxley and others as “a school of thought in philosophy and spirituality which posits that the recurrence of common themes across world religions illuminates universal truths about the nature of reality, humanity, ethics, and consciousness.”  In other words, a search for a commonality in proven human thought, faith, and ethics which could give us clues on the way to live better individually or communally.  But no one thought we could outsource that search, or google it, or that the answer would be a complex algorithm.

Computers are yes/no machines.  In the words of E. F. Schumacher, the real questions of life are divergent rather than convergent problems. Designing a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and eventually arrive at an answer. AI could do this. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e., transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment) is a divergent problem.  Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions.  Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.” Schumacher reminds us that, again, it is the doing that matters: “Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves.” 

I appreciate the good that technology has done for us – many of us, including myself, would not still be here without advances in medicine, education, transportation.  But let’s not give away our hearts (“a sordid boon”) – or our lives.  Science may have given us increased longevity, but, as Mary Oliver asks, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  Show me the answer to that question in an algorithm.

Bare Ruin’d Choirs – Seasons and Similes of Old Age

I have been intending to write a blog about the notion of “singularity,” but my readings on the subject seem to go on and on, so I thought I would just look around me and write about the season and the seasons of life.

This is my first autumn back in New England after almost a decade.  We moved from western North Carolina two months ago (just in time, I guess).  Autumn was longer but less colorful North Carolina; there were the brilliant yellows but not the mellow golds and reds.  Fall has always been my favorite season, and I am looking forward to the colors, the smells, and the urgency of buttoning up the house (nesting) before winter arrives.

If autumn is my favorite season, October has always been my favorite month.  For years (until the printing wore off), I used a coffee cup inscribed with Thoreau’s quote about October. Here it is, to remind us to imbibe some of the magic Henry found in October:

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

Back to our earliest records, poets used the seasons of the year as similes for the seasons of life.  We still do it all the time, talking about a “December bride” or someone being “in the autumn of his years.”  These are apt similes, much like that of the Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  We grow and blossom, reap the karma of our earlier life, and close in ourselves with the narrowing of the light at the end of the year.  One significant difference, of course, is that our lives are linear, while nature recycles upon itself. (Or, as Dante contends, the life span is a parabola! See further discussion of that possibility here.) Perhaps the problem is how we look at it; if we could accept that we are part of nature perhaps we would see it differently.

Cicero, in his “On Old Age,” uses many images of old age that relate senescence to the cycles of nature.  Thus we have age as the “tranquil evening” of the life’s day, as the “autumn” or “winter” of the life’s year, as the ripening, maturing, even withering fruit of the tree of life:

There had to be a time of withering, of readiness to fall, like the ripeness that comes to the fruits of the trees and of the earth.  But a wise man will face this prospect with resignation, for resistance against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.

Clearly, the giants of Silicon Vally do not agree that “resistance against nature” is pointless, but more on them in my next blog.

Shakespeare starts his masterful Sonnet 73 about old age with these lines:

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.

Latter day poets use the images of the seasons all the time to connote the ages of man; when Philip Larkin wrote his comic masterpiece about growing older, he titled it “The Winter Palace,” and ended with the image of a last December snowstorm:

Then there will be nothing I know.

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

For more examples, revisit Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves,” or Rilke’s “Autumn.” To find more correlations between the seasons and the stages of life, just look at my (incomplete) list of poems about old age.  And please send me any of your favorite poems to add to the list. Or write one.

But, back to me and to the month of October.  I used to think I was in the October of life, but that is foolish at this point.  If I were a maple tree, my leaves would have long since been raked up and hauled away.  I am more “bare ruin’d choirs” than the rich golds and yellows of this lustrous October.  I am surely in November, and probably most of the way to Thanksgiving.  The “later twilight” of life.  Robert Frost said that sorrow was his “November Guest,” but yet appreciated the season:

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow…

Yet, I can still enjoy the present October while looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of past Octobers, Septembers, Mays.  And forward to the dark and quiet evenings of December.

Old Men, Old Authors, Phantom Limbs, and Dying Wishes

I like books about old characters, and I especially like it if the authors are also old.  I guess I want to compare notes about how aging feels, what it means.  Recently I read a book by an old man about an old man (Paul Auster’s Baumgartner), a book about an old man written by a middle-aged woman (Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck), and a book by a very old and great writer which should never have been published.

Erpenbeck was middle-aged (40s) when this book was released, but she writes about a recently retired Princeton classics professor (Richard) who is feeling his age and his loneliness.  There are wonderful descriptions about the challenge of what it means to be “old,” like these thoughts about what an old man should wear:

Maybe a cardigan is more appropriate to his new condition. More comfortable, at any rate. And seeing that he no longer goes out in human society on a daily basis, it’s surely no longer necessary for him to shave every single morning. Let grow what will. Just stop putting up resistance — or is that how dying begins? Could dying begin with this kind of growth? No, that can’t be right, he thinks.

Richard is somewhat lost in his old age and retirement, but his chance interaction with some Libyan immigrants ends up turning his life in a new direction.  And, incredibly, he finds parallels between the immigrant experience of wandering from one country to another (hoping for acceptance and work) and with the journey of Odysseus in The Odyssey.  Richard also finds that the oral history/story traditions of his new friends make him think of the way that Homeric epics evolved over the centuries.  And he thinks about what it means to be human but to be thought of as less than human – something experienced by the immigrants but also, at times, by the elderly.

(Spoilers coming!) Erpenbeck’s book ends with a party including Richard, and his academic and immigrant friends – and everyone seems to be having a fine time.  Richard gets into a deep conversation with the immigrants about an incident in which he talked his wife into an abortion that ended rather disastrously.

Why were you ashamed of your wife? asks Ali.

That she might die, says Richard.  Yes, he says, at that moment I hated her because she might die.

I can understand that, says Detlef.

I think that’s when I realized, says Richard, that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.

Like the surface of the sea? asks Ali.

Actually, yes, exactly like the surface of the sea.

Richard might be facing old age and death and things that “can’t be endured,” but he has learned something.  Like Odysseus, he made it home to Ithaca only to find that even homecomings are difficult, and the answer is not about slipping into an old life but forging a new one with the full recognition of the horrors that are under the sea.

Auster’s Sy Baumgartner is also trying to work out what an old life means, what he can make of it.  Baumgartner monitors himself for signs of aging.  For example, he counts the number of times that he realizes he has not fully zipped up his pants, “four times in the last two weeks!” and uses that as a measure of his decline.  He considers marrying again, but the woman turns him down.  He invites a young scholar to work on his late wife’s poetry and papers, but by the end of the book, she has not arrived.  And so it goes.

One of the most interesting metaphors in Auster’s book is that of the phantom limb, that thing that – although gone – can still cause us pain. Set to thinking about this phenomenon when his housekeeper’s husband saws off two fingers, Baumgartner considers writing a book about how things that do not even exist anymore can cause us such angst.  We all know this is so, but can’t really absorb the implications.  I had a therapist tell me once that guilt and regret are two of the most worthless emotions.  This might be true, but that knowledge did not make the regret and guilt go away. (One might think of that golden couplet of Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Pity me that the heart is slow to learn/ What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”)

These things are worth thinking about and the phantom limb metaphor helps.  Unfortunately, Baumgartner never finishes his book, nor his train of thought.

Auster’s book ends with a confused Sy Baumgartner, who, after having gotten lost on a ride to get some liquor, swerves to miss a deer and then takes his bleeding body on foot down the road to look for help.  The book ends with this ambiguous statement: “And so, with the wind in his face and blood still trickling from the wound in his forehead, our hero goes off in search of help, and when he comes to the first house and knocks on the door, the final chapter in the saga of S.T. Baumgartner begins.”  Not much to look forward to here.  This is an Odysseus who probably isn’t going to make it home.

The two books above I recommend to any serious reader.  I also recently read Garcia Marquez’s Until August – not really a book about old age, but a book that was written when the author was in his late seventies and revised in his eighties, and which he asked his heirs not to publish.   In his later life, when dementia prevented Garcia from “following the plot,” he abandoned the text and prohibited its issuance.  The great author died in 2014, but this year (2024) his heirs decided to subvert his wishes and publish the unfinished manuscript.  Such a shame.  Garcia has given us many wonderful portraits of the elderly – if you haven’t read Love in the Time of Cholera, do it soon! – but there was no need for the publication of a rough draft that this Nobel laureate left behind with instructions that it be destroyed.  In the end, reading the slim book made me uncomfortable, and it certainly will do little to further Marquez’s wonderful reputation and standing.

This action of Marquez’s executors evokes the whole issue of what we owe the dead – if the dying leave specific requests, should their wishes be sacrosanct?  What if they had dementia?  What if they were a public figure or a literary treasure???  I know, I know.  We might know little of Kafka if Max Bord had not ignored his dying wishes to have all destroyed.  We all face this problem at one time or another.  I keep thinking about the decades of journals in my closet; I could leave instructions that they be taken out with my body to be cremated, but maybe I’d better do it myself.  I’d like to hang onto them as long as possible though, so the timing is tricky!  My guess is that all of our closets are full of such things.