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How Old Are You Inside? How Old Do You Want to Be?

Aged people are often asked how old they feel inside.   And even if they are not asked, they often volunteer the information.  “I know I’m 70, but if I don’t look in the mirror, I still feel like I am 40!”  Rarely does anyone admit to “feeling” older than their chronological age.  Younger is always better, unless you are a fifteen-year-old waiting to be old enough for a driving license.

The common adage of our age is “you are only as old as you feel.”  This was, in fact, the title of a New York Times article three years ago, in which two doctors discussed the effect of the perception of age on health.  Apparently, most people think of themselves as younger than they are, a discrepancy which widens with age:

If you’re over 40, chances are you feel younger than your driver’s license suggests. Some 80 percent of people do, according to Dr. Stephan. A small fraction of people — fewer than 10 percent — feel older. The discrepancy between felt and actual age increases with the years, Dr. Terracciano said. At age 50, people may feel about five years, or 10 percent, younger, but by the time they’re 70 they may feel 15 percent or even 20 percent younger.

This got me thinking about two things – how old do I feel and at which age was I the happiest? (Happy is not exactly the right word; sense of well-being might be better.)  Or to put it another way, if I’m not going to feel 70, what would be the best age to feel?  To start with the first question, I probably only feel about a decade younger than I am.  I definitely do not feel like a working person; the fire of ambition is almost extinguished – it flickers only for matters of small consequence.  I feel like a recently retired person of about 60 I would say, which squares entirely with Dr. Terracciano’s study, with about a 15% discrepancy with my real age.

More interesting are my thoughts about what age I would like to be mentally or psychologically – which age I would like to adopt the characteristics of.  After a short contemplation, the answer was easy.  I would like to be eight years old.  Being eight was wonderful.  I was in the third grade and the only competition I felt in my life was who was the tallest person in the class – myself or Rae Ann Reutershan.  (The boys were all midgets at that point.)  I loved my teacher, Miss Butterfield.  I loved my school and where I lived.  My younger brother was a tease and my little sister was a nuisance, but they were not my responsibility.  I had started needing eyeglasses in second grade, and spectacles made the world so much brighter and more wonderful that I didn’t mind wearing them at all, despite occasional taunts from my brother and his mean friends (four-eyes).

I had no control over my life at age eight, something I knew and accepted.  My parents and teacher called the shots, and I went along with their decisions the way adults go along with the weather – something that may be aggravating but which we can do nothing about.  There was no anxiety, except perhaps some short-lived angst about whether I would hit the baseball or be able to bicycle up a steep hill.  I loved animals and was interested in almost everything except boys and snakes.   I was ill sometimes – that was the era when children still got the full array of later-eradicated diseases as well as the still common colds and earaches – but even that had it’s advantages; I got to stay at home, lay on the couch, and watch TV.  And read.

Another reason I chose eight was that was when my reading ability hit its stride.  I had been an early and precocious reader, and by eight I was able to get “real books” from the library – books like “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” or Nancy Drew or even “Little Women.”  If I didn’t understand a word, I guessed and kept reading.  I often used words in conversation that I didn’t know how to pronounce, which amused my family.  And reading represented an eternity of possibility.  It was not like Easter candy which would disappear quickly.  I could see by surveying the shelves at our wonderful public library that I would not run out of material for a very long time.  Which was, indeed, the case.  All I needed to do was return the books on time and keep my little sister from destroying them.  The one time of true anxiety I can remember from this period was when my toddler sister crayoned in a copy of one of the Boxcar Kid books I had from the library.  The librarian, who knew me well by then, was very sympathetic.  “It’s still readable,” she said.  Readable – what a wonderful word my eight-year-old self thought.

If it sounds like life was simple, it was. Not for my parents, not for the world – but for me.   I know it is not so for all eight-year-olds.  (Think and weep for the children of Ukraine!)  My family was intact and had its problems, but at eight I didn’t know the difference between problems and normality.  I thought all was as it should be, and I adapted.  I didn’t waste much time wanting to be older or younger.  Eight was wonderful.  Pictures from that period with my sparkly pink glasses and my home perm are a horror, but I was surely not aware of that.  And when something was going on  around me that I didn’t understand and was afraid of, I dove into a book.  Any book.

So back to myself at 70.  Of that little girl, only the joy of reading seems to have stuck.  But maybe I am reverting in some ways.  I would like to think I care less about what I look like or what people think.  I have gone back to realizing that we have very little control over the world. I have come to know that anxiety, guilt, and regret are useless emotions – at least I recognize that intellectually but wonder if one can go back to the innocent Eden of a child.  Last week I wrote about confronting the reality of nuclear war when I was ten.  Two years made a huge difference in my level of anxiety and fear about all things.   Even before the missile crisis, I had lost my optimism and well-being. 

I am talking about a state of mind, not a delusion as to our real age.  My mother’s dementia-fueled descent into her childhood was not a pleasant one.  She spent a year asking me where her parents were and fretting about how she was going to get home.  I do not wish that on myself or anyone.

 But again,  I would like to recapture some of what time and enculturation took away from that eight-year-old girl.  What age would you like to recapture?

The story this week – “Like Heaven” – is about a woman who lives in two worlds – the real one of her old age and a vivid memory of a younger age, which was not perfect but had its moments.   

New Books with Old Characters – Otsuka, Ozick, and Guterson

I don’t know if I am imagining it, but there seem to be more good books written about old age.  Some are fun, some are inspiring, some are tragic – but the best capture some of all that.  Old age is both tragic and funny, both inspiring and depressing.

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka starts with the allegorical story of an underground neighborhood swimming pool used by a number of dedicated swimmers who have their preferred times and lanes, and know the other swimmers by their quirks.  Alice, in the “early stages of dementia,” is among them.  Alice loves to swim; she knows the pool; she knows the routine.  And then the beloved pool develops a suspicious crack.  First no one thinks much of it; some people deny that it is even there.  Then it gets worse and there are haphazard attempts to repair it, to no avail.  Some swimmers are fascinated by the crack; others change lanes to avoid it.    The crack   consumes the minds and imaginations of the swimmers: 

Several of us worry that the crack might somehow be our own fault.   We feel ashamed of it, as though it were a blemish, a defect, an indelible flaw, a moral stain upon our soul that we have brought on ourselves.

The crack worsens; the pool is closed.  Alice no longer has the outlet of her exercise and her routine.  But think about those words: might somehow be our own fault, feel ashamed of it, as if we brought it on ourselves.

The book moves from a group portrait of the swimmers to a chronicle of Alice, written alternately in her voice, the voice of her daughter, and a collective voice of the people in the nursing home with Alice. The methodology is interesting.  We get long lists of things Alice remembers (the persimmons of her youth, the first love of her life) and the things she has forgotten, including most of what happened twenty minutes ago.  Some reviewers took exception to the catalogs that make up much of this book, but these lists give us Alice.  I have often wished that I had saved my daily to-do lists, which I have made kept since I was an adult.  Lists make up our lives.  When our author (or the voice of the daughter) cannot grasp what Alice is thinking or feeling, she gives us the concrete.  Alice’s fade into dementia (the “Diem Perdidi” section of the book) is heartbreaking as she clings to routine in the midst of the fog that is enveloping her. 

Alice is soon moved into a memory care center, Belavista.  “You are here today because you have failed the test.”  The crack has gotten worse, the mind has been shut into a “long-term, for-profit memory care residence conveniently located on a former parking lot off the freeway.”  Alice and her fellow patients are there because each has become “an extremely difficult person to live with.”  The rest of the book details Alice’s descent in the home – a descent into dementia and a descent into hell.  Having had to watch a loved one in such a setting, I found it depressingly accurate.  Why read it?  Because it is there; it is true; as we have more very elderly people, it is proliferating.

The next two books in an indirect way talk about the relationship of aging and writing.  First, there is Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities; Ozick is still writing at 93, which is a good enough reason to read the book.  I found the writing excellent, gorgeous at times, but the story unsatisfactory.  It is told in the first person of a very old man (in every sense) literally living in the past (his old prep school turned into apartments for the last trustees) and obsessed by three incidents of the past – his attachment to a strange Jewish student, his father’s mysterious disappearance into Egypt for a period, and his lifelong adoration of his legal secretary, which he apparently never did anything about.  This aging Lloyd Petrie is fixated on a series of objects relating to these memories, including his secretary’s Remington manual typewriter with which he encodes his memories. In this the book reminded me of another excellent recent book, Ruth Ozeki’s Book of Form and Emptiness, in which objects actually speak of memory and life.

Maybe Ozick’s Antiquities is unsatisfactory because life is not satisfactory; loose ends do not tie themselves up at the end of the book, at the end of our lives.  Or at least, not very often and certainly not in this book.  At the end, the old man is dismayed that no one is interested in his father’s journals; he surmises that no one will be interested in his either.  And yet, it is these journals that Ozick has created to give us a book about old age and the power of memory.

David Guterson’s book – The Final Case –  was also unsatisfactory as to story, but nicely portrays the difference between the son (in his early sixties) who stops writing novels early and the father who is 83 and still goes into his law office every day, bringing bran cereal for his 10AM cereal and coffee ritual.  Guterson published this novel when he was 65, and is clearly grappling with a decision as to whether to go on writing.  To be clear, this novel is fiction, but Guterson is an author and his father was a criminal defense attorney. He may have disguised some of the facts, but the story has the ring of truth.  The old man takes on public defender cases, as he has his whole life, and dies of a stroke while wrapping up the defense of a despicable woman who has murdered her adopted daughter through neglect.  The narrator then contemplates death for a few months and concludes, as Auden did, that in the end all there is is love: “We must love one another or die” (from “September 1, 1939”).  Again, the plot does not satisfy and the story of child abuse by fundamentalist parents appalls, but Guterson’s comparison of a “green” old age and an old old age, the contrast of early retirement and dogged perseverance,  has much to recommend it.

For other reviews of books pertaining to old age see here (Doerr, Osman, Tawada, Wilder), here (Alameddine, McNamer, Bauer, Englehart), here (Schwab, Goethe) or here (Huxley).

 

Projects of Our Old Age

As I sat down to write yet another story for my blog and pick out yet another piano piece to practice for my piano group, I realized I was in dire need of a new project.  For clarification, I am defining a project as an ongoing, long-term undertaking.  It may or may not have an end; for instance, it could be drafting a novel or the mastery of the Chopin Nocturnes.  (The latter would have no end in my case.) It usually takes more energy than I have these days to start something from scratch every time I sit down at my keyboard (computer or piano). This is how Simone de Beauvoir defended the need for projects in our old age:

…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.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that “turning in upon ourselves” in old age is a bad thing, and – in general – de Beauvoir trends far too negative about old age.  (She softened up as she aged.)  Old age offers a time for review and contemplation, and yet there is a need for something more active in our lives.  Some old people just do not retire from their vocations/avocations; some make family their project, caring for grandchildren or others in need. I have known elderly people who built model railroads or created unique birdhouses.  But we all need something of our own which gives us some feeling of accomplishment or worth.  And it does not matter whether it is ever completed.  I sometimes hear writers or scholars fret about taking on a large project when their time is getting short.  This always reminds me of a conversation between Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton (wouldn’t you like to have been at the table?) recounted in an interview Wendell Berry had with Tim DeChristopher entitled “To Live and Love in a Dying World.”  Berry is speaking:

It was the Shakers who were sure the end could come anytime, and they still saved the seeds and figured out how to make better diets for old people. Thomas Merton was interested in the Shakers. I said to him, “If they were certain that the world could end at any minute, how come they built the best building in Kentucky?”

“You don’t understand,” he [Merton] said. “If you know the world could end at any minute, you know there’s no need to hurry. You take your time and do the best work you possibly can.” That was important to me [Berry].  I’ve repeated it many times.

That piece of wisdom is important to me, too.  One thinks of the European cathedrals that took generations to complete.  Or Johnny Appleseed.  Or the Thoreau’s Artist of Kouroo.

But this ruminating still leaves me looking for a project.  I have file drawers full of manuscripts (fiction) I could edit and rework, but they hold little appeal.  For some reason when I have grappled with a problem in story or novel, the fine tuning fails to interest.  But in mid-life, I authored a lengthy dissertation (abstract found here) about the changes in our views of old age (as read through literature) that ensued with the start of the Enlightenment Period, at the dawn of Modernity, and I have long wanted to get back to it for two reasons.  For one, I am much older.  I finished my doctorate in my early fifties and had spent considerable time being the oldest student in the room.  My dissertation topic proves that age was on my mind.  But I want to review it from the perspective of my seventies.  I am not sure I was correct in my conclusions.  Or, at least, my generalizations lacked the texture that my own aging has added to abstract thoughts about what it means to grow old in a culture of progress, in a cult of youth, in an era of a deteriorating planet. 

I hope that there might be something in that research worth sharing.  I found it fascinating to look at how people in different ages regarded old age; it reminded me that our paradigm is not the only one.  Truly, in earlier eras not so many people reached old age as do now, but some did and the possibility was always there.  And ancient and medieval sources had much interest in the scope and purposes of a long life.   In the 6th century, Saint Benedict saw old age as a “truce” with God wherein we had time to “amend our misdeeds;” In the 14th century, William Langland saw senescence as an active enemy that knocked out his wits and his teeth.  Shakespeare saw aging as a time of loss; for him, the last stage of life “is second childishness and mere oblivion; /Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Sans everything.  I centered my dissertation on the encounter with the Struldbruggs in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The Struldbruggs lived so long that the language and culture around them became unrecognizable, and they lived “under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country.”  Any of that sound familiar?

So, I hope to start that process soon and will post excerpts here from time to time.  Projects in old age do not have to be intellectual; they do not even have to be easily definable.  Tell me about your own projects, and look at my story “Again and Again and Again” for an example of one woman’s project, an undertaking both physical and mental, serving the purpose of such projects – keeping us whole in a time of dissolution.

No-Fly Zones and Old Fears

 

The current talk about no-fly zones in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war take me back to 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis.  My family was living in Florida then, and I think our terror was greater than some farther away.  The missiles that were being installed in Cuba were medium range – they might have been able to hit Washington DC but maybe not NYC.  In Florida we definitely felt at risk.  The fear was palpable.  The adults talked of nothing else.  We had exercises in school where we crouched out in the hall or under our desks.  Somehow, even at 11 years old – we all knew our desks would not protect us.

In our suburban neighborhood, everyone was constructing a fall-out shelter. My father dug a “shelter” in the dirt floor of the crawl space and stocked it with rice and canned goods.  It was pretty rough, and I could not really imagine how we all – and the dog – would live down there.  But I did try to imagine it – what it would be like to live in the fallout shelter for months, what it would be like to take a direct hit (even as children we knew this was the preferable way to go), what it would mean to die of radiation poisoning (not pleasant). It was the first time I heard (or thought about) people owning guns, as there was talk that you needed to have one stashed in your fallout cellar to deter your neighbors from taking it over or stealing your food.  Scary stuff. 

For the first time, perhaps, we felt like we were all confronting our mortality together.  But the crisis lasted 13 long days, and when it passed, we gradually forgot about it. Kennedy made some concessions in this instance to bring us that peace.  The concessions were never overtly acknowledged, but, in these times, it is good to remember that concessions can be a valuable tool for peace. In any case, the US and the USSR proved that they could work together to avert catastrophe This is when the hot line/red phone was installed between Washington and Moscow.   In the 1950s and 60s, there was a spat of movies about a nuclear apocalypse – try watching On the Beach or Fail-Safe. But, over time, we gradually forgot or repressed the danger.  We forgot, that is, until the discussion started about what we could do to help Ukraine, and how the use of no-fly zones would lead to nuclear war with Russia.

It seems inevitable that once we had nuclear weapons, someone would eventually use them.  We used them in WWII, with horrific results for the Japanese.  Scientists who worked on the bomb had remorse, and Oppenheimer and others saw no point in mankind building bridges, carrying on – as they felt that it was inevitable that the world would end in a nuclear holocaust.  The great polymath John von Neumann said: Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.  He also said: It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

That being said, it seems amazing that there has been so little general discussion of nuclear weapons over the decades since Kennedy and Khrushchev faced each other down.  I have to admit, they have not been much on my mind.  It is not a comfortable subject.  Maybe, like death, the Damocles Sword of possible atomic annihilation is something we know but do not acknowledge, do not allow ourselves to acknowledge. (Is climate change in this same category?)

In his “Thoughts in Time of War,” Freud talks about how war – even a war in which we might not be participants – forces us to acknowledge death, and considers whether this might be a good thing:

It is evident that war is bound to sweep away this conventional treatment of death.  Death is no longer to be denied; we are forced to believe in it.  People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day…. Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due, and give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed?

I am indeed lucky to have reached the age of 70 without witnessing an atomic apocalypse, nor have I suffered much anxiety about it since 1962.  But I am thinking about it now again, and – as Freud says – war forces us to acknowledge our own mortality, even though most of the time “we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise.” 

I have never written a story about nuclear war – although I have ended the world with an asteroid (“Back to the Garden”) and an epidemic (The Last Quartet).  My story, “Last Things,” though, expresses one way of looking at the end of things – or the possible end of things.

Does Everyone Die Young?

I just read an intriguing book by Marc Augé, entitled Everyone Dies Young. Augé is a distinguished and famous anthropologist; he was eighty-one in 2016 when he published this slim volume of essays about old age.  It starts with the story of Mounette, his first cat, who aged without the psychological constraints that human beings struggle with as they age, and this cat yet knew her own limitations.  As Mounette aged, she gave up leaping to the beloved mantel and contentedly spent days in the sunshine in a soft chair by the window. When she could not leap onto the chair, she lay on the floor.  The old cat was not perturbed.  Like the elderly human, it had time.  Unlike the human, it had no age: “Time is a freedom, age a constraint.  The cat, apparently, does not know this constraint.”

We all feel the “constraint” of age in various ways.  Aches and pains remind us.  Other people remind us.  And then there is the mirror.  In medieval literature (Langland, Gower), the mirror is the vehicle which confronts us with our own age.  In “The Uncanny,” Freud tells of his surprise that the reflection of the old man in the window is his self.  Robert Graves and Thomas Hardy write poignant poems about what they see in the mirror.  They are alternately puzzled and outraged.  And why does the mirror sometimes surprise us?  Because we feel young inside.  That continuing self, the “person” that we were at twenty, is still there somewhere, but now is enshrouded with a wrinkled and faded façade. 

It is a truism that “you are only as old as you feel.”  Nevertheless, one of the worse things that our culture can say about our older comrades is that “they are showing their age,” which usually means they are “acting old” (never a good thing).  Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, posited that feeling younger psychologically would have a positive effect on the physical body and did the famous “counterclockwise” experiment in which she moved a group of elders into an environment that mimicked (or maybe mocked) the world of 1959, the world of their youth.  They watched old television programs, read old magazines, discussed old headlines.  And there were no mirrors.  The staff treated them as if they were young; no one helped them with their luggage or condescended to them.  At the end of the week, they showed improvement in almost all measurable areas – cognitive, physical, perceptual.  Of course, there was no control group and perhaps the group just profited from attention, socialization, and respect from the staff.

We know this kind of thing works.  In this digital age, when our cell phone can design a radio program based on the music we listened to in our youth (and isn’t that the music we all love?), we get a lift as one old favorite after another conjures up scenes and emotions from the days when our whole life was in front of us.  We like talking about old times, particularly with someone who was there.  We enjoy re-reading the books and re-watching the movies that shaped our lives, and all of it is available to us with a few clicks.  We can bring 1959 back all by ourselves.

There is also the matter of memory.  Many old people have much better memories of fifty years ago then they do of last week.  True, we have had time to polish those memories, but they are there.  Augé says that “with regard to our pasts, we are all creators and artists.  We advance facing backward, forever observing and reconstructing the times gone by.”  We can remember the lyrics to a song we haven’t heard for decades and the name of the friend who bought us our first cigarette.  But, for dear life, we can’t remember the name of our neighbor’s husband.  We are youthful in memory.  Except in the face of physical ailments, we all feel young.

Augé ends with this from the title essay of Everyone Dies Young:

Time, as old age experiences it, is not the accumulated, ordered sum of the events of the past.  It is a palimpsest; everything inscribed there does not reappear, and sometimes the earliest inscriptions surface most easily.  Alzheimer’s disease is only an acceleration of the natural selection process of forgetting, at the end of which it seems that the most tenacious – if not the most faithful – images are often those of childhood.  Whether we delight in this fact or deplore it, because there is a share of cruelty in such an observation, we must nevertheless admit it:  everyone dies young.  (85)

I recommend Augé’s little book.  He approaches old age from the vantage point of being old and being trained as an anthropologist/ethnologist.  He encourages us to look at old age as a cultural as well as a biological construction. 

If you are interested in people and mirrors, you might try my old story, “Reflections.”  I don’t like looking in the mirror myself, but don’t seem to be able to avoid it.

 

The Old Lady Wonders: How Many Weeks Do I Have Left?

There is a recent book by Oliver Burkeman entitled: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.  Burkeman makes his calculation on the assumption that we will live until about 80, using weeks because he thinks we will find it more specific and alarming than the years we read off an actuarial table.  By Burkeman’s reckoning, I have about 10 years or 520 weeks left.  If I am lucky (or unlucky) enough to reach 90, you could double that.  Of course, you have to subtract years spent in dementia or visiting your in-laws (just kidding). 

In general, I hate self-help books of the newer ilk (ask me about Arnold Bennett or Lin Yutang though) – especially those that talk about reversing aging or ways to achieve “all that you can be.”  I’ve been duped one too many times, and thinking you can do the impossible is not a formula for a peaceful and contented life.  However, I heard an interview that Burkeman recorded with Krista Tippett, and decided this book might be interesting.

In any case, his point is to impress on us that we are mortal and our time is limited.  All men are mortal says the Greek syllogism – and indeed we are.  It is hard to get that fact firmly imprinted in our consciousness.  There is an old Buddhist saying that the mountain is heavy only if you try to lift it up.  This is meant to remind us that we don’t have to carry all our troubles around all the time.  Very good advice.  But I wonder a little if the advice about death should not be the opposite.  We are all too eager not to carry our mortality around.  Sartre said that our own death was unrealizable.  Freud said that it was “impossible to imagine our own death.” 

Freud admits that sometimes our guard slips and we are reminded of our mortality.  War, for instance, does this.  And Freud thought it was a good thing to remember our transience.  So did the Buddha.  Buddhism has five remembrances that I recite to myself at the end of my meditation time.  They are reminders that we are subject to illness, old age, impermanence, death and karma.  And still, the thought of just those 520 weeks left brings me up short.  Life has very real limits.

We all know the euphoria of close escapes with mortality – when we awake in the hospital after a dreaded operation, when the plane with the misfiring engine (safely) hits the tarmac, when we narrowly escape a head-on car crash on a country road.  In those foxhole moments we swear to appreciate every moment of our lives going forward, and yet the next morning we are complaining about lukewarm coffee.

Burkeman offers us some good but seemingly contradictory advice.  First, we have to do triage – establish the things that are the most important to us; he advises making a long list, prioritizing it, and crossing out everything after the first four.  This is hard.  Everyone these days is subject to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), a term most often related to news and gossip cycles.  But it also applies to our lives.  We do not want to give up hope of ever living long enough to learn to speak French or visit the Galapagos.  The fact is, we squander much time fretting about such things and distracting ourselves from the more important items on our list.  One of my favorite Shakespearean lines is his advice from Sonnet 146: “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross.”  That could be a life motto.

On the other hand, Burkeman bemoans “pathological productivity” – the number of weeks we have left hardly matter if we spend them racing toward our goals rather than enjoying them.  He especially bemoans the decline of hobbies – which he defines as “something that does not lead to something else, but is interesting and enjoyable on its own.”  It can’t be something we are professionally good at or which we hope will turn a profit.  I put both my writing and piano playing in the “hobby” category.  He tells a particularly heartwarming story about Rod Stewart and his hobby of building mediocre model railroads.   

So, we need both to do triage and to appreciate every moment.  Otherwise, we will have been pedaling so hard to get – where? – that it will hardly matter how many weeks we have.  And because, in case you have not noticed, you will never get there.  Even if you achieve the four main items on your bucket list, there will also be an unsatisfied desire.

So, we want to do the things that are meaningful to us, but we don’t want to “instrumentalize” time – as if it were just another resource to apply as efficiently and effectively as possible.  And you have to remember that you are mortal; your time is limited.  But, somehow, Burkeman ends on a hopeful note:

The average lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.  But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time.  It’s a cause for relief.  You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be.  Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start to work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

I only take exception to the word work in the last sentence.  If indeed the task is glorious, engagement with it will not be work. 

If you are interested in a story about hobbies and mortality, you might try an old one of mine, “A Spoonful of Sugar.”

 

 

 

 

A Grandmother’s Despair and the Need for a New Religion

I recently re-read an old essay (1967) by Lynn White, one of my favorite historians, entitled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Yes, people were talking about danger to our planet over 55 years ago.  Discouraging, isn’t it, that the trajectory is still so dismal?  That so little has been done?  In his essay, White details how the West and Christianity “defeated” paganism (wherein everything has a spirit – think of Native American culture) and put in its place the anthropocentric culture (check out Psalm 8:6 or Genesis 1:26) which is ruining the planet.

It is clear from reading their “documents of origin” that religions of the past evolved to solve or ameliorate the problems of their day.  The Old Testament lays out rules for neighbors (if not tribes) to live in peace and incentives for taking care of the poor and widows.  It prohibits foods likely to cause disease and provides for the quarantine of the contagious. It gives authority to an ordained leader to keep civilization on a stable footing.  But these sacred documents were spawned of the era out of which they were created.  When Genesis gave man dominion over the rest of the creation, no one in that era would have imagined where such ascendancy would lead.

In detailing Western religion’s complicity in the fouling of our planet, Lynn White makes one exception – St. Francis, “the greatest radical in human history.” The key was humility:

…the virtue of humility – not just for the individual but for man as a species.  Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures. With him the ant is no longer simply a homily for the lazy, flames a sign of the thrust of the soul toward union with God; now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in their own ways as Brother Man does in his.

According to White, Francis was lucky to have escaped the stake – maybe he should be the patron saint for ecologists.

We haven’t made much progress since White’s essay was written in 1967 – but we do now have a pope who chose the name of the humble saint. In his encyclical “Laudato Si” (“Be Praised), Pope Francis does address climate change and other threats to our planet: “These situations have caused sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world, to cry out, pleading that we take another course. Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.”  He is to be commended; I only wish he were heeded.

In any case, Lynn White thinks that “more science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion or rethink the old one.”  I agree.  “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.”

I don’t think that there is much help in “rethinking” the old religion.  But neither do I see where the new one will come from.  It needs to be entirely different.  Instead of “go forth and multiply,” we need to recognize the holiness of restraint and decrease.  Instead of giving man dominance over creation, man should get on his knees in gratitude for the creation that makes his life – all life – possible.

A whole segment of society has given up and assumes we will go through the hell with our environment and, hopefully, come out on the other side.  There is a popular (and good) website called Post Doom, which defines the “post doom” mind-set as “what opens up when we remember who we are, accept the inevitable, honor our grief, and prioritize what is pro-future and soul-nourishing.”  The site promotes “a fierce and fearless reverence for life and relative equanimity even in the midst of abrupt climate mayhem, a global pandemic, and collapse of both the health of the biosphere and business as usual.”  A variety of guests have interviews on the site; many (like Richard Rohr) come from a religious perspective.  It is fairly pessimistic, but it is also realistic.  We need to face the truth to even begin to cope with it.

For there is one more thing that any religion must do.  It must provide some level of assurance and comfort that “all will be well,” as Julian of Norwich put it.  Otherwise, as we have seen all to vividly and often of late, the fearful draw of anachronistic fundamentalism will continue.  Again, I am verbalizing a hope and not a prescription, projecting a possibility that I cannot quite imagine.  But if individual efforts have failed (and they have), if governments fail to act, if collective efforts seem noble but futile, a new religion, which starts a fervent crusade to save the planet and changes the cultural paradigm, seems the only hope.  Perhaps a desperate hope.

My story this week, “Baptismal Rights,” is about a grandmother who despairs for her grandchildren and wants to give them some method to cope with the damaged and threatening world they will grow up in.  She is grasping at straws, as are we all.

Old Folks and Tales of Climate Catastrophe

We watched Don’t Look Up last night, which led to some interesting discussions and dreams (nightmares?) at our house.  The movie would seem to be an allegory for the way the world is (or mostly isn’t) dealing with climate change.  Old characters – other than a pathetic old general who runs an abortive mission to save the world – do not have much of a role, but the movie got me thinking about some recent novels about our future and climate change in which the old are integral to the plot.

The character of old Grandy in High House by Jessie Greengrass is a good example.  Grandy is raising his granddaughter in a summer community; Grandy takes care of everyone’s cottages while they are away, knowing how to do almost everything from repairs to gardening. The climate scientist in the book seeks him out because she has a “high house” nearby – a house presumably safe for a while from storms and ocean elevation – and is preparing the property to harbor her young son and teenage stepdaughter when the apocalypse comes.   The scientist knows the house will eventually be surrounded by water, so the huge stockpiles she has amassed will (hopefully) not be stolen or plundered.  The scientist herself intends to stay in the battle until the end; she does not foresee herself surviving to get to the high house.  Close to the beginning of the major devastation, she convinces Grandy, now in a wheelchair from a broken hip, to move into the high house with his granddaughter and help her children survive.  Grandy complies; his house will flood. He has no choice.

So we are left with a high house, two teenage girls, a very young boy, and Grandy – who cannot do much but knows everything about how to get the generator going, feed the chickens, harvest the garden, thresh the wheat.   Grandy is the fountain of both wisdom and knowledge.  He delivers instructions patiently from a chair in the kitchen, as the younger folks tend livestock, plant vegetables, and salt fish.   At first their isolation and wholesome lifestyle at the high house seems idyllic, and then the generator stops working, the storms get worse, and the full impact hits.  It ends with the thoughts of one of the young women.  Caro says “the high house isn’t an ark.  We aren’t really saved.  We are only the last ones, waiting.”  There is no doubt, though, that they would not have lived as long as they had without Grandy.  There is also no doubt that had the world had Grandy’s wisdom, the predicament might have been averted.  I highly recommend The High House.

I do not recommend Joy Williams’ Harrow.  First is a hard book to read – although this in itself is not a reason to avoid it.  Sometimes hard books are needed to address hard topics – but not in this case.  The Atlantic calls Williams “the great prophet of nothingness.” Harrow gives us no such redeeming characters or situations as we have with Grandy and his charges at the high house.  We sometimes empathize, but we do not identify with these people, nor do we admire them.  The main character (Christen, nicknamed Lamb), in a search for her lost mother in a time of civil dissolution and “conservative” politics (meaning in this case actually waging war on what remains of nature), stumbles on a dilapidated resort/conference center full of old people who are, by turns, giving up their lives in what seem to be futile acts of ecoterrorism.  They cannot bear to live without doing something, but there is almost nothing they can do but die with great futility.  They fail to even comfort each other, and their acts of self-immolation are often misdirected.  If Grandy tried to help with his old-fashioned knowledge about how to live a primitive life, these folks are just trying to figure out the best way to die.

These two novels are climate dystopias, but they somehow reminded me of Margaret Drabble’s much more conventional book of a few years ago about ways to be old, The Dark Flood Rises.  Drabble’s book (highly recommended) touches on climate change only incidentally, with the main character being an older woman, Fran, who works on housing issues for the elderly, cares for her ailing ex-husband, and tries to make some sense out of what remains of her life.  Most of the other characters are also old, and we get an array of ways people arrange the ends of their lives – physically (much discussion of old age homes and such) and psychologically.

“Prepare your ship of death” Fran tells herself over and over – which is a phrase from “The Ship of Death” by D.H. Lawrence from whence Drabble got the book’s title:

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

Lawrence is talking about the “dark flood” of death; these books enable us to also read it as the dark flood of global warming.

I have written about old folks and environmental issues before (see “Failing Bodies and the Failing Planet“).  Our role is an open question that these books address – do we have wisdom to offer?  Should we risk death (so close anyway) to help in some way?  What to do? 

This week’s story, “Three Women,” does not seek to answer these questions, but just to look at some ways we pattern our lives and see (or fail to see) ourselves.

 

The Gift of Latter Rains – What Old Age Might Give Us

I have written about the rewards of old age from time to time.  It is sometimes hard to remember that – beyond Medicare – there are gifts for which we should be grateful.  T. S. Eliot lists the gifts of old age, but some of the “gifts” seem more like punishments (“the painful recollection of all we have done”).  Saint Benedict says that old age is a truce from God, in that it gives us a chance to “amend our misdeeds.”  These might be dubious gifts. 

But the Bible talks – in both the Old and New Testaments, about the “latter rains.”  There is this from Deuteronomy: “That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.”  And from the Epistle of James: “Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.”  The latter rain – in a dry country, rain is a gift; Jeremiah says that the happy soul is like a “watered garden.”   And the latter rain is particularly precious.  Apparently, in Israel, the early or first rains are called the Yoreh.  They soften the land and make it malleable for the plow.  The middle months, the months of summer, are dry, but the late rains, which are called the Malkosh, actually allow the crops to finally ripen for harvest.

What are the latter rains of life? What are the gifts of old age?  Paradoxically, many of them come from giving up on things.  How the relinquishment of ambition frees us!  Fantasies often fall away!  Bertrand Russell, in his wonderful essay “How to Grow Old,” asserts that the greatest gift is the ability to let “the walls of the ego recede.”  He warns, however, against two dangers that inhibit this gift: 1) “undue absorption in the past,” and 2) “Clinging to youth in the hope of sucking vigor from its virility.”  The latter involves his feeling that, while children and grandchildren may be gifts, they should not be emotional crutches.  Here is a quote to ponder:

When your children are grown up they want to live their own lives, and if you continue to be as interested in them as you were when they were young, you are likely to become a burden, unless they are unusually callous.  I do not mean that one should be without interest in them, but one’s interest should be contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic….

Many of us have children who wish we were slightly more contemplative and vastly more philanthropic, I would guess.

There are other gifts.  In old age, we find that much of what we worry about never comes to pass – or, if it does, it is not half as bad as we expected.  (Try making a list of the things you worried about when you were thirty-five!) If we have any sense, this teaches us to worry less.  Sometimes we find in old age, that seeds we planted long ago and had long since given up on, finally come to bud and flower.  Again, if we have any sense, this teaches us to wait, to bide our time.

Bide our time.  Maybe the greatest gift of old age is time.  The latter rain brings time to reflect.  Time to pursue things we did not have space for in our busy lives.  As time until the end shortens, time in the here and now expands.  We have time to water our gardens.

Back to Russell and the gift of descendants, this week’s story, “Boxing Day,” is a meditation of a group of adult children who are for the first time marking a holiday without parental supervision or obligation.  Enjoy. 

Father Time and Airport Security

I traveled over the holidays – probably not a wise decision, but it seemed like a necessary one at the time.  As I double-masked, waited in long lines, and prayed that our flight crew did not call in sick, I pondered why I was doing this at seventy years of age.  Open question.  But the question of age and its benefits and disadvantages kept coming back to me during this time as we approach the end of 2021 and the prospect of another year gone.

Nothing has changed in the past few decades as much as air travel.  So, I separated my liquids and made sure our fruit cake was not wrapped in aluminum foil.  When I came to the front of the airport security line, I asked a TSA employee if I needed to remove my shoes.  I tend to get dizzy bending down so I would have liked to avoid untying my sneakers, not to mention pattering around on my socks on a dirty airport floor.   The nice young man asked how old I was, and I told him (70).  He smiled and said that the limit was 75, but I should just lie next time because they never check.  Nevertheless, I make it a policy never to fib to people who can put me on a “no fly” list, so I guess I will keep taking my shoes off.  But the encounter got me thinking about uses of age – we want to be old to qualify for keeping our shoes on, for Social Security and Medicare (especially Medicare!), for early Covid vaccinations, for senior discounts, but we don’t want any age restrictions on driving, employment, credit, or any other parts of our lives.  I have a 95-year-old relative who says she is too old if confronted with something she doesn’t want to do, but alternately asserts that she is so old that she can do anything she wants to do in the face of any kind of limitations (regardless of protest from the near and dear).  Ahhh….  In a way, this is all of us.

Centuries ago, there was little concept of age restrictions on the old; neither was there much sympathy for retirement.   Pope Celestine became the first pope to “abdicate” at age 79 (in 1294) for which he was much maligned; he wanted to become a hermit.   Celestine even makes it into one of Dante’s circles of hell for his “great refusal.”  The whole point of King Lear seems to be (at least at first glance) that the old man let go of the rei(g)ns too soon.

Early modern times did make some allowances for the old.  At sixty, one could not be forced into military service and at seventy an elder was exempt from jury duty.  (The latter is of interest to me as I have a jury duty notice and, in my state, the automatic exemption age is 72 and I don’t quite make it.)

But, in general, the old were expected to carry on to the extent of their capabilities.  To be excused from service to the House of Lords, for example, age was generally not enough.  The important imperative to persevere, however, was more ethical than legal, and in it was embedded the assumption of the duty of the old to be wise and to impart that wisdom to the young.   When the Fool admonishes Lear that “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise,” he paraphrases the words that Lucrece addresses to Priam as she views a tapestry depicting the deception of Sinon (in the Bard’s “Rape of Lucrece”): “Priam, why art thou old, and yet not wise?” Regardless of her age, no one expected or wanted the Virgin Queen Elizabeth to retire in Shakespearean England (and the current Queen Elizabeth apparently assumes this is still the case).

Again, I am also focused on numbers because we are headed toward the countdown for a new year. (I will be asleep when the ball actually falls.)  What will 2022 bring besides making me another year older (if I live through it)?  I have a habit of making resolutions in my journal every year, but last year’s entry was mostly about my hope that Covid would disappear.  That has been a disappointment for us all.  I hope for more good days, more ordinary days.  I pray with the Psalmist that life will even out, and that God will “make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil” (Psalm 90), that there will be a return to normality, good days to make up for the bad, normal to balance the abnormal.  But maybe such strict accounting is not necessary; as Frost says, “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”   If Frost is right, numbers surely do not matter.

My new year story, “Amnesia at the Airport,” was prompted by memory and my recent air travel.  It compares the fantasies of youth with the realities of age, and I hope it also points out the advantages of each.  You might also take a look at my blog on Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  Cheers!