Scrooge or Quixote

First, happy holidays and a hopeful winter solstice to all of my readers. I recently got a notice that I have posted over 200 blogs and scores of stories, lists, and miscellanea. Amazing. I particularly appreciate those of you who have been with me from the beginning. To paraphrase Tiny Tim, bless you, every one!

And so Christmas brings up that quintessential old person of holiday fiction – Scrooge. His name has entered the English language as probably the most common word used to describe someone who is mean and miserly and … old. In the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Dickens describes Scrooge this way:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

The original Grinch. Scrooge is surely not the only elderly miser in literature – think of Ethan Frome, for example. Miserliness is a trait that has been commonly used for the aged for millenniums. Horace, in around 20 BCE, describes old men as having “desire for gain, miserliness, lack of energy, greediness for a longer life, quarrelsomeness, praise of the good old days when he was a boy, and condemnation of the younger generation.” Of course, in days before social security and pensions, old people had every reason to be miserly – even in the face of impatient heirs. King Lear is surely a lesson about distributing our assets before we are dead! Scrooge has been the model for many old tightwads, including a Disney duck. But, of course, Scrooge is not just miserly – he is mean and cautious and compassionless. Nevertheless, he is certainly one of the stereotypes of old age – in his pre-conversion state.

But there are many oldsters in literature. If Dickens gave us one commonly-used word for old men, Cervantes’ Don Quixote gave us another and somewhat opposite one – quixotic. Here is how the Don is described in the beginning of Don Quixote:

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame…. and so it was that with these exceedingly agreeable thoughts, and carried away by the extraordinary pleasure he took in them, he hastened to put into effect what he so fervently desired. (Grossman translation)

If Scrooge was mean and “Bah Humbug,” Quixote was magnanimous and “Let’s go!” Both got more than slightly in their own way – Scrooge saw ghosts and Quixote tilted at windmills. One was rich and one was foolish. Scrooge learned his lesson, and – although Quixote goes home in the end – the Don never really regrets anything. In honesty, both men end up often making life fairly miserable for those around them, until, of course, Scrooge sees the light and Quixote turns his horse homeward.

So where is the lesson in all this from these two old men? First, let’s admit that the elderly are entitled to some level of avarice, caution, and retrospection. We are planning to support ourselves for a lifetime of unknown length and quality. Our bones are fragile, our energy is limited, and our earning-power is defunct. We may want to be Quixote, but, in all honesty, we usually wind up acting more like Scrooge.

But here’s what is admirable about Scrooge. Albeit with the help of Christmas ghosts, he looks at the past and present honestly. Quixote is deluded in his romantic idea of being a knight, but Scrooge has been deluded too about the results of his actions and what his money can really do for him – until the ghosts arrive. Scrooge is scared into opening up, Quixote is stuck in his delusions.

And there is this. What Scrooge goes through during the course of A Christmas Carol is a life review. It is a model for what the angel Clarence takes George Bailey through in It’s a Wonderful Life – albeit George needs to recall all the good he has done, while Scrooge needs to face his bad deeds. Life review is surely one of the tasks of old age. Indeed, there seems to be an instinct that makes people want to make sense of things – to unravel the themes (not plots) of their lives. Like miserliness, looking to the past is a trait commonly criticized in the elderly. But, our experience may be our most valuable possession. And I find that thinking about it is not enough. Talking to someone else is good, but even better is to try to concisely relate what happened on paper, read it over, and determine what we have learned. So, Scrooge does have something to teach us. However, if you are already quixotic and out meeting the world with an open heart, more power to you! I myself am more like Scrooge, and probably still need the assistance of ghosts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like Foreigners in Their Own Country”

I have been thinking a bit about language these days for at least four reasons. First, I have been taking a French class at the local senior center. I passed a French translation test for a graduate degree, but that was decades ago, and I never learned to speak it very well. Second, I have been rereading my old journals, and realizing how much my memories diverge from the words that I wrote down at the time. Third, I have been dealing with communicating with my grandchildren (ranging in age from five to sixteen) and recognizing that we are seldom speaking exactly the same language. And, lastly, having embarked on my “rereading” project, I have realized how language changes in the context of its historical period and in the context of the age of the reader.

Learning a new language in old age is supposed to be good brain exercise. OK – I hope that’s true. More importantly, spending time with another language’s constructs and idioms makes you realize that all language is more arbitrary than we realize. It is not only the words that are different, but the structure is also different. In French, for example, the pronoun “ils” (meaning “they”) applies to groups of men or groups of men and women – even if women are in the majority. Groups of women (only) are “elles.” Even one male in the group changes the pronoun. It makes me pause and consider more seriously the messages encoded in all language.

Reading old diary entries has reminded me of how slippery language and memory are. It is not unlike the old game we used to call “Telephone” or “Gossip,” where a message whispered in ear after ear in a big circle comes out differently at the other end. Words that were written down at the time and survive are intact, and I must believe they represent what I experienced at the time. However, some memories have apparently morphed to become perhaps more interesting or easier to bear. I have been amazed.

Language changes over time are nothing new. My maternal grandmother, who never learned to drive, called their car “the machine.” Movies were “the pictures,” and the radio was “the wireless.” When her granddaughter took to wearing blue jeans in college, she insisted on calling them “dungarees” and elongated the word so it was clear what she thought about dungarees as female attire. With my own grandchildren, I am struggling with my pronouns, my technological ignorance, and a lack of words to describe the kind of relationships teenagers have these days. Some of their truisms drive me to distraction – like “it is what it is” or “whatever.” And when did wait and sales staff begin to answer any question with “of course”?

Reading old books is a challenge; can we really understand the context – not just of the vocabulary – but of the situation? Of course, one can more properly understand Shakespeare or Chaucer with notes to explain what certain words meant at the time they were written. But can we realize what it might have felt like to be pregnant and unwed at the time of Tess or imprisoned in the England of Moll Flanders? Also, the age at which we read a book matters. As I re-read books that I first opened in my youth, I find that they are totally different – because I am totally different?

This is nothing new. Montaigne (whose essays I have been rereading as part of my “nothing new” project) said that he realized his words were not eternal:

I write my book for few men and for few years. If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now? It slips out of our hands every day, and has halfway changed since I have been alive. We say that at this moment it is perfected. Every century says as much of its own… (Essays, Book III)

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has his hero visit the eternal Struldbruggs, who – like poor mythical Tithonus – get old but never die. After a number of years, however, they cannot communicate with those around them:

The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another . . . and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country.

One of the Buddhist daily reminders is that my body will age and decay. So will my language. AI wants to bring me up to date; it will gladly edit my work so it doesn’t seem so … old-fashioned. Incidentally, it would also like to bring Montaigne up to date. Cosmetic surgery for the written word. Spare me. What is all around me might be a “foreign” language, but, again, all the research shows me that struggling to understand a foreign language is good for old people. And it doesn’t mean I have to give up my native tongue.

For one of my stories that thinks about language, you might try, “Why My Aunt Josie Has a Limited Vocabulary.” If you want to surprise yourself, look at a diary entry or letter you might have sent about an event that happened a decade or more ago. Does your memory fit the facts? And what does that mean? Should we school ourselves to accept reality or take refuge in our edited memories?

Old People as Their Own Best Teachers?

In my random reading this morning I ran across this quote from Yeats: “When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.” The sentiment reminds me of James’ Beast in the Jungle – we spend life in preparation for some event, some epiphany, some revelation.

Bibliophiles like me have read a lot of books by the time they get old. They might not remember all of them, but they have spent vast swaths of their lives living in a state of immersion in the reading experience. As Ecclesiastes says, “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” And now, like the preacher at the end of Ecclesiastes, I am old and am only too aware of the “weariness of the flesh.” It seems to me that there should be a time to stop reading and to try to make sense of what we have read, what we have learned. Montaigne wonders when the old man will stop learning and be wise in what he has learned, and it seems to me that his own essays were an attempt to do just that.

But it is hard to give up. The internet assures me that this one new book will explain things to me once and for all. Or that the latest novel will change the way I think of the world, or I must read a newly translated book that was never-before available in English. And it is not just the push-marketing of Amazon and the like; when I look something up on Wiki or do a Google search, I am presented with lists of books that will elucidate the very subject which I am interested in – and I can have an electronic version of said book within seconds. And then there are the prize-winning books, the best seller lists, the books I keep seeing people walking around with. Surely, of the “making many books there is no end.”

But even without our buying books, myriads of books are available to us. Libraries have a far vaster array of offerings than they used to have, as they pool their resources and make what we used to call inter-library loans so easy. Anything we want is available one way or another – anything we want except the answers that will enable us to stop looking.

One of my early blogs (“Possessing That Which Was Mine”) was about a vow I made to read nothing new – to go back and reread what I had read for a second time and to take time to process what I had learned. That did not last long. After a few months, someone recommended something that “I absolutely had to read,” and I was off.

In addition, I have cabinets full of daily journals that go back 21 years, and sporadic journal entries and autobiographical fragments going back to my childhood. I have manuscripts of novels and short stories that I have been meaning to edit for years, but never do. I clearly like writing more than I like revision. just as I like reading a new book better than really taking time to absorb an old one. I am getting to an age at which I either need to use this material or recycle it. Do I really want my children to read my journals? (Not that they would have any interest.)

There are various ways to handle such material. I have a friend who, cleaning out his own artwork, offered to send all his friends a piece. I happily accepted. Other friends have reduced their written work to one flash drive that they can slip in their pocket and jettison before death if they don’t want their heirs pouring through the story of their lives.

But I am not ready to jettison my precious words without review. So, I have decided to do a moderated version of Swedish death cleaning with the recorded experiences and ideas in my life. First of all, I am going to try to stick to re-reading rather than reading. For light reading (which for me means mostly mysteries), having long forgotten the “who-done-it” for novels I read over thirty years ago, I have the joys of Ngaio Marsh, Amandra Cross, and Agatha Christie to look forward to again. For more serious reading, I will start with the novels that have meant the most to me over the years, probably first going back to Herman Hesse, Jorge Borges, and George Eliot. For non-fiction, I am currently rereading David Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, and will soon move on to Thoreau and Montaigne.

And as for my manuscripts, about ten years ago I drafted a novel (The Order of the Stock Farm Jesus – excerpt here) about an old woman who encounters a young girl who, for reasons of her own, wants to collaborate on writing a list of rules for life. What are the rules you live by? What is the difference between what you do and what you think you should do? Writing this novel was a good exercise then, but ten years later it seems an even better one. In conjunction with that project, I will start reading my own voluminous journals (young to old) to see what the lessons of my life were. What can I teach myself? Have I learned anything? Can I put what I have learned into words? More importantly, have I internalized these learnings and started to act accordingly? (Can you teach an old dog new tricks?)

Virginia Woolf kept journals, and – although she never got very old – said that she wrote precisely so that her older self could read her younger self: “Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920, will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost…” Marion Milner (A Life of One’s Own) started keeping journals in a desperate attempt to find out what it was in life that made her really happy. Thoreau went to Walden and kept a journal to “front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” I’ll let you know how my project goes, and – if you have attempted anything similar – please tell me about it!

I have written before on keeping journals in old age, “Journaling in Old Age.” It’s not too late! I didn’t start doing it seriously until I was 53, but I am so glad I did. The benefits accrue not just in having a record, but in the very process of sorting out your thoughts every day, at transferring your experiences into words. Try it.

If you have been journaling, you might look at an old blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for ideas about how to mine your own words for life lessons. You might also look at my fanciful short story, “Nothing New.”

Ishmael, Odysseus, and Seeing a Friend after 40+ Years

In Moby-Dick, we don’t know how much time has elapsed before Ishmael – the only one who survives the voyage of the Pequod – tells his tale. “And I only alone am escaped to tell thee” is the quote from the Book of Job which opens the Epilogue. Ishmael has to remember, but there is no one left to keep him honest.

I recently had the experience of having lunch with someone I hadn’t seen for over forty years. We were young wives and mothers together, and very close over a period of seven or eight years, but then moves, divorces, and misunderstandings drove us apart. There was no internet in those times for casual contact, no Facebook to keep track of our families. In addition, I knew this friend through my ex-husband’s family; she had been a lifeline when I had felt isolated in a new marriage. But after the divorce, she drifted away with all the distanced in-laws. After all those years, I finally told her how grateful I was for her friendship.

But how do you summarize forty years of your life? Especially, how do you do that with someone you once were close to? There are the facts of relocations, jobs, divorces, marriages, deaths. There are the milestones of the children and grandchildren. Ten or twenty minutes took care of the timelines; on what was really important in our lives, I think we barely got started.

And there is the question of what is important. Seven or eight years into his trip home to Ithaca from Troy, Odysseus is washed up on the island of Phaeacia and the local king gives him a banquet. He asks Odysseus to tell the guests about himself. Odysseus had been king of Ithaca, he had been ten years at the war in Troy, and many years at sea. He responds with these questions (which might very well have been Homer’s questions to himself when he started writing his epic): “What shall I say first? What shall I keep until the end?” These are the questions I asked myself when I sat across the booth from my old friend. These are the questions that I ask myself when I think about my life.

I have done a lot of writing in my life – novels, blogs, stories, reports – most of which were for my own amusement. This blog is the only location where I share. And I have never written straight-forward memoir. As I get older, however, I have had the urge to go back and try to make sense of the sweep of my life. An autobiography, of sorts – or at least fragments of one. But trying to piece my life together for my friend reminded me of how difficult that would be.

First, how honest could I be? I found myself not sharing the more uncomplimentary pieces of my life. Understandable, but regrettable. If we don’t share our mistakes, we don’t bless the mistakes of others. Secondly, I wonder how reliable my memory really is. With friends, with family, we have all had the experience of recalling an event that no one remembers or that everyone remembers differently. I brought up some things this week with my old friend that she had no recollection of and vice versa. Did they really happen? When biographers piece together a life, they look at documentary evidence of dates, events, truth. Should we do the same with our own memories? It should be noted, of course, that even if some of these events never really happened, they shaped our lives because we think they did.

Melville is, of course, writing fiction. He slips in and out of Ishmael’s perspective and had to have a survivor of Ahab’s tragedy in order to have a frame for his tale. Melville knew how the tale would end and what he wanted to include to come to that terminus. We are trying to make sense of a life that, perhaps, does not make any sense. We may be honorably trying to tell the truth, but our truths are more complicated than can be corroborated by documentary evidence.

I have tackled memoir-like writing at times, but always hidden behind the mask of fiction. I wrote a novel about a woman visited by the ghost of Jonathan Swift. By having to explain her life (and the last few centuries to him), she is forced to recapitulate and justify her life. I also wrote a fanciful piece about a middle-aged woman and child trying to co-write – at the instigation of the child – a rule book for the best way to live (excerpt here). I published neither, but learned a lot in writing them. I’m with Montaigne, who said, “What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.” But, still, there was cloak of fiction, of story. Was I being honest with myself?

Borges says that part of the problem is words. Words reduce the ineffable to the mundane. In “Aleph,” Borges talks about seeing life as a whole, but the tragedy of having to move it into “successive language:” Yet, in his powerful poem, “Everness,” the master tries to convince us that nothing is completely lost:

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.

“God saves the metal and he saves the dross.” God may save, but we must sort out the “metal and the dross” for ourselves. Borge’s poem reminds me of a line from Shakespeare’s powerful Sonnet 146: “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;” I don’t know of a better credo for life. But to do this, we must be able to identify the dross, and honest memoir writing would probably help.

Meanwhile, how would you explain the last forty or fifty years if you ran into a very old friend? How would you explain it to yourself?

About five years ago, I wrote a blog relaying some suggestions as to how to write a life review: “Feast on Your Life.” Maybe it could help us as we think about it again.

Still Crazy After All These Years

Two related questions have nagged at me during one of those inescapably bad weeks. To wit: 1) Does an individual life have any pattern, theme, or meaningful narrative? 2) Does anyone ever really change their basic nature? These are eternal questions, posed by thinkers from Saint Paul to Pogo. I ask myself these things as I inexplicably continue to make the same kind of mistakes I have always made. Has living a long time taught me nothing? Sometimes it seems so.

Our culture has a penchant for Bildungsromans, stories about the coming of age of young people. These youngsters (usually lads) go through scrapes and adventures and learn lessons along the way. One might think of David Copperfield or Catcher in the Rye in this regard. But these books often end when the protagonists are young adults (and usually with marriage if the character is a young woman), and I doubt anyone that young has ever learned anything really important (look around).

Then there are the less common Vollendungsromans, tales of the coming of old age and death. Again, lessons are learned, the principal one being how to die. One might think of Robinson’s Gideon or Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent. The point of all these life stories – young or old – seems to be that life has some kind of meaningful narrative and we discern patterns and “better ways” as we gain years and experience. And yet in my old age, I – like Saint Paul – sometimes wonder why “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). There are certainly times when, at three in the morning, I cannot help but think that my life is not a meaningful narrative, but simply a vicious rerun of my most egregious character traits. (As I said, it has been a bad week.)

One person who pondered the nature of the life story was Arthur Schopenhauer. He authored an essay with the weighty title: “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual.” (Maybe it sounds more interesting in German.) It is, nevertheless, a fascinating piece of work.

Schopenhauer starts out by admitting that almost everyone believes that:

…the course of an individual’s life, however confused it appears to be, is a compete whole, in harmony with itself and having a definite tendency and didactic meaning, as profoundly conceived as is the finest epic.

He finds this true in almost all cultures. In some societies, this “course of life” is ascribed to fate or providence; in others, it is seen as the inevitable result of maturation, education, and goal setting. But, in the end, Schopenhauer thinks that it is mainly a matter of inborn character:

The systematic arrangement, here mentioned, in the life of everyone can be explained partly from the immutability and rigid consistency of the inborn character which invariably brings a man back on to the same track.

What is not determined by character is determined by outside events – which then interact with character. Some 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus observed that “character is destiny.” Schopenhauer seems to agree.

As a person who keeps a journal and believes writing one’s life “story” is therapeutic, I find this unsettling to think about. Maybe Schopenhauer was right. What, perhaps, we are trying to discover in our life review, are simply those permanent traits of character which make us keep playing the same scenes over and over again. Rather than living out a comprehensive life plan, these traits might simply keep us, as Paul Simon puts it, “still crazy after all these years.”

Or maybe I’m wrong. Ask me again when things in my life are going better.

Meanwhile, I also drafted a short story on this subject, provisionally entitled “Life Stories.” Don’t take my chatter too seriously – I am as capable as the next person of seeing my life as an ongoing epic (or soap opera).

New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age

The title of my blog site (When I Come to be Old) comes from a list of Jonathan Swift’s resolutions, made when he was a young adult, about how he was determined to act (or more specifically not to act) when he was old. His list is worth reviewing by us seniors, just to see how the younger set may perceive us (no comfort there). This new year, however, I am more interested in thinking about what kind of resolutions old folks should make about themselves?

What kinds of resolutions should old people make? If you do a search on the web, most of what you will find are suggestions to improve your mental or physical health: take up crosswords, walk at least a mile a day, eat more vegetables. Yes, of course. These are common sense maintenance items, and we all are fully aware that learning a foreign language will work our brain harder than watching Brit Box. I surely make such resolutions, but they usually (in my case) take the form of the negative. No more than an hour of TV per day, no dessert unless I have walked three miles that day, no more than one restaurant meal a week – and so on. Games we play with ourselves which (hopefully) make us a little healthier without undue deprivation.

On my doctor’s suggestion upon my query about any possibility of avoiding my mother’s dementia, I have gone back to French. (I once knew enough to pass a translation exam for a graduate degree, but those brain cells seem to have disappeared.) I am using Duolingo and pledged myself to a modest fifteen minutes a day. I don’t have to worry about reminders; Duo is a pest. I also continually contrive and amend reading lists and rules (e.g., at least one literary work of fiction or nonfiction for every mystery novel).

But how about other hopes and goals other than those aimed at life extension? There are at least a couple of other categories. How about creative endeavors? Not to be published or hung on our grandchildren’s walls, but for our own satisfaction in doing something which draws on our experience, something, perhaps, that we have always wanted to do. Most of us know what that means for us – which could be anything from adventuresome cooking to bonsai gardening to a full-length novel. Here, too, I have found it necessary to set concrete goals for an enterprise which is not concrete at all in its reason or its results. When I first started to keep a journal over twenty years ago, my resolution was ten single-spaced pages per month – and if I put it off, I had to write all ten on the last day. It never came to that – but since that time I have produced the minimum (usually far more). Similarly, when I started a blog, it was with the determination to post a blog at least twice a month and a new story every six weeks. I have succeeded, at least on the average.

But there are more personal ambitions to do with our states of mind – our souls, if you will. One of my resolutions this year is to start going back and reviewing my journal from the beginning to see what I can learn about myself. (See my blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for the wonderful Marion Milner’s advice in this regard.)

And how about resolutions that have to do with the very fact that we are aging, facing changes we cannot (wholly at least) control, coming closer to the end, however we might define it? “Do not go gentle into that good night” was a resolve, made not by an old man, but by a younger man (Dylan Thomas) on behalf of his dying father. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my children making resolutions for me. And I don’t want to spend my last years in a “burning and raging” against the “dying of the light.”

Kay Boyle was already old when she formulated her “Advice to the Old (Including Myself).” Boyle, like Swift, warns us about not dwelling on old times or regaling others with our aches or disappointments – but she ends with a challenge to battle despair:

Have no communion with despair; and, at the end,

Take the old fury in your empty arms, sever its veins,

And bear it fiercely, fiercely to the wild beast’s lair.

This is a different kind of battle – not against inevitable death and age, but against self-generated despair, not against the reality of existence but against an antagonistic attitude toward what is. For me, it is not so much a battle (who wants life to be a battle?) as a matter of – resolution.

Resolution is a word with many meanings; at the new year, we often mean it in the sense of “firmness of purpose.” But it can also mean the “solution to a problem” (as in “the dentist resolved my toothache”) or the “degree of sharpness with which we can see something” (think of the resolution level of your monitor or TV). All the senses of resolution are related: firmness of purpose is only of use if we can see sharply enough to define the issue we are trying to resolve, and know what action on our part will “resolve” it.

Old age is, in itself, not a problem. Grief or despair about the changes that old age brings can be a problem and is worth resolving. But before we can resolve it, we must examine and define it. Yes, bad habits can come with age and these need to be guarded against (just ask Jonathan Swift), but that is true of all times of life. And again, perhaps the real sin is to despair at the facts of existence. I spent my childhood wishing to be older; I spent much of my middle age looking forward to retirement. I am trying hard not to miss the opportunity to enjoy and make the most of my old age. My resolutions will be to understand my own nature and changes (read the old journals), learn (French and patience, although not necessarily in that order), and work toward some form of resolution with age, provisional though it may be.

For a fictionalized account of a different kind of resolution, you might try “Nothing New.“

Letters from an Old Person (To a Stranger)

In the hiatus of the plague, I have been trying to convince my eleven-year-old granddaughter to spend some of her spare time writing about what she is going through – from piano lessons on Zoom to way too much time with Mom and Dad. I tell her that her own grandchildren, her own older self, might be interested someday in the 2070’s. But the greatest value would be, of course, that she would have to process her thoughts about this major disruption in her young life. That is the same reason we should all do it – especially now that time is often not an issue. If you haven’t gotten around to keeping a journal or writing your life review yet, let me give you another way to think about it, another way to do it. And a book endorsement.

At the recommendation of one of my readers (thank you!), I recently read Meet Me at the Museum. Besides being a good read, it was interesting to me for a few reasons. The two main characters are reasonably old. And it was the debut novel for Ann Youngson, who was seventy when the novel was published – there is hope for us all! She apparently wrote it after a career in the automotive industry, and I surely hope she writes another.

A woman on a farm in England writes to a professor at a museum in Denmark, whom she remembers corresponding with as a class project over fifty years prior. Since that man is long since gone, another administrator at the museum answers her letter and thus starts the correspondence which makes up this epistolary novel. Without having ever met (and never meeting within the timeframe of the novel), these two older adults start telling each other bits and pieces of their own histories. Either one can stop writing at any point, but they do not. And soon we know a great deal about two very private people.

There is something about talking to strangers. While it is hard to get started, we all might admit to some very delightful conversations on airplanes or in waiting rooms. I think there are two reasons for this. First, because the person knows nothing about us, we are forced to try to relay our history – who we are and how we landed in this place and time. Second, because we don’t know them and have no reason to think we will ever see them again, we are more open. We are less likely to edit and abridge, which is something we do constantly even with people who are close to us. And if you want to see the epitome of this, look at the rosy view of their lives most people portray on Facebook.

There is a long literary history of telling tales to relative strangers. One might remember Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” where the old man stops a young wedding guest and spills out his story. Or preludes to the tales the travelers tell in Canterbury Tales, where – for example – the Wife of Bath spills out what appears to be an honest account of her life before she goes on to tell her tale. Or one might think of the letters that Celie writes to God in The Color Purple.

In any case, it might be worth a try to address your journal, memories, life review to a stranger. You surely don’t have to mail it and the person can be alive or dead – but who would you like to talk to? Most of us need someone to talk to these days, and a one-sided conversation has its limitations, but also might give you a new and more honest perspective. By addressing an imaginary audience, their reaction is not really an issue. We have all spent more than enough of our lives thinking about the reactions of others (she says with much experience). Old age is a good time to stop such lunacy.

Try it. Pick someone you would like to talk to but not a member of your family, not someone you know at all well – preferably someone you don’t know at all. Alive or dead. And write to them. Tell them about yourself – past and present. Soon you will know a great deal about yourself. And it does not have to be prose – it could be poetry, song. Leonard Cohen did something like this in his “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

Of course, there is the question of the ultimate disposition such writing. First, assume that no one will see it, otherwise it won’t work. The value is in the process and not the product. But what to do with such manuscripts in the long run? I have saved years of journals, and still ponder the proper time to dispose of them. Covid has made me consider this problem again – you never know when you will leave your belongings behind permanently. But my guess is that no one would want to wade through that material anyway, and in the meantime, it has value for me.

So, I will try to continue to encourage my granddaughter to write it all down. Who knows – I never thought I could teach her to knit, but since our Zoom lessons, mile-long scarves have been proliferating.

And, by the way, if in writing these letters you should realize how fortunate you have been in your life, particularly in getting help from others when you needed, consider writing a check to your local food pantry. Their clients need assistance, nourishment, now more than ever.

The story for this week, “Luck,” is about two strangers on a bus and what they learn about each other and themselves.

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