The Bhagavad Gita in Old Age

There are many reasons to study the Gita in our old age – just ask Gandhi.  Verse 36 of Chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita encourages us: “Even though thou be the most sinful of sinners, thou shalt cross the ocean of misery by the boat of knowledge.”  In Gandhi’s commentary (recommended), the Mahatma addresses this passage from the standpoint of old age:

For me, the Gita is the ship, not because it is a learned work but because I have liked it, it has appealed to me in my old age, and verses in it have been a great support to me.

I agree with Gandhi on this, but with caveats.  The Gita is a tricky document.  It would seem to be the story of a strange blue God (Krishna) exhorting a young warrior (Arjuna) to get out on the battlefield and kill people, and yet Gandhi found his doctrine of non-violence in it.  It is a war story that describes the war within us.

Again, the Gita is a little slippery, and many people have gotten it wrong.  There was a popular book a few years back that assumed that the Gita was telling us to follow our bliss.  That might be good advice, but it is not what the Gita is saying.  The Gita’s message is more complex; it is more nuanced; it is more like life.  I hope I can convey some of the complexity and the relevance of the Gita to aging – but, of course, you must read it for yourself.

I recently watched a golf movie that was based on the message of the Gita called The Legend of Bagger Vance.  Good movie (directed by Robert Redford), but it didn’t quite hit the mark.  However, the movie was close enough to get me to read the novel that it was based on, and that was indeed fortuitous.  The novel, by Steven Pressfield, is somewhat drenched in the intricacies of golf.  (I admit to skipping the long paragraphs in the sand traps.)  I noted, when I have written about the Gita before, that Krishna values devotion of any kind – perhaps even devotion to the game of golf?  The author has Bagger (the Krishna figure) tell us that “all sport is holy, for it embodies the objectified search for the subjective experience of yoga, meaning the union, union with the divine.”  But golf is even better because:

In other sports the opponent is regarded as the enemy.  We seek by our actions to disable him…This is not the way to salvation, or more accurately, it is at one remove.  The golfer on the other hand is never directly affected by his opponent’s actions.  He comes to realize that the game is not against the foe, but against himself.  His little self… (121)

Read The Legend of Bagger Vance, but please read the Gita first.

The Gita pops up in unexpected places.  Thoreau took Emerson’s copy with him to Walden.  Emerson’s poem “Brahma” is all but lifted from the Gita.  Whitman scribbled in his copy.  Philip Glass wrote an opera using only the words of the Gita.  Such references abound – there is even a Gita for the CEO.  And I recently found another interesting citation.

It is my daily practice to read the lectionary of the Episcopal Church, wherein are noted feast days for people of note.  Being curious, I often look up the souls honored there and thus came across the rather incredible Vida Dutton Scudder, whose feast day is on October 10.  An American scholar, philanthropist, sometime pacifist, and activist, she also wrote a book about old age called The Privilege of Age, which I have been unable to find.  I did, however, find her autobiography, On Journey, which was written in her seventies.  In it, Scudder chronicles how, born in India as a child of Christian missionaries, she returned to England as a toddler when her father died in a swimming accident.  He left her his books, among which was an early translation of the Gita.  In Scudder’s long memoir, we get much about her participation in the Christian church, her development of settlement houses and retreat centers and the teaching of the principles of social work – her exemplary life goes on for hundreds of pages.  But she reserves the precious last few paragraphs for the Gita.  Specifically, she talks about how the Gita has prepared her for old age (Scudder lived into her nineties), and how the Gita’s admonition to care about the work, but not the results of the work. has taught her to let go of what went before.  It also taught her courage:

…I turned to the Gita in the Great War, to dispel hesitant scruples.  Then it taught me fearlessness, and gave me courage to accept the moral risks in action.  Now the days of action are passed, does the somnolence of age creep over me?… The Gita shall say the last word; it is a word of comfort, it is still better, a word of hope:

“Following the Rule, cleansed of spirit, victorious over himself…his self becomes the Self of all born beings…. Putting away utterly all loves born of purpose, little by little, he shall win stillness [quoted from Gita 6].

The second chapter of the Gita famously tells us that “Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits.”  In old age, it is often hard not to live in mourning for the fruits of our actions – individually or collectively.  If we do so, we are not meeting the challenge of the moment, not facing the work that is before us of aging and death.  And we must use what energies we have left to do the work that is left to us, while not relinquishing the stillness and peace that is our right.

If you have never read the Gita, please read it.  Read it for the first time without many annotations.  If you want to go further, there are some wonderful commentaries out there, including those by Gandhi (based on his talks) and Eknath Easwaran.  Easwaran has a one volume translation with an excellent introduction, as well as a separate three-volume commentary.   And if anyone has a copy of Scudder’s Privilege of Age, please let me know!  She published an essay of that title in the Atlantic in 1933 which I have, but the full book was published in 1939.

Getting Old in the Time of Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Models for Aging?

The Baby Boomers were a generation that suffered from lack of models.  It wasn’t that our parents and grandparents were not admirable people, heroes even, but they did not live the lives that we lived in the times that we had to live them.  Many women who worked their entire adult lives grew up with stay-at-home moms.   Even if our moms worked, the model out there was the carefully coiffed young mother with an apron and a roast in the oven.  Think of June Cleaver or Lucy Ricardo.  Men of our generation did not learn what it meant to have a working wife, not to have dinner on the table when they got home from work, how to handle demands for assistance with domestic chores.  The result was that not only did we work ridiculously hard at home and at work (we did have models for a work ethic), but we were always feeling guilty about not being able to be the kind of parents, husbands, and wives that our parents were.

Then there were relationships.  When I was a child, divorce was never discussed – and even if it did happen, no one talked about it.  And yet, even today, baby boomers divorce more than any other age group: Another life event that we had no template for, and, again, that nagging guilt if it happened to us. 

We must remember that, as children, we soaked up so much unconsciously.  We learned the complexity of language – the words, the grammar, the pronunciation.  We absorbed social norms – ways of eating, sleeping, interacting.  And now we are getting old. We surely absorbed something about what it means to grow old, and – whether we are conscious of it or not – it is affecting us now that we ourselves are old.

When we were children, our models for growing old were our grandparents, who often did not live to be as old as we are now.  They might have been stern (my Dutch paternal grandmother) or doting (my maternal Nana and Papa).  I did not think much as a child about how they lived, but it surely had an influence.  There were other elderly relatives, most of whom seemed like another species.  Surely, we would never look like that!

And our culture provided few positive templates in our formative years for senescence.  Coming of age novels (Bildungsromans) and movies abounded – from Little Women to Catcher in the Rye – but coming of old age stories (Vollendungsromans) were scarce on the ground and rather scary.  There were tales like Heidi, in which an old person gets rescued from isolation and depression by a younger one.  But novels about old people who were interesting in themselves, potential models, were few.

Think of fairy tales.  The protagonists (often princes and princesses) were always young and beautiful.  The evil stepmother was old.  The witches were old.  Consider Arthur Rackham’s illustration from Hansel and Gretel with a very scary witch of advanced years (here).

The stories usually ended with the witch in the oven, the adventure complete, and a wedding, with no note about what happened as the characters aged.  The Grimms’ classic telling of Cinderella ends like this:

And now her two sisters found her to be that fine, beautiful lady whom they had seen at the ball. They threw themselves at her feet to beg pardon for all the ill-treatment they had made her undergo. Cinderella took them up, and, as she embraced them, cried:

That she forgave them with all her heart, and desired them always to love her.

She was conducted to the young prince, dressed as she was; he thought her more charming than ever, and, a few days after, married her. Cinderella, who was no less good than beautiful, gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and that very same day matched them with two great lords of the Court.

There are many things to be noted here, but generally, marriage is the end of the story.  Cinderella is always beautiful and bountiful and young in our imaginations.  We wanted to be Cinderella and have no model of an old Cinderella.

Songs of our youth assumed that “forever young” was the way to be.  Even songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game” or Peter Yarrow’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” assume that upon adulthood, all magic is gone.  Old folks make no appearances.  The movements of the sixties didn’t trust anyone over 30, and it never occurred to us that we would someday be old.

So here we are trying to work out the best way to be old.  The aged folks in Washington surely have not figured it out.  The drunk crowd in Margaritaville don’t seem to have the answer.  But there are clues out there.  And the first step might be to be more aware of our ingrained assumptions.

Around me, there are various models – positive and negative.  There’s the “let’s see the world and spend our money before we die” folks.  There are those kind souls who sacrifice their time and resources to take care of grandchildren so that their kids can avoid daycare and afford a house.  There are those who spend their time and resources in keeping fit mentally and physically, and have a weekly array of classes and therapy sessions.  There are those who secluded themselves during Covid and never fully emerged.  And everything in-between.

While I was writing this, I heard that Jane Goodall had died – at age 91 and while out on the road doing speaking engagements, active and with a project to the end.  An article about her in the NYTimes (What Jane Goodall Taught Us About Living a Long Life) which extols her for staying active, having a purpose, and having an optimistic view about things in general, including the afterlife.  Of course, Jane Goodall was no ordinary woman and we all need more relatable models.  Or, of course, we could structure our own.  I’m just trying to encourage myself and all of us to do it consciously.  Any suggestions are welcome.  And we must remember that – although they could not seem to care less – our grandchildren are watching.

For me, reading and writing are ways to explore alternatives. I have written several reviews of novels about old people (see here and here).  Many of my short stories involve older people trying to come to terms with where they are in life.    You might try my short stories “Closing Time” or “Snickerdoodles” – or write your own.

“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.

Slowness in Old Age – Perhaps a Gentle Blessing?

I have always been interested in the concept of time, at once fascinated with it and threatened by it.  Back in graduate school, I wrote essays about the depiction of time in literature from different time periods.  For example, in The Canterbury Tales we find multiple ways of telling time.  The new technology (mechanical clocks) was so recent that it had not had time, as yet, to eradicate prior knowledge (unlike our current era, when many children growing up in the digital age cannot tell time on an analogue clock).  In one short passage, Chaucer refers to the time in at least four different ways: as a portion of the “artificial day”, by the length of the shadows, by the degrees of inclination of the sun, and by the hour of the “clokke.”  The clock in this case was probably read by ear, by the chimes, and emanated often from the local monastery, reminding all that all time was God’s time.  It is of note that early Christians did not believe in usury because, among other reasons, it involved making money through time and time belonged to God.

By Jonathan Swift’s era, however, usury was accepted, and time was dominated by mechanical devices.  Not only did clocks have faces and more exact calibration, but they were even carried in one’s pocket, something which puzzled the Lilliputians when they encountered Gulliver:

He [Gulliver] put this engine [pocket watch] into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did anything without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.

I was always a creature of the clock.  When I was a working mother with two children, I had no choice.  Every moment was scheduled.  I was good at it, and it became a habit.  What I am apparently not so good at is slowing down.  There is a quote that is making the rounds these days from the Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.”  He also said that “The idea of slowing down is not about getting answers, it is about questioning our questions.”  Akomolafe is talking about global humanitarian issues like climate change and refugee displacement, but slowness is also, it seems to me, necessary to navigate old age.  First of all, we are no longer built for speed.  Almost every fall that my mother took in the latter part of her life happened when she was rushing to answer a phone, tending to a barking dog, or some such non-emergency.  Secondly, haste makes waste.  We don’t have the energy or money to cope with larger mistakes.  Lastly, we are approaching the end.  It is time to put on the brakes and look around us before we become stardust again.

All of this makes sense, but – nevertheless – old habits and values don’t change easily.  For a simple example, I find myself frustrated with fast pieces on the piano.  I can play them, but not at accepted tempo, not fast enough.  I am just playing for myself (and my husband who, locked in his study, is an involuntary audience).  Would I rather play the piece well but very slowly or fast with mistakes and frustrations? Slow practice has always been recommended. “If you practice something slowly, you forget it slowly. If you practice something fast, you forget it fast,” advised Itzhak Perlman.  And then there is this from Saint-Saens: “One must practice slowly, then more slowly, and finally slowly.”  Since all the piano playing I do could be labeled as “practice,” slow is fine with me and enables me to play pieces that would ordinarily be beyond me.  It is a trick, however, to go slowly and keep an even tempo; this is true both on the piano and in life, I think.

The same is true for reading and writing.  There is this from an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

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

“Now I’m very happy to ….”  There is an acceptance of reality in Mumford that is graceful and wise.  And the thought that goes into that smaller word count may make for better prose than the facile writing of our youth.  Early readers (before the 17th century) spoke words aloud as they read.  Until recently writers used pen and paper to write and revised with cross-outs and clipped-on inserts.  These practices were slower, but surely made for better understanding.

Slowness is in the air.  We are now being told that slow learning is better than fast; slow thought is a necessary balance to fast intuitive thinking.  And, of course, slow food is better than fast food. One of my children recently told me that he couldn’t imagine spending the time we spend on food shopping, planning, preparation and clean-up.  I could have argued that, once you have a personal catalogue of recipes and experience in preparing them, it does not take that much more time than driving to a restaurant, waiting for your server, etc.  But the real answer is that preparing food is a worthwhile activity in itself – and what would you be doing if you weren’t slicing vegetables for tonight’s stew?  I could go on and on, but talking to younger people almost never convinces them, and I have better things to do.

“Quickening” is the term we use for the very first detectible movement of a fetus in its mother’s womb.  It is a big moment for pregnant mothers and marks the first independent action of a new life.  If the beginning of life is “quickening,” maybe we need an equivalent “slowening” for the last part of life. And perhaps, by accepting our slowness, by appreciating it, we are accepting one of the greatest gifts of old age.

If you are interested in the development of timekeeping, Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization is highly recommended, although I believe it is out of print.  Anything by Mumford is highly recommended.  I have also posted here my old essay on the depiction of time in The Canterbury Tales.

And lastly, I just read this morning’s New York Times Magazine, where there is an article on the peace and joy of slow driving.  I am already a right lane person.

A Great Old Age Simile from Bertrand Russell – and Some Advice

Bertrand Russell lived to be very old, and – in his rational and philosophical way – was much interested in the best way to grow old. (I could have told him it was slowly!)  Russell starts by admitting that the best advice is to “choose your ancestors carefully” – his own parents died young, but his grandparents led long and productive lives.  (His paternal grandfather was prime minister of England well into his 70s and an active opposition leader long after that.)  Russell cautions us against expecting too much from our children and gives the realistic advice that they won’t abide much from their elders in the way of advice or society – but they will welcome any funds that might be forthcoming.  All true enough.

In fact, in his essay, “How to Grow Old,” Russell says there are two major mistakes that oldsters make.  The first is to cling to the younger generation, or even worse, to try to imitate them.  The other error is to cling to the past:

It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead.  One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done.  This is not always easy; one’s own past is a gradually increasing weight.

So, what does Mr. Russell suggest that we do? His great mind has pondered this, and his conclusion is much like that of his contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir (see here), both of whom think that we need “projects” in old age:

I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities.  It is in this sphere that experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere that the wisdom born of experience can be exercised without being oppressive.

In his 80s and 90s, Russell took on things like nuclear disarmament, opposition to the Vietnam War, and overpopulation.  I hope he would have also approved of less noble pursuits and projects – like playing the piano or cultivating a garden.  Russell himself was purported to dabble in birdwatching.

Russell acknowledges that fear of death is often an issue with the old, but he finds this somewhat “ignoble.”  It is in talking about the best way to overcome our mortal fear that he waxes the most poetic, as we can see in this passage:

The best way to overcome it—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

I love water metaphors for life.  Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity – all spiritual thought comes back to the symbol, the example, of water.  We are made of water, we need water, and – at our best – we are like water.  The Tao reminds us that, like the Tao, “water doesn’t strive or compete. It simply flows, finding its own path. [reaching its own level,] and adapting to the environment. This teaches the importance of letting go of ego and resistance, allowing things to unfold naturally.”

And, this brings me to Spinoza.  (I always come back to Spinoza.)  Many great geniuses – Russell and Einstein to name just two – were Spinozans.  Russell tells us that Spinoza was the “best example” of being able to view the world in this impersonal way as the end approached:

Spinoza, who was perhaps the best example of the way of feeling of which I am speaking remained completely calm at all times, and in the last days of his life preserved the same friendly interest in others as he had shown in his days of health.  To a man whose hopes and wishes extend widely beyond his personal life, there is not the same occasion for fear that there is for a man of more limited desires.

But, assuming we can transcend the personal, where does that leave us?  These are tough days. In my greener years, I protested the Vietnam War, signed petitions, marched for peace.  I was young, but things did not seem so overwhelming as they are today.  I was stronger and more resilient. I bellowed, but I did not despair.  Now I am tired, and I often despair.  I would urge the younger folks to get more involved, but we did not listen to our elders who told us to get less involved.  The tides rise and fall.  Tranquility in old age does not mean giving in; it means giving up neither our serenity nor our standards. And we must keep in mind that we are about to “merged in the sea.”  Russell is also famous for telling us, “The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”  These days the world is often horrible, and yet we must maintain our equanimity and “friendly interest.”  Not easy.

It is always interesting to look at how smart people have approached and lived their own old ages.  For more about the conjunction of old age and genius, you might look back on my blog, “Does Life Have Two Trajectories?”

“Here Be Dragons!” – AI and Old Folks

I have been trying (and failing) to stop thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  It is everywhere.  And it occurred to me that the replacement of our brain by silicon networks has ramifications that old people know something about.

But let’s start with an earlier usurpation by technology – that of replacing people power (physical work and transportation) with machines.  I am always amazed when reading Emerson or Thoreau to find that they thought nothing of a twenty-mile round trip walk to see a friend.  These guys were in great shape!  As was almost everyone in those days (except the filthy rich and they were fat).  Now we are all out of shape and spend hours doing Pilates or walking on the treadmill trying to regain some of the fitness that Thoreau had as a matter of the life he lived.  This only gets worse in old age, as we continue to try to persuade our bodies not to freeze up or flab up.  I, of course, am grateful for technology that allows us to replace or medicate arthritic joints and such, but we must also realize that as we delegated many physical activities to machines (machines that polluted the planet), we also handed over a natural way to stay fit. We have even convinced ourselves that going up and down stairs is bad for us, so we should live on one level or (better yet for the economy) invest in a stair lift.  While there is a time of life when stairs are not possible, study after study has shown that climbing stairs is good for old people.  I read once that when Paris put elevators in some senior residence buildings, the life expectancy actually declined!

Now we are accelerating a parallel process that had already been underway – that of replacing our minds.  If we don’t think our minds will decay from reduced use, we are deluding ourselves.  Anyone who has retired from a mentally challenging job knows that “use it or lose it” is true.  Old folks try to compensate by doing word and number puzzles – any group of elders often drifts to that day’s Wordle or the Jumble in the morning paper.  We take French classes, join book groups, tackle the myriads of math problems that show up on Facebook.  We are trying to maintain what is now not adequately used.

And, incidentally, there is AI designed just for old folks, including a monitor with the cute name of ElliQ which will help you take your pills, do your exercises, plan your meals – as well as giving you someone to talk to at any time!  If your younger relatives give you ElliQ for Christmas, you can be assured that they don’t want you looking to them for help!  And if we do not have to exercise our minds at all, what does that mean?  For the old and for the young?

Spinoza equated intelligence with virtue; Aristotle said that it was our ability to reason that makes us human.  Could farming out our intelligence rob us of both our virtue and our humanity?  I fear it might.  There is also something authoritarian about AI – it has the one true answer, the ability to tell us what we ought to do.  And if you think it doesn’t have its own biases, remember two things: it was created for profit, and it has no ethics. Already AI is biased toward capitalism and away from “wokeness.”  As its usefulness seduces us, we will be easy prey for collateral damage.

Earlier times were more skeptical about technology.  They warned us.  In the 19th century, as technology spread in the form of trains, gas light, and electrical power, there were many thoughtful discussions about whether it was good or bad.  Two major utopias of that period were set in worlds where the decision had been made to discard most technology.  One thinks of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).  These are “post-technology” narratives, where humans have taken life back into their own hands.  Here is Samuel Butler:

True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery whenever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of machines – they serve that they may rule.  (from Erewhon)

To avoid this despotism of technology, Erewhon destroyed all the machines created in the past three hundred years.

Similarly, William Morris created a world that has severely limited the invention and use of technology.   Both utopias were in stark contrast to Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1890), which more or less predicted that science and technology would solve all our problems by the year 2000 – albeit it had also replaced capitalism with socialism, so it wasn’t a profit-based technical utopia.  Hard to imagine.

But, again, as I said at the start, old folks know what happens to our mental and bodily functions if we don’t use them enough.  We also have a long view of the kind of change that technology engenders; we have watched the dumbing down of culture, the plague of obesity, the destruction of our attention span.  Elders are cautious folk, and we are worried.  In the Middle Ages and earlier, when cartographers had gotten to the end of their knowledge of geography, they labeled the unknown areas with warnings:  Hic Sunt Leones (Here Be Lions) or Hic Sunt Dragones (Here Be Dragons).  All warnings about AI and related technology seems to have disappeared – it is now blessed by the President, the media, higher education, and the venture capitalists.  But I, for one, will be looking for lions and dragons.

“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.”

Charlotte Brontë, Luddites, and AI

After Charlotte Brontë wowed her world with Jane Eyre in 1847, she disappointed her reading audience by stepping away from Gothic romance to write Shirley, at least in part about the Luddites of the early 19th century.  (Both books were published under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell.) The Luddites, you might remember, were a group of craftsmen who were protesting the installation of semi-automated weaving machines, making skilled weavers redundant.  Shirley, as it turns out, is more about gender, class and economic roles and less about the Luddites per se, and yet is a truly wonderful book with notable and quotable insights on all facets of life.  But, in the end, it shows us a world that is capitulating to technology with the same inevitability that our own world is.

I reread Shirley because I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence.  AI is everywhere.  AI is trying to help me (go away!) write this blog.  The very existence of AI makes me doubt the pictures I see and facts I read.  In the past, mechanization and automation have threatened manual workers and artisans the most (think about type setters), but AI threatens the white-collar worker, the computer programmer, the teacher, the content provider.  The Luddites in Brontë’s novel flail against “progress” to almost no avail.   Similarly, it is beginning to look like the creeping hegemony of AI is inevitable.

But back to Shirley.  When the Luddites initially destroy a loom in transit, this message is sent to the mill owner: “Take this as a warning from men who were starving, and have starving wives and children to go home to when they have done this deed.”  And not all the children are at home, as the mills take root and hire the cheapest unskilled labor:

The mill windows were alight [because it was still dark out], the bell still rung loud, and now the little children can running in,  in too great a hurry, let us hope, to feel very much nipped by the inclement air; and indeed, by contrast, perhaps the morning appeared rather favourable to them than otherwise, for they had often come to their work that winter through snowstorms, through heavy rain, through hard frost….

[Later] It was eight o’clock; the mill lights were all extinguished; the signal was given for breakfast; the children, released for half an hour from toil, betook themselves to the little tin cans which held their coffee, and to the small baskets which contained their allowance of bread.  Let us hope they have enough to eat; it would be a pity otherwise.  (from Chapter V)

Our anonymous but omniscient narrator clearly has his tongue in his cheek.  These children never have enough to eat.  And yet the mills expand, the new equipment is finally delivered, and we move from the plight of hungry children to the romantic interests of the local gentry, including the mill owner.

In fact, Shirley ends in a double-wedding and a brilliant future for the local textile mill.  Brontë’s narrator wraps up by looking into the future and telling us about his visit to the area long after the weddings and the new machinery:

The other day I passed the Hollow, which tradition says was once green, and lone, and wild; and there I saw the manufacturer’s daydreams embodied in substantial stone and brick and ashes – the cinder-black highway, the cottages, and the cottage gardens; there I saw a mighty mill, and a chimney ambitious as the tower of Babel…. (from Chapter XXXVII)

Yes, there are worker’s cottages with gardens, but there is also the chimney and the ash in this once green corner of England.

For many years, optimistic thinkers envisioned labor-saving technology as helping to create a kind of utopia, as giving everyone a chance to use their minds instead of their bodies. Manual workers would unbend their backs and pick up a book or a musical instrument.   Eric Hoffer envisioned university-like campuses for adults, freed from the workplace, who wanted to study in any area they were interested in.  Edward Bellamy imagined a world full of music, books, study, and communal dining.  But instead of having technology free us up to use our minds, it appears that we will have no need of our minds – AI will take care of it.   It might also be noted that Samuel Butler and William Morris wrote utopias where technology is strictly controlled for the benefit of humankind.

Just as the pastoral town in Brontë’s book ultimately and inevitably succumbs to the mill, I have recently watched one area of life after another capitulate to AI.  You might look at the front-page article in today’s NYTimes: “AI on Campus Casting Chatbot as Study Buddy.” The most disappointing defeat has been the way AI has been accepted by educators.  “The students are going to use it anyway,” they often plead, “so we might as well encourage them to use it well.”  That might be true, but I’m suspicious that it would be AI doing the “using” and not the student.  If things are made too easy for us, we get soft – in mind and body.  And if we don’t resist AI now, it is unlikely we will have the mental resources to do it years from now.  The Luddites lost and they lost badly.  But, at least, they realized what they were losing.  And they tried to do something about it.

For a story about how artificial intelligence is not always the answer, you might try my “Two New Apps,” or read almost anything by Ray Bradbury.