Tag: aging

An Old Lady Thinks About Population Statistics

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

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

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  Now there is not a vacant lot, shacks have been replaced by McMansions, and the freshwater ponds and their diverse habitats have been overrun by invasive species fed by the runoff from lawn treatments.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Old House

In trying to find a house in the right location in a tight market, my husband and I ended up buying an old house – one that is close in age to ourselves, a 1950’s house with a lot of character and a lot of problems.  It was not the wisest of decisions, but we have always made our housing decisions with our heart and not our brains, and, in the past, we have been able to make things work.  This time, however, we are old and tired, and I am not so sure.  The house has charm, but it is the charm of an old flirt in a wheelchair.

This is not the oldest house we have owned; that prize goes to a beauty we bought in 1999, which had been given to the couple we bought it from as a wedding present from her father.  It was immaculately kept up – not modernized, just kept up.  It had the original cherry kitchen cabinets with a built-in flour sifter.  That house was like people who take care of themselves their whole lives, and do not succumb to either bad habits or cosmetic surgery.  The old house we are in now was not kept up, and all too often, modern “updates” were grafted onto deeper problems.  It has gracious bones but needs both detox and some reconstructive surgery.

Obsolete appliances and rotting wood have got me thinking about the analogies between old houses and old people – a very popular analogy.  I recently ran into this by Frederick Buechner (from Whistling in the Dark):

Old age is not, as the saying goes, for sissies.  There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it’s like living in a house that’s in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn’t work right anymore.  There are bats in the attic.  Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there’s a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather.  The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on.

Buechner’s analogy, of course, reminded me of the old revival song, “This Old House,” by Stuart Hamblen, written about the time that my house was built:

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer, ain’t a-gonna need this house no more.

Ain’t got time to fix the shingles, ain’t got time to fix the floor.

Ain’t got time to oil the hinges or to mend the window pane,

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer I’m getting ready to meet the saints.

Rosemary Clooney had the first hit with the song, but everyone from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson has recorded it.  It was supposedly inspired when Hamblen, while out on a hunting expedition with John Wayne (who else would you go hunting with in the Sierras?), came across a broken-down house where an old dog was guarding his dead master.  Believe that if you want.  The song has a catchy tune and great rhythm, but I think the song mostly resonates because it tells a great truth.  Hamblen reminds us that as the body deteriorates, we are getting closer and closer to not needing it anymore, and that is just how life is – so we might as well sing about it.

I need my body now, however, and partly I need it to make this house livable.  I need it to build a new life one more time.  But I also need to stop hearing my husband moan as he unearths (literally) some new problem.  (Though he denies it, the man is a saint.)

So, we try to cope with this old house in our old age.  Probably a mistake.  Surely feels like a mistake many days.  But maybe the process has some redeeming lessons about accepting what old is.  You can paint it, prop it up, make it over, but it is still an old house.  In the end, one can only enjoy its charms, but that is only possible if you can contain the angst and come to a kind of peace about aging, senescence.  In the Prologue to his Rule, the great St. 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.” (See my earlier post, “The Truce of Saint Benedict and Rules of the Road.”) A truce, not a war.  We will fix the house the house as we are able and as we try to “safeguard love.”  We will try to remember that we are fortunate – to grow old, to have a roof, to be busy with meaningful chores.  And we came here to be near family, and there are no regrets in that regard.  As I look at our teenage grandchildren, I wonder how they see us.  And then I think of this old house again.  I hope they think that we have some charm.

 

 

Analogue Aging in a Digital World

Moving requires vast amounts of bureaucratic interaction – something to be avoided in the best of times, and my age keeps reminding me that this is perhaps not the best of times for such activities.  I can testify to the fact that getting anything done – from making a medical appointment to changing addresses – is harder than it used to be.  It is almost impossible to get a live person on the telephone; the days of hitting 0 for help are gone.  And if your needs or problems require anything but a “yes or no” answer, you are out of luck.  We have moved completely from an analogue to a digital world.  And now we are moving to AI, which is predicated on the on/off, yes/no assumptions of a digital world.

Before we talk about AI, think about the differences between an analogue and digital world.  Think about analogue as a wave, keeping all its nuances; digital is a series of pictures on that wave taking snapshots of what is happening so that you end up with a series of on and off points, or 0110110101.   Computers (and therefore AI) want everything to be digital.  They do not want to hear your story about why you need to have special bloodwork done before you see a doctor or why you can’t wait fourteen months to see a dermatologist.  They don’t want to know that you have already been on hold for an hour, only to find out you are in the wrong department and maybe need more help than just being returned to the main menu.  Life is not a multiple-choice test; there is no way to so neatly describe my needs and problems.  I wish there were, but I am old enough to know that life is never such.

Yet, we are being forced to deal with things as though it were.  Here is a minor example.  AAA (American Automobile Association) is divided into regions, each with its own administrative offices and billing (as far as I can tell).  I moved from one region to another.  After hours on the phone with no button to push for the exact action that I wanted to take, I finally scored with a live being.  She took all the information and said I would be getting a confirming email with a temporary card I could print out.  Much thanks on my part, only to find out that the email never came, and the Massachusetts AAA’s digital portal never heard of me.  I finally decided it would be easier to let my original membership expire and start from scratch.  That’s fine for AAA, but not for doctors, dentists, pharmacies and the entire structure that supports my old bones.  There is no starting from scratch as my prescriptions are running out, my bones are due for their semi-annual injection, and there is a funny spot on my ankle.  Digital systems do not want to know these things.  It is even true of travel; we still use old-fashioned paper maps that show you the whole region – towns, lakes, context.  GPS just wants to give you directions, one digital step at a time.

I suspect that the mechanisms which are being implemented facilitate the full expansion of AI.  The database must be prepared.  We must all be numerically defined and labeled; our problems must fit within a set of algorithms and an array of specific multiple choices.  The answers must be exact and quantifiable.  Old age is not like that.  Life is not like that.  And, if AI is incompatible with life, I know which one is winning.

So much for an old lady whining about the problems of moving.  I am getting through it, but it is teaching me lessons.  I was used to my old shower and kitchen and route to the grocery store.  I am learning new ways, but I am doing it in an analogue way.  Although I do not use GPS, I am even learning new routes, even shortcuts, and starting to remember names (of streets and people).  It is a gradual and imprecise process.  It is up and down – wave-like.  Definitely analogue.

I admit that some things adapt to being digital – date of birth (but not how old you feel), Medicare number (but not how your body is feeling), phone number (but not the explanation of how your husband does not use text so please leave a voice message instead), and so it goes.  We all might like our lives to be tidily swept up into categories, but it is not so.

And while I am at it, let me complain a little about the health care systems (or lack of such) in this country.  One realizes it while trying to transfer medical records – some offices will only take fax transmissions (really), while other offices will only send digital files (really).  No matter how many consent forms you submit to get files sent, the form will be lost.  Apparently, there is no slot in the digital program for them.  So, you will sign more forms.  Pharmacies will transfer some prescriptions, but not all.   A major healthcare system in our new area has no slots with primary care doctors, and other medical offices are booking into the new year.  I am not helpless; But it is hard.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote a delicious and ironic poem called “One Art.”  In many ways it is about aging; here are a couple of stanzas:

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster                                                                 of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.                                                                        The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:                                                                places, and names, and where it was you meant                                                             to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

All of us know about this kind of losing.  We lose things, we forget things, things change.  Moving is loss.  I will persevere.  New systems will digitize me, schedule my lab tests, order my pills and AAA card – eventually.  But, in the meantime, it feels like a disaster, and I do not think that the predicted danger of AI is far away.  We are already being manipulated by machines that give us no choice.  And every time we maneuver through phone trees looking for the right digital responses, we lose something.  We lose the space between the analogue waves of our existence, we lose the subtle differences in our lives, we lose our ability to communicate with other human beings, and I resent it.  And we old folks remember when it was otherwise.

Travel, Rituals, and Old Age

My husband and I just returned from a ten-day marathon in New England with all our relatives.  We are not used to hotel beds, restaurant food, and such a rich diet of forced socialization.  It was reassuring and comforting to see people we love, but we missed our rituals – from tea at 3PM to oatmeal on weekdays to the PBS News Hour on Wednesday nights (we can only stomach the news once a week).  We are home now and nestling back into our routines, and this has gotten me thinking about the value and meaning of ritual.  I am also thinking about it because I found myself trying to defend it on several occasions while we were gone.

Usually, I would say as I sat down at the restaurants our hosts had chosen, Thursday is the day we have fish.  Or, upon being asked if we eat oatmeal every morning (we bring our old-fashioned oats with us), I would reply that we ate oatmeal Monday through Friday, have pancakes on Saturday and eggs on Sunday.  Generally, our friends and relatives were appalled.  You know what you are going to be doing every day of the week? they exclaim.  What kind of life is that?

It is a sacred kind of life as far as I am concerned.  And a life that leaves much room for contemplation and creativity.  It may not work for everyone, but not worrying about what’s for breakfast or dinner, or what we are going to watch for our nightly hour/dose of daily television leaves room for the more intriguing parts of life.  It is not that our rituals are not important; it is that they are holy.  These moments in our days are like a religious Book of Hours, where we perform and say the duties of the day between work, play, thought, meditation.  I would never criticize someone who lived a spontaneous life in all respects, but such is a life of continual decisions and effort of which I am no longer capable – if I ever was.

Ritual also teaches us to appreciate the small wonders of life.  In one of my favorite books, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery writes “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.”  Back home after a major disruption in our routines, the blueberries on our oatmeal, my peanut butter and cracker afternoon snack, become luminescent in their beloved familiarity.  And this, in turn, reminds me to appreciate all life.

Routine makes for contentment rather than thrills, but who says that happiness is something to be “pursued”?  I would say that the pursuit of happiness is an oxymoron (with due deference to Jefferson).  Children love to hear the same bedtime story over and over again; they sleep the peace of the familiar.  Monasteries and convents are models of a scheduled life, and yet they fertilize the genius of a Thomas Merton, a Hildegarde, a Gregor Mendel.

And I think of Nietzsche, who raised the question of eternal return – is it possible to live our lives in such a manner that we would be happy to live them again and again?  Or would it become an eternal frustration, a Ground Hogs Day of confusion and regret? Routine, for me, makes parts of every day a blessing of eternal return– knowing that I will come back daily, hourly, weekly to these holy points, making the rest of life easier, fuller, and more open to adventures of another sort. 

One last note: rituals and habits are “near enemies” in Buddhist terminology.  Near enemies are two things that look the same on the surface – like equanimity and indifference – but are totally different in their intention.  It is true that rituals can become habitual, but something is lost.  And I would never call a bad habit a ritual.  One must be vigilant.

This week’s story, “Paradise on Earth,” is about habits (not rituals) that develop about how we treat each other, and what can happen when things change.

 

Auden, Narcissus, and the Duty of Happiness

I have gone back to reading Auden; this time I am reading his prose in The Dyer’s Hand.  He has much to say about life and old age, but I was particularly taken by this bit about Narcissus:

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his.   If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

We love our image because it is ours; we even correct it in our minds to be closer to what we think it should be.  I always think I look better in the mirror than I do in the cell phone pictures people take – I guess it is harder to mentally photoshop pixels than it is a face in the mirror (or in the mind).

Auden’s love for his own old body extended to his old age, even though he himself described his face as “a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain.”  It was his.  This comes across in his poem “A Lullaby,” written a year before he died.  Here he hugs himself, calls himself “Big Baby,” and references Narcissus again:

The old Greeks got it all wrong:

Narcissus is an oldie,

tamed by time, released at last

from lust for other bodies,

rational and reconciled.

For many years you envied

the hirsute, the he-man type.

No longer: now you fondle

your almost feminine flesh

with mettled satisfaction….

Harold Bloom loved this poem: “Older than Auden was [when he wrote the poem], I chant this lullaby to myself during sleepless nights and wish I had more of his admirable temperament.”

Bloom is right; Auden did have an “admirable temperament,” even in his old age (although Auden only lived to age sixty-six).  Like Spinoza, Auden thought we all have a duty to be cheerful, to be happy (again, from The Dyer’s Hand):

It is incorrect to say, as the Declaration of Independence says, that all men have a right to the pursuit of happiness.  All men have a right to avoid unnecessary pain if they can, and no man has a right to pleasure at the cost of another’s pain.  But happiness is not a right; it is a duty.  To the degree that we are unhappy, we are in sin.  (And vice versa.)  A duty cannot be pursued because its imperative applies to the present instant, not to some future date.

My duty toward God is to be happy; my duty towards my neighbor is to try my best to give him pleasure and alleviate his pain.  No human being can make another one happy.

Spinoza did not put it in religious terms; in his Ethics, he tried to reason his way through to a formula for the good life and says this: “Cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good; melancholy, on the other hand, is always evil.”  And Spinoza has no use for regrets, the one thing that often heads off happiness in old age: “Repentance is not a virtue… instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched.”

Auden quotes Caesare Paves on the definition of maturity: One ceases to be a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.  Auden does not think that it even does any good to tell ourselves about our trouble.  Love the old body, love the life you have had and have now, and do your duty to be happy.  So says Auden, but it is not easy.

However, there are moments, like the one my character has in “Snickerdoodles.”

Whispered Words of Wisdom – Let It Be

I like autumn as a metaphor for old age. I know it is not a perfect metaphor; golden leaves on the trees renew themselves in the spring, but we cannot renew ourselves in the same way. Hopkins points out that the “Goldengrove unleaving” is a reminder of the “blight  man was born for.” And it is. And yet. I recent read a memoir by Pico Iyer entitled Autumn Light and would highly recommend it – or any of his books. There was this about fall in Japan:

And every year the autumn poses the same question, which I, every year, am barely able to answer. There’s no time to waste, the yuzu-colored light reminds me; and yet it would be a crime – a sin – to turn away from the beauty of the season. The bright days make me unable to resist the impulse to go outside; the days of sudden, unrelenting rain commit me to solitary confinement. I am not always ready to accept that it’s in surrendering my hopes and careful designs that real freedom comes. (my emphasis)

And it is really surrendering that I want to talk about – letting go. It should be so easy, and it is nevertheless the hardest thing. And not just for me. Every meditation or contemplative group that I have participated in comes back to this again and again. We know it will make our life easier; we know it is inevitable in the long run. But we cannot do it. And I would note here that letting go is not the same as disregarding; detachment is not apathy.

I have always known intellectually that letting go would help. When my son complained of stress at work, the only advice I would give him that I knew was right, was to not take it seriously, to let it go. To do the job well, but with detachment as to results and the regard of other people. This was advice I was never able to follow myself, but I knew it would have allowed me to work longer and healthier. And better. It’s even true of relationships – we all know of relationships that fell apart because one of the partners tried too hard, held on too tight, as William Blake knew:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Maybe it’s a little like dieting. It should be the easiest thing in the world not to eat. So it is with worrying, fretting, blaming, catastrophizing. Who wants to frighten ourselves to death? Apparently, most of us.

In old age many of the worries of our youth should have dissipated. Our children are grown, ambition has run its course, (most) passions are dulled. But that seems to make little difference. We worry about our grandchildren, our aches and pains, our declining loved ones. There is always something. But we also have our own very real experience proving that 99% of the things we worried about never came to pass – and even when catastrophe materialized, it was seldom as bad as we expected. Shouldn’t we have learned? The truth, I think, is that we have learned, but old habits die hard.

One thing we know will happen. We will die. Worrying about that not only won’t help, but it will diminish the days we have left. I started with the metaphor of autumn for old age. Autumn is a wonderful season, my favorite. But it would be spoiled if we just saw it as a harbinger of winter. Let it be say Lennon and McCartney. Fear no evil says the 23rd Psalm. You can only lose what you cling to says the Buddha. Consider the lilies says Jesus.

If you have figured out the trick to this – to letting go and letting be – let me know. Let all of us know.  Please.

My story, “Every Winged Bird,” does not give us an answer, but it does give a picture of someone who has given up everything which does not give her joy. It was part of a series I wrote inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ovid knows about change, and in another poem he said “happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.” He doesn’t tell us how, though.

The Poetry of Old Age

On the topic of aging, I most trust poets who are old. Some poets –like Frost and Yeats – wrote poetry throughout a long life. Some turned to poetry in their old age. Thomas Hardy published his first volume of poetry at age fifty-eight and apparently wrote nothing but poetry for the next thirty years. I think poetry lends itself to the old mind, both in the writing and the reading. Good spirits must be distilled.

There are various types of poetry about old age. There is serious poetry and silly poetry. There are elegies for what has been and odes to the joys of senescence. There are genres and tropes. There have been more than a few poems about glimpsing one’s own aging façade in the bathroom mirror – one thinks of Hardy’s “I Look Into My Glass” or Robert Graves’ “The Face in the Mirror.” There are poems of return to places of one’s youth and reminiscences of lost loves. (Yeats is good at this.) Poignant poems capture the difficulties and loneliness of old age. There are no more affecting lines than the end of Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” Other poems are filled with the realization that life is going to go on without us, as in Housman’s “Tell Me Not Here.”

Then there are the losses – which some poets see as a mixed blessing. There is the loss of memory. In “The Winter Palace,” Larkin writes that “Some people know more as they get older, /I give all that the cold shoulder.” There is the loss of those we love, as in  Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” And the prospect of our own death, which for some is fearsome (mostly for the younger ones – Dylan Thomas was only thirty-three when he wrote “Do Not Gentle”), for others is welcome (Stevie Smith’s magnificent “Black March” or Auden’s “A Lullaby”). For some the final event is imagined – we hear and see the deathbed scene in Dickinson’s “I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died.”

As I read poetry or novels, I note the age of the poet/author at the time of composition. This is easier in older volumes wherein the date of birth of the author appear on the back of the title page in the Library of Congress information (why did they stop?), but there is always Wikipedia. I find it particularly interesting to read works of poets at about my own age. The human experience is not entirely singular; there are correspondences. And differences.

I read poetry about old age to learn about myself. Poets can put into language what I often cannot. If I cannot speak it, if I cannot even think it coherently, I cannot truly comprehend it. E.M. Forster asked, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” Flannery O’Connor said, ““I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I read poetry about old age to give me words for what I am feeling. To give me courage. And sometimes for comfort.

I have attached a list in progress of some poems about aging that are worth looking at. In addition, as I have noted before, there is a wonderful collection by Harold Bloom entitled: Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems. There is also The Art of Growing Older by Wayne Boothe which gathers poems and other literature about aging into categories. Part of my daily reading for years has been in the Poem A Day books – there are three volumes. The original volume was compiled as a project for The Natural Death Centre in Great Britain, and many of the poems address old age, loss, and death. Many of them also express and bring joy. I will add to my list of old age poems as more come to mind or are discovered; I encourage readers to send me their own favorites. In this business of being on the downside of life’s parabola, we all need comfort, companionship, and a marked-up map.

So what is my favorite poem about aging? I am tempted to cite Frost’s two-liner, written in his eighties:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.

But no. My choice (at least for today) is from A. E. Housman’s volume Last Poems. Housman published only two volumes of poetry in his lifetime – one at age thirty-seven (A Shropshire Lad) and Last Poems at age sixty-three. I own a first U.S. edition of the latter, and it is a treasured possession. On page 60 is the following poem:

XXXV
When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.

Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here’s the fair,
But where’s the lost young man?

– To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore
And long ’tis like to be.

If you are interested in poems about old age, you might also look at my post about last poems here.

Becoming and De-becoming

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been hobbled with a broken foot. I was carrying on quite well (perhaps too well) until I went to what I thought would be my last appointment with the orthopedist – looking forward to leaving the office with my cumbersome boot under my arm and destined for the trash bin. Instead, I was told that my foot hadn’t healed; we would have to give it at least another month and see what was happening. I did not take it well.

It is true that I have osteoporosis. I take calcium, eat a ton of yogurt, and exercise regularly, but my genes and my age have caught up with me. My body is breaking down and taking longer to repair itself. Eventually, of course, it will be beyond repair (some might say that it has already gotten to that point). In the course of my daily meditation, I repeat the five recollections (Upajjhatthana Sutta), the second of which is “I have a body which is subject to aging and decay; I am not beyond aging and decay.” I have been repeating these words for years, but somehow I don’t seem to want to believe them. None of us does. And yet, none of us is beyond aging and decay.

I have referenced Hermann Hesse’s Hymn to Old Age before, and I recommend it heartily. There was a critical article about Hesse in a recent New Yorker – even the title was negative: “Herman Hesse’s Arrested Development.” Hesse did try to catch the soul of the young, and this review emphasizes such works as Demian and Siddhartha, but neglects The Glass Bead Game – or, more accurately, points to it only in that it includes young men living celibate lives in perpetual school. Unfair, I think. Hesse wrote prose and poetry into his old age; The Glass Bead Game (particularly cited when Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize) was published when he was in his sixties and has much to say about being old and being young. The compendium of his words in and about old age which I reference above is a treasure.

In any case, Hesse has this to say about the process of “de-becoming” – a term I have come to appreciate:

For the task, desire and duty of youth is to become, and the task of the old man is to surrender himself or, as German mystics used to call it, ‘to de-become.’ One must first be a full person, a real personality, and one must have undergone the sufferings of this individualization before one can make the sacrifice of his personality.

And this, again, reminds me of Buddhism, where “becoming” is not always a good thing, while Nibbana or “extinction” of desire is indeed to be wished for. Bhikkhu Bodhi, a great Buddhist scholar and translator puts it like this:

In the end he must choose between the way that leads back into the world, to the round of becoming, and the way that leads out of the world, to Nibbana. And though this last course is extremely difficult and demanding, the voice of the Buddha speaks words of assurance confirming that it can be done, that it lies within man’s power to overcome all barriers and to triumph even over death itself.

Like it or not, as we age we are “de-becoming” what we used to be – body and mind. It is a sacrifice that we make whether we do so willingly or not. But perhaps the measure of a Hesse’s “full person” is that one can surrender willingly, even joyfully. I have not gotten there yet, but the forces of nature are working on me.

This week’s piece of fiction (“May 12, 2036”) is an exercise based on Jorge Borges’ short story “August 25, 1983,” wherein the great Argentinian writer imagines meeting himself in the future on his own deathbed. (He died in 1986, so was off by three years.) It is an intriguing story and a good model. Read my story if you like, but please do read the Borges. And try the exercise yourself.

The Sacred Book

Books are wonderful. I learned at a very young age that there is nothing better than a good book.   Books were the things, besides the body, that seemed to transcend every transition in life. I married, had children changed husbands, launched kids, moved houses – but there were always the books. A mystified coworker (who could not believe I spent precious vacation time going somewhere to talk about books) once gave me a sweatshirt that said: “So many books, so little time.” Yes, indeed.

I thought you could learn anything from a book. My father may have been the culprit on this. He built his first house  out of a book entitled Your Dream Home: How to Build it for Less than $3,500 – very popular with GI’s who came home after World War II. My father read the book and he built a house. He had some help and the house had its problems, but the book told him what he needed to know, and – more than that – it convinced him it was possible. In later years, he used books to teach himself to sail, play chess, and to build a fireplace with rocks that he picked up on the beach. I have a clear memory of all of us standing around the massive hearth, where misshapen rocks were held together with a little more concrete than you might see in more professional masonry, and holding our breaths as we waited to see whether it would draw smoke. And it did. Again, not perfectly, but well enough for the man who was so proud of it. You could learn anything out of books.

Over the years I used books for a variety of reasons. I wore out my Dr. Spock while raising children and I am on my second red Betty Crocker cookbook.  I learned to knit and crochet with books; I taught myself enough French to pass the second-language translation test for a graduate degree I used books to plan trips, bake bread, grow roses, sew curtains, buy cars, set up a retirement account, research almost anything I was interested in.

Of course, the obvious extrapolation from all of this textual success was that the same vehicles that taught me information and crafts, that delivered me safely where I wanted to go and told me if my child had the chicken pox, could also teach me how to live a happy, peaceful life, could free me from irrational fears (hypochondria, catastrophic thinking) and rational fears (death and global warming), could help me adjust to old age. So, I read great books, self-help books, spiritual memoirs, important works in psychology and philosophy and popular works of psychobabble. I ran through subjects and authors. Still I could not read myself into faith or peace or self-acceptance. But I kept trying. If the original story were true, it was just a matter of reading the right book, wasn’t it? And I had always thought there could not be enough books, but perhaps we should remember what the Preacher says (in Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible): “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.”

So my faith in books had some holes in it. It is clear, while I have learned much on a “technical” level, there is something that books have not been able to give me. I have wandered and thirsted through Borges’ labyrinthine libraries and gathered all of the likely candidates. And still there were no answers to many important questions. (See this week’s story, “By the Book,” for a tale of bibliomancy, the belief that books can indeed answer specific questions.)

I ran across this passage from the ever-pessimistic Schopenhauer not long ago (and it is worth thinking about pessimistic vs. optimistic attitudes toward life and where they land us, but that is for another time):

…much reading robs the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a spring under a continuous weight. If a man does not want to think, the safest plan is to take up a book directly he has a spare moment.

This practice accounts for the fact that learning makes most men more stupid and foolish than they are by nature, and prevents their writings from being a success; they remain, as Pope has said. “Forever reading, never to be read.”

“The safest plan is the pick up a book….” Books are no different from other experiences in many ways, but perhaps inferior in being at second hand. And if – like other experiences – we do not take time to process our reading, make it part of us, love, criticize, accept or reject what we read, books are, at last, simply amusements and diversions.   I will always love books, but I no longer believe they will save me. And I particularly cannot believe that the next one will be the jackpot – because there will always be a next one (ask the Preacher).

So, here might be the new story. There is a time in life to lean back and try to bring the reading and experience into synch – to enter into a Lady Slane (All Passion Spent) period of reflection. This may be one of the things old age is for. A moratorium on input and time for processing. I have not read every good book, but perhaps I have realized that I will never get to the end of good books. And if I keep trying to get to the end of them, I might never get to the bottom of them.

Dante’s Parabola

 

In this pleasing contrite wood-life which god allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not.

– Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days with a new baby, a lovely new baby. This special infant evoked lucid memories: adults making fools of themselves, the smells of spit-up and sweet baby skin, the rule of chaos in everything including time, and the utter vulnerability in which our species is born. But this time I noticed something else too. The little baby boy was staring very intently at one thing after another. Trying to make sense of the world.

Wordsworth claims that babies come into the world “trailing clouds of glory” and that former babies forget as the shabby realities of the world override the wonders of heaven. Be that as it may, surely babies are trying to make sense of what must seem like a confusing world. And we big folks work to convince them it’s a noble effort and that there is any sense to it all. We teach them labels for things (“Mama”) and, when they respond, we think they’ve really learned something. Maybe. In any case, babies often look intent and perplexed. This one certainly did.

In some cases it seemed the baby had figured things out – or been born knowing them. Our grandson certainly was able to communicate hunger or discomfort of any kind. And we watched him testing how much control he had over his own body – although whether he differentiated his body from his mother’s was unclear. Mostly our baby had a curious and puzzled look on his little face – and that got me thinking again about Dante’s parabola of human life.

If life is a parabola (related to the Greek word parabolē, which also gave us parable), it might be an interesting exercise to ponder the mathematical definition of a parabola, which is: “a curve where any point is an equal distance from a fixed point (interestingly call the focus) and a fixed line (called the directrix).” You can see a good diagram of this here.

In such a model, our lives would travel through time along what we would normally call the x-axis, which in this case is called the directrix – from birth to the left through death to the right. And we might note here that directrix is the archaic feminine form of the director. The directrix is the feminine axis of time. The three Fates were also women: Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the allotter, and Atropos, the unturnable.

So, if time (the directrix) is the horizontal axis, what is the vertical axis?   If Dante is right, it is the measure of perfection. And he says that it crests in the thirty-fourth year. Maybe true, at least in Dante’s day. Or might it be that with better sanitation and medical help, the peak might have migrated a little to the right? Does it matter? The point is that life’s trajectory goes up – and then goes down. But whatever we call it – growth, development, maturity – it goes through the same levels (think y-axis) going down as it went through going up.

Here’s another way to look at it: the distance from the focus is always changing, but there is always one point going up and one coming down where the distance is the same. A correspondence with an identical point on the y-axis. Birth with death, for instance. And certainly poets have been known to compare the process, the labor of being born with the labor of dying. Could there be other correspondences – menopause and adolescence, for example? Marriage with widowhood or divorce? Steady debilitation in old age with the steady development of children? Can we make comparisons? Can we take lessons from the first time we crossed these vertical markers and use them when we are on the same level on our way down? And what is that still point in the middle, the focus, from which all is measured?

One might think of the Buddha’s enlightenment. After trying to gain nirvana (or at least lasting peace and happiness) through severe ascetic practice – starving himself until he would touch his spine by putting his hand on his stomach – he suddenly remembered a moment from his childhood. As a young child, Siddhartha went to a ploughing festival with his father and was left to sit in “the cool shade of a rose-apple tree” – alone and safe and soon in a kind of self-induced rapture. It was not a rapture born of deprivation; it was a function of deep contentment. And in his adulthood he remembered and re-learned this lesson from his youth. He went back to learn something which taught him how to go forward. The rose-apple tree turned into the bodhi tree. An even better example might be Proust and the memory of the taste of a cookie he dipped in tea when a child. This memory at age fifty-one triggered the Remembrance of Things Past, a review of his life and a masterpiece. A taste and a memory. Parallel moments. Baudelaire said genius was “nothing more than childhood recovered at will.”   Think about that.

And think about the newest baby in our family trying to make sense of the world and more than a little perplexed by it all. And about the oldest member of our family who is also perplexed and getting more so every day. At the same horizontal point on the parabola perhaps, but headed in different directions.

I have attached a story, “Like Heaven,” about a woman at two points on her own parabola. I wrote this tale long ago when I was first thinking about the parabola parable. I am currently working on a novel where I pair diary entries over the course of a lifetime to explore whether the same issues come up as we rise along the arc of life and as we venture down the other side. It isn’t scientific and I’m not even sure the metaphor even holds, but, as I said, it is worth thinking about.