Tag: All Passion Spent

In Praise of Ordinary Times

My husband and I just got back from a week away from home and are slowly getting back to… normal.  As far as I am concerned, ordinary time is a precious commodity.  While the definitions of ordinary or normal sound pretty boring – “usual, typical, expected” –  I think normal life is undervalued, and I would prefer to define it in terms like “comfortable, relaxed, and reassuring.”  We have our rituals (Thursday is shopping and laundry, Tuesday and Saturday are hike days, Saturday is movie night), but the quiet anticipation of known events nurtures me far more than waiting in crowded airports or sleeping in strange beds.

I know that I am in the minority on this.  Advice columns tell us older folks to keep trying new things, exploring unfamiliar places, stretching our wings.  We have friends who spend half their lives on cruise ships, and others who spend as much time visiting one relative or another.  I would remind everyone that if you peeled back the travel industry’s propaganda, you could find documented risks to the elderly from air travel (blood clots, etc.), cruise ships (petri dishes of germs) and relocations of any kind.   How much more likely are we to fall trying to find a strange bathroom in the middle of the night?

There is a wonderful line in the movie, Mrs. Miniver.  Suffering the deprivations, apprehensions, and demands of life in wartime Britain, Mrs. Miniver (played flawlessly by Greer Garson) thinks back to what normal life was like, and promises herself to cherish it when and if it returns.  The movie was based on a series of newspaper columns by Jan Struther, and in one of them, the writer reflects on her feelings about returning home after a holiday:

Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays, but she always felt – and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over.  Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she would find herself unable to get back.

It is true that many old folks have a tendency toward the static, toward ritual, toward constancy.  Our culture works against this and has somewhat tainted what should be one of the major joys of old age.  By now, my readers know that one of my favorite novels is Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  Lady Slane, elderly and retired far from children, grandchildren, and obligations, finds life’s “last, supreme luxury” to be the time to sit and reflect, to live a life of one’s own making, to enjoy one’s own quiet habits.

Some Christian churches have periods of what are called “Ordinary Time.”  Generally, they are times that are not special because they are neither just before Christmas and Easter (Advent, Lent) nor just after (Epiphany, Eastertide).  Holy Week is coming up soon, with many churches having a dozen or more services; I’m sure the rectors sometimes long for ordinary time.

Ordinary Time brings me to T.S. Eliot and his poem “Ash Wednesday.”  Eliot seems to rebuff those exhortations that we “stretch” ourselves as we grow older.  Eliot spurns such advice, quoting Shakespeare in the process:

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

I sometimes mourn lost stamina, but I never mourn lost ambition or the impetus of “striving.”  I resist replacing forced imperatives of youth (those of employment and raising children) with self-imposed ones of old age (doing “what is expected of me” or “what is good for me”).  I want to define my own normality.  I want to stay at home and reflect like Lady Slane.  I am accused (often and even by loved ones) of being boring.  However, this agèd eagle is not bored.  And I am not afraid of ordinary times.  I am just happy to be at home among my books and chairs and pots and pans.  And my quiet thoughts.

For the value of ritual, you might try my story about Walden Pond, “Again and Again and Again.”  And, please be assured, if cruises and world tours make you happy, keep at it.  Just don’t expect me to envy you.

Bad Grandmothers and Wallowing in Old Age

Good grandmothers, society’s traditional grandmothers, have been defined by Hallmark: they bake cookies, love their grandchildren above all else, and are always available to babysit.  There are plenty of these good grandmothers in literature, but it is a welcome change to read about bad grandmothers.  Some bad grandmothers are selfish, some are just self-protective, but they all warm my heart.

First, the disclaimer.  I have eight grandchildren and I love them all.  But there are limits.  When they visit us, we put them (and their parents) in a hotel.  We refrain from birthday gift wish items of which we do not approve.  We almost never babysit.  On the other hand, we have traveled a lot over the years in order to have an opportunity to know them, for them to know us, and to watch them grow.

In our neighborhood, where there are many grandmothers, we sometimes take note of those grandmothers who stay home for Christmas instead of visiting progeny during the most hectic travel season.  Sometimes I am in that group and sometimes not.  We joke about it and call ourselves the “bad grandmas” as we sip our holiday eggnog, but it is humor tinged with guilt.  Aren’t we supposed to be hopelessly devoted to our offspring once and twice removed?  What is Christmas without greedy children hanging their stockings, crowded airports, and airlines losing your luggage?

But, back to fictitious grandmothers.  I just finished Margaret Drabble’s Witch of Exmoor.  You guessed it – the “witch” of the title is the grandmother, Frieda.  Frieda, who never had an excess of maternal feelings, has increased her distance from her offspring by buying a big, gothic, hard-to-get-to seaside house and then disappearing into it.  Her three adult children are angry, confused, and worried about their mother and about her will.  While Frieda does not have much in the way of traditional motherly love, she does appear to have money.  She published some successful books in her day, one of which is being turned into a movie if only they can find the author to sign the contract.

Frieda’s grandchildren see her disappearance as just another example of adults acting in inexplicable ways.  As Drabble explains, Frieda’s adult children have a more personal view:

…Frieda has turned the tables on them this time.  They are surrounded by friends who complain at length about the burden of visiting their aged relatives, their aunts with Alzheimer’s, their fathers grumpy with cancer or heart conditions or gout, their mothers whining about the treacheries of the past: none of them has a mother who does not want to see them.  It is against the natural order.

Frieda has made clear that she is fine on her own, and they pretty much leave her that way.  She is a delightful character, and it is a pity that she disappears in the middle of the book. (It turns out she has fallen off a cliff and drowned.) She has not stopped being a bad actor, though, as she leaves her fortune (not as large as her children suspected) to only one of four grandchildren.  Not only does this arouse outrage in the children, but it almost ruins the life of the one member of the family it was designed to benefit.  No one is happy.  (There is a lesson there.)

Frieda is a more malicious version of my very favorite “bad grandmother,” Lady Slane of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  After years as the wife of a statesman, Lady Slane becomes a widow.  She has had it with adult children, big houses, and social obligations.  She remembers a lovely little house she once saw from a train, goes back to find it, buys it and moves in with her maid (of course, she has a maid).  She tells her family to stay away unless invited.  And then she spends her time entertaining a small circle of elderly men and sitting in deep revery about the life she has led.  It is one of the most delightful books of old age.  A fairy tale of senescence.  As in the Witch of Exmoor, we read much about the consternation of the adult children.  Who does their mother think she is anyway?  Doesn’t she know she owes them something?  No, Lady Slane acknowledges no unpaid debts; she has raised her children and now she is done, thank you very much.  After offers from her daughter to visit frequently and bring the grandchildren, Lady Slane answers firmly:

“…that is another thing on which I have made up my mind.  You see, Carrie, I am going to be completely self-indulgent.  I am going to wallow in old age.  No grandchildren.  They are too young.  No great-grandchildren either; that would be worse.  I want no strenuous young people, who are not content with doing a thing, but must needs know why they do it…. I want no one around me except those who are nearer to their death than their birth.

“I am going to wallow in old age.”  I love that woman.

But let me say this.  In these days when so many grandparents end up raising grandchildren because they have no other choice, perhaps it is unfeeling to exalt selfish grandmothers.  I honor the sacrifice that is made when old people do not have the luxury of carving out some space for themselves at the end of their lives.  There are many such grandparents, and I commend them.  They may not be blessed, but they are a blessing.

I do not really want to emulate Frieda or Lady Slane, but they are fun to read about.  There is something heady, especially for older women, about protecting the space we have finally “earned” after a lifetime of careers and child-raising.  When I look back on my days of rushing from work to daycare to the kitchen to feed my brood, I don’t know how I did it.  I’m enjoying a rest and some space in which to contemplate what has been and what is.  Children read about superheroes, even though they cannot really emulate them.   I read about feisty old women who have thrown guilt out the window.  It is a vicarious pleasure.

I have written about grandmothers many times before – you might look at “The Age of Grandmothers” or “A Grandmother’s Despair.”

The Purpose of Old Age


I recently encountered an anthropological theory to explain why women evolved to live beyond their child-bearing years. It is called the “grandmother hypothesis” and posits that having post-menopausal women looking after the kids and tending the home fire worked to ensure the survival of the species. (I could find no such hypothesis about male longevity – but that is another subject.) This hypothesis made me think, as I often have, about what the purpose of old age might be. Or (and better), what purpose can we give it?

Literature gives us an array of meanings to choose from. The “grandmother hypothesis” reminds me of Willa Cather’s wonderful story “Old Mrs. Harris.” Mrs. Harris takes care of her daughter’s family, sleeps in a room off the kitchen, and comes from a culture where “every young married woman in good circumstances had an older woman in the house, a mother or mother-in-law or an old aunt, who managed the household economies and directed the help.” Mrs. Harris has no “help,” so she does it all herself, and her neighbors feel sorry for her, until they realize at the end that Mrs. Harris is doing exactly what she wants to do. While it is hard on the old bones, “the moment she heard the children running down the uncarpeted back stairs, she forgot to be low. Indeed, she ceased to be an individual, an old woman with aching feet; she became part of a group, became a relationship.” There is a special kinship between her and the young ones she tends so solicitously. She was “perfectly happy.

On the other hand, the elderly Lady Slane (in Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent) pushes her family away so that she will have time to reflect on the past and meditate on her life. Lady Slane characterizes such time as “life’s last supreme luxury.” Similarly there is an old custom in Buddhist societies of the old “going forth” into the forest or ashram to spend the last part of their lives in contemplation.

The very elderly speaker in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead concludes that old age is for forgiveness – and love: “ It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.” So, we live long enough to forgive others. I can tell you from experience that if you outlive the “others,” forgiveness is easier. And then there is Saint Benedict who says in the Prologue to his Rule that “our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.” So we live long to forgive and be forgiven.

In fact, old age in the Bible is often seen as a reward for faith and good living. Abraham and other Biblical patriarchs died at “a good old age” for a job well done. “If thou wilt walk in my ways to keep my statutes, and my commandments, as thy father David did walk, then I will lengthen thy days” (1 Kings 3:14), says God to Solomon. In this way, the purpose of old age is to reap one’s reward for work well done, and many retired people indeed look at their “golden years” this way. This attitude has been very lucrative for the cruise industry (until Covid).

Again and again, the Bible exhorts the old to find purpose in sharing their wisdom: “The glory of the young is their strength; the gray hair of experience is the splendor of the old” (Proverbs 20:29). Similarly, in his Republic, Plato (and he was surely talking about the grandfathers rather than the grandmothers) thought that those over fifty should turn to philosophy, but also take a turn at being an officer of the state, “regarding the task as not a fine thing but a necessity.” As I have noted elsewhere, we have many elderly leaders these days – but I am not always sure they come at it from the attitude Plato would have them adopt.

Emerson posited that the best use of leisure at the end of our lives would be to “run to the college or the scientific school which offered the best lectures.” Bolingbroke wrote an essay in the 18th century about the role of study in retirement, stating that the old mind “may continue still to improve and itself” as compensation for the decline of the body . But Seneca and Montaigne rather disdained the view of an old man as a pupil. Montaigne does, however, draw a distinction between studying and being instructed. “While it is creditable for every age to study, so it is not creditable for every age to be instructed. An old man learning his ABC is a disgraceful and absurd object; the young man must store up, the old man must use.”

In her book The Coming of Age (recommended if not always agreed with), Simone de Beauvoir says that the only way to make old age meaningful is to have projects:

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work. In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.

Yes. But. She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) that it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.” And we must consider these projects carefully; Carl Becker (Denial of Death) posits that many people engage in “immortality projects,” sometimes doing tremendous damage while trying to make sure that their name never dies.

Carl Jung, who uses the metaphor of times of day in his essay on “The Stages of Life,” says that each stage has its own program and the purpose of the evening of old age is to be reflective, “preoccupied with himself.” He agrees with the anthropologist that there must be a meaning to our longevity. “A human being would certainly not grow to be 70 or 80 years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.” And he is firm that we should not try to be young. It is as ridiculous for us to take on the goals of youth as it would be for youth to spend its time reflecting on its death.

Finding a purpose in old age is clearly an individual quest – or it should be. If we take our motivations from internet ads, glossy content, or paperback advice, there will be nothing individual about it. I have no answers for you, but leave you with the good advice of Seneca:

It is disgraceful for an old man or one in sight of old age to be wise by the book. “Zeno said this.” What do you say?… All those men who never create but lurk as interpreters under the shadow of another are lacking, I believe, in independence of spirit.

If you want to think about the grandmother hypothesis some more, you might try my story “Common Enemy.” The title comes from Sam Levenson: “The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.” Of course, no one who is not old enough to be a grandparent will have any idea who Sam Levenson was or why this is funny.

Turning Things Upside Down in Old Age

Young people look forward – forward to the day when they can carry a cell phone, drive, leave home, marry, have children. There is a long and hopeful future ahead of them. On the other hand (according to Victor Hugo), elders live in “a cottage with a balcony on the edge of the abyss.”

Old peoples’ future is not nearly so long as their past, so they tend to look backwards – a reversal that happens sometime in our late sixties (in my opinion). Events, creeping mortality, and the mirror all jostle our perspective until it… flips. From that point, it appears that we are looking at the world from a different angle than other, younger people. One is reminded of Lewis Carroll’s poem:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”

Old people may be forever standing on their heads. This is not such a bad thing. G.K. Chesterton talks about the value of seeing the world upside down (literally):

If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging…. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its [the town of Assisi’s] walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact.

Needless to say, the turning of the world upside down more or less voids the idea of progress. I have talked about progress elsewhere, but it is worth noting again that after the midpoint of life (the peak of Dante’s parabola), the human body is not progressing; the modern aging person lives with the myth of progress while living… the opposite.
But there is hope. Dante describes an upside down world in his Inferno – one goes down only to come out on the other side:

You were there as long as I climbed downward.
When I turned myself round you passed the point
To which all weight on every side pulls down.

And now you come under the hemisphere
Opposite that which domes the vast dry land:
There, beneath its pinnacle of sky… (Canto XXXIV)

Dante and Virgil, of course, emerge in Purgatory, which is not yet heaven (but is far nicer than hell). Remember when you were very young and thought you could dig a hole to China? If you could have done so, you would have tunneled down to the center of the earth and then started going… up. There are also the mythological upside-down trees of the Bhagavad Gita and Norse sagas.

This ability to look back is a blessing of old age. In Mrs. Dalloway, we find this passage:

The compensation of growing old…was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

And in All Passion Spent, Lady Slane calls “looking back on the girl she had once been” as the “last, supreme luxury…. She could lie back against death and examine life.” Old age has its benefits.

And where do we old people come out in our upside-down world? Hopefully, with a new perspective. I love to hike and I have often noted that when going the opposite way I usually travel on a loop, it almost seems like a different path! In retrospect, we may see events in our lives from the standpoint of how they came out rather than what the intention was. We are more likely to forgive mistakes (our own and others – for who could bear the past without forgiveness?) and learn the lessons we missed in our initial shame and regret. From this new standpoint, we also realize that what we thought was good fortune was often disaster in disguise. All this makes us less sure that we know all the answers, but perhaps more sure about what the important questions are. Maybe we are on Hugo’s porch hanging over the abyss, but – nevertheless – we are enjoying the long view down.

And it is just not our personal story; we have lived long enough to see changes in our world. Our generation has seen technology emerge around us and then submerge us all. We have seen what is commonly called progress, but, in retrospect, we are not entirely sure how progress should be defined.

This week’s story, “Two New Apps,” is about technology and love and truth. Enjoy.

 

Lists: Reading About Old Age

Over the next few weeks, I am going to post some lists of books, articles, poems, and other works about old age that I have found helpful (and fascinating) in trying to comprehend old age. I am interested in understanding both the evolution of how we regard old age and the variety of individual stances regarding senescence. I compiled these lists (sometimes with assistance) for a variety of purposes: research for my dissertation on aspects of the literature of old age (which particularly explored changes engendered by the Western Enlightenment project), reading lists for Great Books and senior groups, reminders of works I would like to read or re-read. There are texts that I have discovered and loved which have old people as predominant characters, and works that were written by fairly old people. There is a mixture of genre in these lists: fiction and non-fiction, classics and science fiction, plays, poems, and essays. I even include some works of art and musical compositions – think of Beethoven’s late quartets!

There are, of course, some good anthologies of works about old age. There is, for example, Helen Nearing’s Light on Aging and Dying. If you are of my generation and remember fondly Helen and Scott Nearing’s book on Living the Good Life, you might also enjoy her book about Scott’s death, Loving and Leaving the Good Life. Wayne Booth compiled a wonderful anthology with commentary entitled The Art of Growing Older: Writers on Living and Aging. Harold Bloom gathered his favorite “last poems” in 2010, in a rich volume entitled Till I End My Song. Bloom’s musings are almost as good as the poems. And there is the wonderful Helen Luke’s meditations on literature and late life in Old Age: Journey into Simplicity. But these compendiums are only a start.

I also seek out works by older authors. I have been very young, but I have never been very old (getting there fast). I want to know what those ahead of us have to tell. For example, I just finished (and would highly recommend) Amos Oz’s Judas, which he wrote in his mid-seventies and wherein one of the principal characters is also of that age. I will put together such a list of books by old authors about… living while old.

I have my favorites – most of which I have noted here before. There is Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, about the old gentlewoman (Lady Slane), whom I would like to be in my extreme old age. There are the poems of the old ages of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Thomas Hardy. There are the journal entries of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s old age. We need not go through it alone.

I am posting today the extensive bibliography for the dissertation I finished a number of years ago, which was entitled “Foreigners in Their Own Country”: The Struldbruggs and the Changing Language of Aging in Swift’s World. It is an interesting list because it spans the history of Western literature on aging, up to and including the era of Jonathan Swift. If you have not read (or do not remember) the Struldbrugg section of Gulliver’s Travels, please go back and find it! (It’s in Book 3.) If you read Gulliver when you were young, you probably will react a little differently now to this episode about the extremely old. On this list I would especially recommend the works from the Greek and Roman world and the late Middle Ages/Early Renaissance. Of particular note would be Cicero’s “On Old Age,” Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. For a look at some of the earliest books on living a long life, one could take a peek at Cornaro’s Art of Living Long or Cheynes, Essay of Health and Long Life. Luigi Cornaro died at the age of 100 in the sixteenth century; Cheyne was a physician in the early eighteenth century with an eager audience for advice on longevity.

I have also posted the abstract from my dissertation so you can see the territory I was exploring. When I researched and wrote it, I became convinced that the Enlightenment and western faith in science changed the way we look at the cycles of life; I have not significantly altered my opinion. (More on that later.) And I closely reviewed much material at that time. And yet, as I grow older, there is still much that surprises me about senescence, both individually and culturally. These lists are just a way to put material out there for others exploring this new (old) territory. Next time, I will post some lists for book groups (for seniors and potential seniors) and talk about my experience in that regard.