Tag: Beethoven

Late Style – Two Approaches to Aging

There are basically two approaches to aging.  The first seeks a deep acceptance of the changes wrought by decay and death; the other prizes fighting until the end.  I think you know which camp I am in, but I have had reason to examine this topic again recently, both in relation to myself and to the larger world.

In his posthumous book, On Late Style, Edward Said differentiates between two artistic approaches at the end of creative lives.  He proposes that one group of aging literary and musical artists reflects “a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of miraculous transformation of common reality;” he puts the Shakespeare of the late romances and the Sophocles of Oedipus at Colonus in this category.  However, Said is more interested in those creative minds that struggle with the “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction” of “age and ill health.”  He references Beethoven (I disagree with him on this) and Ibsen as artists who “fight until the end.”  One might think of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”  There is an article in last week’s NYTimes magazine written by a woman whose father rushed through his last months and last dime trying every new treatment, leaving no chance to say goodbye or to experience the end of his life.

In the same year (2006) that Said’s book was published, David Galenson published a classic account of old age and genius.  Old Masters and Young Geniuses divides artists into conceptual geniuses who do innovative work early, and experimentalists, whose best work is the product of the slow accretion of learning, experience, and reflection, and often occurs in the later years.

If we continue to struggle, when will we have time for the reflection and “the slow accretion of learning”?  Do we really want to heed Dylan Thomas in his exhortation to combat the inevitable?  Do we want the screaming and resistant death of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich, the bitter death of Eliot’s Peter Featherstone – or the serene death of Alcott’s Beth March, Cather’s Archbishop?  I know which one I would choose.

But even if we choose a peaceful old age, it is not easy in our culture.  Capitalism sees no profit in a serene old age.  There is more money in sending old folks out on pilgrimages to the fountain of youth – hawking cosmetics, plastic surgery, cruises, lifestyle “enhancements.”  In theory, technology should be the best friend of elders, allowing them to shop, listen to music, order books from the library – even when driving is no longer possible.  However, the internet is a capitalist production these days and even what it is good in it (think Wikipedia) has been co-opted to feed the AI engines.

As usual, we can be our own worst enemy.  New retirees often feel the need to excel at something to get back the respect (situational though it might have been) that they had in the office.  They want to write their first book and they want it to be a bestseller.  They take up art and enter juried shows with their first watercolors.  That is all fine if you can step back and realize what is going on.  I had a friend who fell into this pit so often that she posted a reminder on the top of her computer screen: “You’ve already done that.”

I have recently been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han.  It is the first of his books that I have read, but it won’t be the last.  I recommend this slim volume.  I don’t always think that Han is right, but he definitely gets me thinking.  In any case, he talks about the old systems of narrative (religious stories, heroic sagas, legends) with endings.  Capitalism wants no closure – there is always another way to spend your money.  A sense of endings gives way to what Han calls the “endless conjunction [and].” Capitalism thinks we always need one more thing.  Rituals are stopping places:

Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life.  They are forms of closure.  Without them, we slip through.  Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults.  The discontinuity of autonomous time gives way to the continuity of production and consumption.

I am not trying to tell anyone how to handle their own old age, but I am cautioning all of us to think about it consciously.  As one who plowed through her childhood and young adulthood with more energy than consciousness, I know that I want to carefully consider how to spend the time left to me.  It is hard to battle the latest cruise ad, bestseller list, fashion, or medical fad.  I have written both a story and a blog about someone who determined on “nothing new” in their old age.  No reading new books, no going new places, replacement purchases only.  It is not a prescription for life, but it is a worthwhile exercise.  (Ann Patchett tried it and wrote about the results here.)  But, again, there are at least two ways to spend our waning days.  Let’s at least choose somewhat deliberately.

Even if we believe in wringing the last drop out of life, we should consider how to do that.  I think of Thoreau:

…nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden)

Lastly, it often seems like our world, our culture, is in its old age, even in its death throes.  And it is fighting against it, although not in any logical way.  It is fighting for oil, for supreme intelligence, for control, for the way it used to be – and the fires rage, the coral dies, and there is constant action but no real progress, and surely no peace.  Just a thought.

 

 

 

 

Chips from the Hanging Spar – Melville’s Last Works

Melville would seem to have had a fairly miserable old age, ending with his death of cardiac failure at the age of 72.  No wonder his heart gave out.  After an initial success with books about sailing in the South Seas (Typee, Omoo, among others), Melville struck out with Moby-Dick (the greatest American novel that the NYTimes misspelled the title of in his obituary) and then again with Pierre (“Herman Melville Crazy” read a headline).  At the age of 38, he seemed to be washed up.  His last full novel, The Confidence-Man, didn’t help his reputation.  It is, however, a novel worth reading and a book of our time, of illusion and disillusion.  Not long ago, Philip Roth said that “the relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ ”

The characters in Melville’s novel are either scammers or those who are just asking to be scammed.  It asks the brilliant question as to why we are so prone to believe what we want to believe and not to look for the truth.  One of the most interesting passages in this regard involves an old person and is worth quoting here.  A “confidence man” is talking to a man from Missouri (no one seems to have names) about the conning of an old man on the steamer they all are traveling on.  The Missourian has just finished telling the old sick man that he shouldn’t trust in the natural remedies sold to him by the doctor/con man and the con man argues that it would be “pitiless” to take away the old man’s hope:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you [the old man].  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

Truth is too hard to bear in old age – and so we turn to religion, medicine, what? One might think of Jung’s call for religion as a source of “psychic hygiene” for one approaching death.  But of more interest here is Melville’s disillusionment with life.  There is none of that in Moby-Dick.  While there is the evil of Ahab, Moby-Dick is a tale of the cooperative effort of a shipload of very different men who work together to a common end.  Something has changed for Melville with time and age.  The taste of life has gone sour. 

But this was not Melville’s final statement.  I prefer to think of Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd as his last judgment on life.  There is still disillusionment, but there is also handsome, honest, innocent Billy.  Billy Budd has been called “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance” of life as it is (Fogle).  It has also been called a work of tragic irony.  I prefer to think that, after being buffeted about for decades, Melville shows us he remembers innocence, he remembers Eden.  And he has accepted that it is inevitably lost.  One thinks of Beethoven’s inscription to the last movement of one of his last works (String Quartet Opus 135): “The Difficult Decision.”  Over the notes he wrote the question, “Must it be?”  He then responds to himself as the movement lightens and quickens: “It must be.”

In Melville’s story, Billy must be hung even though his action was provoked by a psychopath and the whole crew is on his side.  But in the British Navy one could not get away with flaunting the rules.  It would be bad for discipline.

Melville flaunted the rules and paid the price in many ways.  I have no idea whether he had regrets in his old age, but it seems he was not particularly content.  In 1850, he had written an enthusiastic piece about Hawthorne (whom he had yet to meet), and in it he talked about how great writers did not avoid difficult topics.  And he says that “he who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.  Failure is the true test of greatness.”  Melville himself was about to be tested.

He wrote the piece about Hawthorne in 1850, while he was working on Moby-Dick.  That great novel was published in 1851 to mediocre (at best) reviews.  In 1852, he published Pierre, which induced reviewers to doubt his sanity.  The Confidence Man  – Melville’s last full novel – was published in 1857 when Melville was only 38.  Eventually unable to sustain himself as an author, he took a job as a customs inspector in 1866 and worked at the New York Customs House for 19 years.  And then he started Billy Budd, which was published many years after his death.

According to the biographers, Melville entered a long silence at the end of his life.  Some thought he was crazy; but he was writing Billy Budd and, perhaps, came to the conclusion that we are all crazy and had to be to live this absurd life.

Melville had early success, which dwindled into an undeserved neglect and failure in his old age.  It happens.  We all have things (or marriages or children) which did not turn out as we hoped.  The question is what we do with all of that in our old age.  I wish I could tell Melville how much I love Moby-Dick; how well he read human nature in The Confidence Man, and how Billy Budd is one of the grandest of tragedies.

 In Billy Budd, the spar that Billy is hung on turns into a holy relic of sorts, with sailors chipping off bits surreptitiously because they know that there died a noble soul.  I have no chips of the spar or the true cross, but I have Melville’s books.

 If you are interested in thinking about what to do with a sense of failure in old age, you might look at my stories “A Balm in Gilead” or “A Perfect Ending.”  Or you might look at an earlier post, A Dimished Thing?.