Tag: Book review

“Our Elders Are Books”

I recently read Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth – a memoir of sorts about his removal to a small homestead in Ireland to practice self-sufficiency and environmental integrity, and perhaps to escape the culture that he has become increasingly disaffected with.  Part of that culture, he realizes, is the written word, the words he reads and the words he writes.  Words are the “savage gods” referred to in the title.  “I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.”  Much of the book is a discussion of writing and words; we forget that they are only symbols; misplaced emphasis on words pulls us away from a direct connection with the world. 

All this was very interesting, but it was his quote from Gary Snyder that really got my attention:  “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”  What does this mean?  Does it mean that our books are our shamans, priests, wise men?  It surely discounts personal experience, oral history, and common sense.  And, if it’s true, it surely discounts the elders.  I had trouble finding the exact citation from Snyder when I went to look for the source, but I did find this in Snyder’s essay “Tawny Grammar”: “In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”  Think about that.

Before a general level of literacy, experience had real and appreciated value.  Elders had knowledge about the best time to plant the crops, best way to make a mattress, best chance to find a wife.  They were the repository of the history of a family, a district, a craft, a people.  Even when their bodies started to fail, they could provide expertise and counsel that was valued. In early (non-literate) cultures, the memory of the elders was a critical asset, a form of social capital. And it was largely the written word that changed this. 

What did an increase in literacy mean for the elderly?  It might have meant that other, often younger, members of the household – the children and grandchildren – could read the new broadsides and chapbooks that their elders could not decipher.  One could imagine that, rather than tales told around the hearth by the oldest member of the group (the member with the longest memory and the most to “tell”), the literate were now reading to the illiterate. For these reasons, communal value increased for someone who could read to the group or could manage the new insistence on written legal documents – usually the junior members of the group.  One might think about how we rely on the young to fix our computers or set up our smart TVs.

Is it good or bad that the books are our elders?  Not so good for the elders and maybe not always so good for the readers.  In many ways, books are an easy out for all of us.  We think we have the answers in our hand.  In the Bible, the beleaguered and bewildered Job says that he wishes that “mine adversary had written a book” – meaning that he would then be able to understand, anticipate, and solve his problems if he only had a book to tell him what he needed to know.  We all think the right book can solve our problems.

I am particularly guilty in this regard; the answer is always going to be in the next book.  I inherited this from my father, who was adamant that everything that one needed to know could be found in a book.   Sometimes though, the nuances are more subtle than words.  He once built a stone fireplace with plans from a book – and he was completely confounded when it didn’t draw well and smoked up the room.  An old chimney sweep was able to tell him where he went wrong – but a little too late.

There are many differences between advice from books and advice from elders.  There is the nuance and the dialectic of human interaction.  There is the sharing of emotion from one who is struggling and one who has put the struggles of youth and doing behind them.  Human beings can provide counsel for the heart that supplements the advice for the work of the hands or the brain.  And the testimony of the old people – especially when they speak of their youth – reminds people of all ages that, with good fortune, we will all be old some day and we might look to our elders for models.  Blake put it this way in “The Ecchoing Green”:

Old John, with white hair 

Does laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green.’

Besides their advice and their memories, old folks like Old John provide models for aging to all who come in contact with them.

And now we are taking another step away from any such real interaction between generations with the advent of AI.  There was a story on the front page of the Sunday NYTimes last week about an elderly woman who gets an AI companion.  She shares her life, her stories, with the glowing machine.  This may be comforting to her – and I hope it is – but it makes me sad.  The machine can respond to her, help her organize her day, notify the proper people if she is ill, but it is a machine, an algorithm, a pricey way for families and communities to absolve some of their guilt for not being there.

Lent began this week.  With my husband recovering and a steady roster of doctors and therapists necessitating a complete change in all of our routines, we are experiencing our own kind of Lent, our own kind of renunciation.  We will learn in the process, and we might even turn to books for help and counsel.  But the kind of change in heart that such upheavals require are not fully relieved by the written word; the reassurance of those that went before is in facial expressions and kind listening.  AI may be able to listen, but it cannot wince or squeeze our hands in the appropriate places.  Neither can books.  Both books and AI minimize the value of individual experience, knowledge and judgment.  We have seen the results of this in recent years.   Not only are we losing the repository held by our elders, but we are losing confidence in our own experience and judgment and placing it in the hands of publishers, AI developers, content providers, media moguls, and spin doctors.  I love books and I don’t hate technology – but neither of those things is going to get us out of our current political dilemma or help me realign my world. 

I have written about books and AI in relation to old folks before. You could try my earlier blogs, Here Be Dragons or Charlotte Bronte, Luddites, and AI on artificial intelligence. On reading, you could look at Teach Your Children Well or Some (Unspoken) Thoughts About Reading Aloud. For a short story about what one generation has to offer another, you might look a “Any Help She Can Get.”

Some (New) Mysteries of Old Age

I recently read two new murder mysteries involving old people sleuthing – the plots were amazingly similar, but the attitude was quite different.  It is worth considering the portrayal of old age in one of my favorite genres.

The two murder mysteries both concern the death of elderly people – intended and unintended.  In The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann, a self-made community of elders provides euthanasia services for one of their members, by (as she requested) shooting her when she wasn’t expecting it.  The plan goes astray when someone else gets the gun and muddies the waters by shooting unintended victims.  Since the gun belongs to one of their own, the senior community has to solve the crime before they are suspected – and they have to do it without admitting to their own involvement in the first death.  A little complicated, but it is made more so by the fact that almost all the older characters are… muddled.  Now a lot of us are muddled on occasion, but such confusion seems to define these characters – who are, to be sure, muddled in a variety of ways. In one scene the oldsters are about to go into the funeral of one of the victims, when one of them refuses to go in because they are wearing hats, and she does not have one.  “Nobody wanted to give up their hat, so they continued to stand around the taxi at a loss.”  The poor soul ends up wearing a tea cozy for a hat.  Cute, somewhat funny, but not much of a compliment to the characters.

In Leonie Swann’s previous mystery, which I liked very much, the detectives were a herd of very bright and interesting sheep – for the most part.  Some were – well – stupid and silly, but I took no offense when Swann portrayed foolish sheep.  She should have stuck to animals. Please note that The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp got marvelous reviews, so I am in the minority on this.  And it is a good story, a good read, and while I do not have any trouble acknowledging the quirks of elders, I do object when realism tips into caricature.

Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die is the fourth and latest installment in the “Thursday Murder Club” series.  Again, we have a carefully planned act of euthanasia, but it is a side plot and there is a careful line drawn between the undesired deaths and the desired one. Osman’s seniors are so skillful, that they have the local police working for them, and while they have their quirks, they are not strictly old folk quirks.  And yet, as one of the characters puts it, they work with the “urgency of old age.” The most touching thing is the camaraderie among them; they help each other out in mechanical and emotional ways and show the very best of what an elderly community can be – discounting the murders, of course.

One point here about the old in both of these novels – they must depend on one another.  When their children appear on site, things deteriorate badly.  Grandchildren are fine if they are young and not in the company of their parents.  But there is a consistent despair in relying on the next generation, and greater comfort in people that understand the joy and anguish of getting old.  Both authors sympathetically explore the issue of euthanasia, although Osman gives us the more realistic and rounded view of the complexity of end-of-life decisions.

But back to my review of these mysteries.  My opinion here is not that either of these mysteries is bad; but there is a difference between having protagonists who happen to be old and spinning your plot around the quirks of bumbling elders.  I do not mind oldsters in books who have senior moments or balance problems; I object to portraying these realities as silly.

Neither of these authors is aged; Swann is in her forties and Osman is in his early fifties.  Many mystery writers, like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, wrote well into their eighties, and for a model of senior detectives, no one can beat Miss Marple.

I have written very few mystery stories, and none involving the elderly, but if you have my predilection for the unsolved problem, you might enjoy “Essentials” or “No Change Orders.”