Tag: books

Three Stories About Old People with Regrets

I read a couple of books and watched a movie lately about old people at the end of their lives who are trying to deal with a major regret.  I would recommend these stories highly – any of them are perfect for a cold winter’s evening.  The books are The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, and the movie is The Great Escaper (on Amazon). I’ll try to talk about these stories without spoiling the endings – and, in these cases, the endings are true endings.  They are all about elders trying to deal with regrets, mistakes, and profound guilt.  It seems to me that this is a prevalent and profound problem of old age; in old age we have a lot of time to think and a tendency to look back.  If you are exempt from major regrets, you are privileged indeed.  I surely have moments in my past that I regret, that I am still trying to deal with, and which flare up from the embers of my memories.  What to do with them?

Religion or AA might tell us that we need to atone, or, at least, apologize.  But the older we are the more likely it is that the actions are long buried along with many of the participants.  How do we deal with those regrets, guilts?  Make a deathbed confession?  Ask a priest or someone else we trust to absolve us?  Must we realize, finally, that they were the product of where we were at the time and chalk it up to karma – and assume we will pay or have paid for our transgressions one way or another?  I was recently thinking of Dryden’s riff on Horace – “Happy the Man” – but that speaker is “secure within” and satisfied that he has “had his hour.”  What if we regret the hour?  And how do we adjust the scales so everything comes out alright?  As the clerk at the Marigold Hotel reiterates, “Everything will be alright in the end, so if it is not alright, it is not the end.”

Each of these three stories concern an older person who sincerely regrets something in their past.  And, in at least two of the cases, they surely have committed (or given tacit approval to) a grievous act.  The third case is situational, where a soldier does what he has to do, but there are dire consequences.  All of these incidents happened many years ago, but shadow the rest of the lives of these characters. What to do?  What can be done?

Let me tell you how the characters in these stories deal with it.  The protagonist in The Correspondent, Sybil, (unsurprisingly) writes letters, letters she sends and letters she does not send.  Besides having mortality breathing down her back, she is dealing with the imminent loss of her sight.  This is a woman who is deeply attached to the written word in all its forms, and it is the word that keeps her going.  Sybil writes to famous people (like Joan Didion), some of whom even write back.  She writes to her children, old friends, and herself.  She writes to living people and dead people and, in the process, she slowly seems to sort things out.  It will make you mourn the lost art of letter writing; it will make you want to write letters.  Or a journal.  Do it.

Ian McEwan waited until he was in his mid-seventies to write one of his finest books.  Earlier in his life, of course, he wrote the classic Atonement, about guilt and absolution.  In Atonement, a woman spends a lifetime trying, at least partially by writing, to make sense of a youthful mistake.  In What We Can Know, there is an academic mystery being researched in the far future.  Where is the lost poem, the renowned corona of which there was only one copy?  The book sets itself up as a literary mystery, which is resolved by the “last testament” of the poet’s elderly wife – she has produced one piece of writing and destroyed another, in revenge and atonement.  The novel asks questions about the words and deeds we leave behind; the title morphs from What We Can Know to “what can we know?” This story got me thinking (again) about what to do with all my old journals.

(Incidentally, the novel looks backward, but it is framed in a time period a hundred years hence, and we get this caution from our narrator:  “I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them in the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.  Do not trust the keyboard and screen.  If you do, we’ll know everything.” Fair warning.)

The Great Escaper stars the very old Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson.  Jackson died shortly after the film was made.  Both stars were closing in on ninety when the filming was done, which was only appropriate as the story is about a 90-year-old man.  I have to admit that at first it is very hard to watch those very old bodies – much older than we usually see on the screen – but the film soon sweeps you away with both the love between the two oldsters and the heroic effort that Bernie makes to understand and atone for his actions at the beach at Normandy seventy years before. When I was young, I would not have believed someone could be so tormented by things that they did seven decades ago; now I know better.   And when Bernie gets to the 70th commemoration of the Normandy invasion, he finds that he is not the only one who is abashed to be treated as a hero when he feels like a traitor.  But, back on the beach and at the military cemetery, he faces his demons.  Those demons might not be completely vanquished, but they are at least acknowledged and shared.

These stories do not display miraculous cures for our trespasses; even if our sins are forgiven, we still cannot ever forget them.  Sybil, the letter-writer in The Correspondent, has made a pen pal of Joan Didion, and she quotes her: “What I have made for myself is personal, but it is not exactly peace.”  Stephen Crane put it more crudely: “But I like it/Because it is bitter, /And because it is my heart.”  Our regrets are personal, they are bitter, but when we at least acknowledge them, we might be able to accept them as part of who we are.

I’ll end with one of my favorite poems, “The Ideal,” by Paul Fenton.

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

For one of my stories about regret, you might try “Shrove Tuesday.“

Old People as Their Own Best Teachers?

In my random reading this morning I ran across this quote from Yeats: “When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.”  The sentiment reminds me of James’ Beast in the Jungle – we spend life in preparation for some event, some epiphany, some revelation.

Bibliophiles like me have read a lot of books by the time they get old.  They might not remember all of them, but they have spent vast swaths of their lives living in a state of immersion in the reading experience.  As Ecclesiastes says, “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”  And now, like the preacher at the end of Ecclesiastes, I am old and am only too aware of the “weariness of the flesh.”   It seems to me that there should be a time to stop reading and to try to make sense of what we have read, what we have learned.  Montaigne wonders when the old man will stop learning and be wise in what he has learned, and it seems to me that his own essays were an attempt to do just that.

But it is hard to give up.  The internet assures me that this one new book will explain things to me once and for all.  Or that the latest novel will change the way I think of the world, or I must read a newly translated book that was never-before available in English.  And it is not just the push-marketing of Amazon and the like; when I look something up on Wiki or do a Google search, I am presented with lists of books that will elucidate the very subject which I am interested in – and I can have an electronic version of said book within seconds. And then there are the prize-winning books, the best seller lists, the books I keep seeing people walking around with.  Surely, of the “making many books there is no end.”

But even without our buying books, myriads of books are available to us.  Libraries have a far vaster array of offerings than they used to have, as they pool their resources and make what we used to call inter-library loans so easy.  Anything we want is available one way or another – anything we want except the answers that will enable us to stop looking.

One of my early blogs (“Possessing That Which Was Mine”) was about a vow I made to read nothing new – to go back and reread what I had read for a second time and to take time to process what I had learned.  That did not last long.  After a few months, someone recommended something that “I absolutely had to read,” and I was off.

In addition, I have cabinets full of daily journals that go back 21 years, and sporadic journal entries and autobiographical fragments going back to my childhood.  I have manuscripts of novels and short stories that I have been meaning to edit for years, but never do.  I clearly like writing more than I like revision. just as I like reading a new book better than really taking time to absorb an old one.  I am getting to an age at which I either need to use this material or recycle it.  Do I really want my children to read my journals? (Not that they would have any interest.)

There are various ways to handle such material.  I have a friend who, cleaning out his own artwork, offered to send all his friends a piece.  I happily accepted.  Other friends have reduced their written work to one flash drive that they can slip in their pocket and jettison before death if they don’t want their heirs pouring through the story of their lives.

But I am not ready to jettison my precious words without review.  So, I have decided to do a moderated version of Swedish death cleaning with the recorded experiences and ideas in my life.  First of all, I am going to try to stick to re-reading rather than reading.  For light reading (which for me means mostly mysteries), having long forgotten the “who-done-it” for novels I read over thirty years ago, I have the joys of Ngaio Marsh, Amandra Cross, and Agatha Christie to look forward to again.  For more serious reading, I will start with the novels that have meant the most to me over the years, probably first going back to Herman Hesse, Jorge Borges, and George Eliot.  For non-fiction, I am currently rereading David Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, and will soon move on to Thoreau and Montaigne.

And as for my manuscripts, about ten years ago I drafted a novel (The Order of the Stock Farm Jesus – excerpt here) about an old woman who encounters a young girl who, for reasons of her own, wants to collaborate on writing a list of rules for life.  What are the rules you live by?  What is the difference between what you do and what you think you should do?  Writing this novel was a good exercise then, but ten years later it seems an even better one.  In conjunction with that project, I will start reading my own voluminous journals (young to old) to see what the lessons of my life were.  What can I teach myself?  Have I learned anything?  Can I put what I have learned into words?  More importantly, have I internalized these learnings and started to act accordingly? (Can you teach an old dog new tricks?)

Virginia Woolf kept journals, and – although she never got very old – said that she wrote precisely so that her older self could read her younger self: “Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920, will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost…”  Marion Milner (A Life of One’s Own) started keeping journals in a desperate attempt to find out what it was in life that made her really happy.  Thoreau went to Walden and kept a journal to “front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”  I’ll let you know how my project goes, and – if you have attempted anything similar – please tell me about it!

I have written before on keeping journals in old age, “Journaling in Old Age.”  It’s not too late!  I didn’t start doing it seriously until I was 53, but I am so glad I did.  The benefits accrue not just in having a record, but in the very process of sorting out your thoughts every day, at transferring your experiences into words.  Try it.

If you have been journaling, you might look at an old blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for ideas about how to mine your own words for life lessons.  You might also look at my fanciful short story, “Nothing New.”

How Do You “Mask Despair”? How Do You Handle a “November of the Soul”?

As my regular readers know, I have been mulling over Moby-Dick after a recent re-reading.  (Re-reading is highly recommended; see my blog here.)  In the very beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tells us that when he is starting to despair, when he feels the “November of the soul,” he goes to sea.  Ishmael thinks that this is a universal solution, and the reason that all over “Manhattoes” (Manhattan) people in despair migrate to the shore, to the docks, and gaze upon the ocean: “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”  The ocean does help me when I am in the doldrums.   Perhaps it is the immensity and power of the ocean in relation to the paltriness of one human life.  I recently had a welcome dose of the sea, but it is not readily available to us all and is only a temporary antidote.

Thoreau reminds us that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” so we know we are not alone.  There are others, many others, in the clutches of despair.  Old age may or may not be more liable to this condition, but it definitely provides less distraction from our own minds.  In our younger days, when we had jobs, children, obligations and a hectic schedule all around, there was still despair, but perhaps little time to consider it.  Now, it descends during quiet late afternoons and the wee hours of the morning.  And, lately, every time we turn on the news.

The ocean helps, but so does nature in all its forms.  Wendell Berry finds relief (not alleviation) from despair in wild things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

Berry finds “grace,” but only “for a time.”

There are other ways, additional ways, that we handle despair.  Niall Williams’ latest novel, Time of the Child, is about an older doctor who has lost his wife and also lost his faith.  Yet Doctor Troy attends mass, in an effort to ward off despair and order his life with the comfort of a schedule, a routine:

The doctor attended Mass, but without devotion.  After his wife Regina was taken by a cancer he hadn’t seen coming, he had lost the relic of faith he once had.  To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more or less than how to get through another day.

Oh, the things that we do to “mask despair”!  Is this perhaps the reason that we old people cling to habits, our houses, our ways of life? Rituals, habits, and repetitions paper over despair.  In a world and a body that are failing us, they are something that is ours – built up over a lifetime.

In an earlier book, This is Happiness, Williams talks about how an old woman has braced herself against despair:

As a shield against despair, she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived.

Again, we know pessimistic people like this, we know times when we are like this ourselves (practically every day in the political realm, I am finding).  Not a pleasant way to live though, but, for some, expecting the worst is often a partial armor against despair.   

 So, what do we do with this despair in relation to our fellow elders: should we share it to make others know that they are not alone?  I remember, as a young woman, the first time I read Virgina Woolf’s admission that life “is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength.”  Someone was finally admitting to me what I thought was obvious, but I had never heard anyone articulate.   Mary Oliver says, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”  Yes.  The alternative is to buck up and, in our bravado, give others the hope that despair can be overcome.   Later in Walden, Thoreau exhorts us: “We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.”  I think I’m with the ladies on this one.

And there is another reason that we should share.  Our fears and worries, spoken out loud, are seldom as scary as when whispered silently through our minds.  When we expose our fears to the light, they do not disappear, but they often seem to shrink – or, at least, stop growing.  Also, remedies can be shared, as noted above.  Go to the sea, go to the woods, find comfort in ritual or habit.  And discovering that others have survived despair is the best encouragement we can find.

For anyone who came to this page by googling “despair,” and is in its clutches, please remember that you can talk to someone by texting or calling 988 for the suicide hotline.  Despair is a fact of life for all of us at times, but if there is no relief, please get some help.  You are not alone.

When I was young, I often used fantasy to counter despair.  I find it doesn’t work so well in old age.  I wrote a story in order to think about that: “Amnesia at the Airport.”  Try it.  Better yet, write your own story.  And share it.

Reading in Old Age, Reading About Old Age

As you are aware, I like to read about old age – in poetry, novels, biography, memoir, history, and science.  This recently brought me to a fairly obscure book by Luis Sepulveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories.  Who could resist that title?  It is a slim volume and well worth your time.  The “old man” lives deep in the Amazon.  Old Antonio had minimal education as a boy, never reads, and can write only to sign his name.  But, upon being presented with some documents in relation to a forced voting registration, he realizes that he can understand them:

He could read!

It was the most important discovery of his whole life.  He could read.  He possessed the antidote to the deadly poison of old age.  He could read.

What a reminder that we have the gift of reading!

Antonio had “forgotten” he could read, so when he rediscovers this gift, he has no idea what to read and, with the assistance of a local schoolteacher, tries everything. He decides that history books were just a “string of lies” and that tragic stories made him suffer. (There was enough misery in his life already.)  So, living deep in the Amazon – in the forest and on the shore of the river – Antonio buries himself in tales of lust and love and happy endings.  This is also a novel about the environment and the rape of the land, about the criminals who “whored on his [Antonio’s] virgin Amazonia.”  The old man is outraged at mankind, its governments, and its ignorance.  He fights as long as he can, and finally escapes to his reading:

…he set off in the direction of El Idilio, his hut, and his novels that spoke of love in such beautiful words they sometimes made him forget the barbarity of man.

I, too, would like to forget “the barbarity of man,” but the news keeps reminding me.

Young people are purported to have largely lost the skill of immersive reading, of attention, of transference.  How my young self used to love to hide in my room and get lost in Little Women or The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. It was a respite from the nagging of my parents, the perceived disdain of my peers, the boredom in the days when instant distraction was not available.  Except in a book.  As an old lady, reading is still my greatest pleasure.

In Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time – Life Beyond Sixty¸ there is an entire chapter on reading, entitled “Unmet Friends” – unmet friends being those people and characters we know through books and not in person.  Heilbrun extols this gift of the written word.  She does, however, doubt that one can develop the skill of reading late in life if one hasn’t been reading right along:

Reading – like those more frivolous lifelong pursuits, singing in tune, or driving, or roller-blading – is either an early acquired passion or not:  there is no in-between about it, no catching up in one’s later years.

Heilbrun has a point and makes me glad that I have been a lifelong reader of eclectic taste and interest.  However, I do not think that she is entirely correct.  It is true that “new” recreational readers may not be able to start with Dostoevsky, but they can certainly start with murder mysteries or love stories.  And they might find their way to Anna Karenina.   At least I hope so.

In my old age, I’ve developed a bunker mentality about books.  I am deathly afraid of being stranded somewhere with nothing to read.  I fondly remember reading an autobiographical piece by the philosophical longshoreman Eric Hoffer, who lost his sight for seven years while he was young and vowed to read everything he could once he could see.  And so he did.  He used to take the thickest book he could find when he went on a train, and once read all of Montaigne’s essays in this way while stranded in a snowstorm.

I have the luxury of having a Kindle to take on trips, and always have my phone to read on if I get desperate in unexpected situations.  I also always have at least twice the number of books out of the library than I can possibly read.  In my new (old) abode, I can walk to the library – a great incentive to keep up with my exercise. But even having to lug a heavy bag to and fro has not dampened my need to have a full array of unread books under the bed!

I struggle with how much to challenge myself with my reading.  I am a lover of murder mysteries, and have discovered that mysteries read over twenty years ago are new again!  Such a joy to re-read Christie, Tey, Marsh, and Allington!  But, I do realize that if I do not challenge myself a little, I will lose the ability to read complex books with complex sentences.  There has been much research showing that increased computer time has decreased our ability to follow more profound texts, and more profound texts are what nurture my soul (while mysteries put it to sleep – sometimes also a desired outcome).  So, I almost always have three books going – one mystery, one literary novel (old or new), and one work of non-fiction.  Although the mysteries are only one third of that array, I go through them quicker and surely read more.  Strangely, in these dark days, they help.  While mysteries are full of the “barbarities of man,” those barbarities are acknowledged as barbarities.  They are usually exposed and punished.  I have my fantasies.

Lastly, I am currently reading a book about how old women have written about themselves: The Lioness in Winter: Writing an Old Woman’s Life by Ann Burack-Weiss.  It contains selections from female authors who wrote memoirs well into later life.  Besides enjoying the excerpts and commentary, it is helping me compile a list for further reading, which I will share at some point. Meanwhile I recommend the book, which has much to say on the reading and writing of old people.

If you want to visit one of my stories about reading, you might try “By the Book.”  And one last word of advice about the Sepulveda book: don’t read the second dedication until after you finish the book. Then read it and weep.  Our poor planet.

 

Build Your Own World, Create Your Own Day, Construct Your Own Life

When I was young, I thought I would have figured things out by the time I was old.  (Old then being about 50.)  Yet I seem to be fighting many of the same battles with myself that I have been fighting for seven decades.  I know I don’t need another book to tell me how to fulfill my purpose, stop procrastinating, live according to my values and priorities.  I have read a slew of those books and know what it is that I am supposed to do.  That is not the problem.  Actually doing what I know is the best thing is the problem.

Moving closer to my teenage grandchildren and hearing them interact with their parents has been somewhat enlightening in this regard.  The conversation goes like this.  Parent: “Do you think eating all that candy (or staying up late playing video games or spending your allowance on silly things) is a good choice?”  Child: “I know, I know – but I really wanted…” You get the picture.  Many days this same conversation is going on in my head, but both characters are… me.  I know what the good choices are, but as Saint Paul laments in Romans 7:19, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.  Or as Ado Annie says in Oklahoma, “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

I have won the battle in some cases.  I keep a serious journal and have an exercise routine of sorts.  I take my vitamins and see my dentists and doctors as required.  I make my bed and remember birthdays and get a blog posted a couple of times a month, yet my life is overshadowed by the things I want to do and do not do.

Friends have told me just to climb out from under the guilt.  Retired people don’t really need to do anything, do they?  And yet this is not an answer for me.  I want to end every waking day by being satisfied by what I have accomplished, but I also am looking more closely (than I would like) at the end of my life.  The big deadline looms.

Three pieces of advice have helped me lately, and I am glad to pass them along.  Two are quotes from the Transcendentalists, first from Emerson in “Nature:” “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”  Birds single-mindedly build their nests; we should do the same.  In old age, our nests are for nurturing ourselves and not our babies, they are for cradling us to the end.  No better reason for building your own world.

If Emerson seems to call for too much, Thoreau parses it into to smaller chunks for us to consider.  In Walden, he tries to whittle his life down to the marrow; he trims his expectations to the day in front of him.  “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  Make this day a good one – and our days will add up to a life, a world.   Thoreau’s gentle exhortation has gotten me through some rough patches.

Lastly, I have been reading a wonderful novel, This is Happiness, by Niall Williams.  The book was recommended in a recent NYTimes piece by Ann Patchett and is narrated by a very old man who is recalling the coming of electricity to his Irish village.  Read it to find out if the residents are happier before or after technology catches up with them!  In any case, the seventy-eight-year-old man reflects on this very subject:

Not that you ever quite know what that is [the better version of ourselves], still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you.  I write this now. Having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard.  With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour.

And what are the fruits of this fruitless endeavour?  Perhaps that we affected the quality of our days with Thoreau and built our own (yet imperfect) world with Emerson.  I am happy to make an old lady’s accommodation with these truths.

Old Folks and the Wisdom of Appreciating Little Things

Younger people sometimes make fun of their elders for the simple pleasure we find in routine – waiting for the mail, afternoon tea, watching our favorite television show, knitting a sock, dead-heading the roses.  Somehow, they think small pleasures are signs of a diminished life.  However, there is every reason to believe that these are the constituents of the good life.  Maybe this is something we learn in our old age.

You may remember that at the end of Voltaire’s Candide, that satire of the optimistic philosophy that all things are for the best, Candide counsels us that we must all simply “cultivate our own garden.”  I have always thought that it was a way of reminding us that the worth of our lives, the joy of our lives, comes from paying attention to the small things that we do every day, the things that truly make up our lives.   As I have aged and the distractions of the outside world are more easily kept at bay, I have realized what good advice this is.

My husband and I have been reading Thomas Hardy lately, and at the end of the Mayor of Casterbridge, I was quite taken by a passage which talks about the “ever-after” of Elizabeth Jane, a central character who has suffered much from the ups and downs of life:

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers.  But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.  And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

While you might not agree with Hardy that life is a “general drama of pain,” we must all agree that it is no Eden either. Hardy’s “solution” was akin to Voltaire’s:

As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt of it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody  not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider  interests cursorily embraced.

This talk of the cultivation and appreciation of “minute forms of satisfaction” is brilliant, I think, – and true.  I think of the little pleasures in our life – watching “Grantchester,” espresso on Saturday night, a good pasta dinner – what would life be without them?  Hardy is skeptical enough to put a caveat in (“to everybody not in positive pain”), but generally he gives us hope.

I wrote some years ago about the wonderful book by Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own.  It was based on a journal this amazing woman kept in an effort to try to ascertain what, really, made her happy:

I could not by direct effort feel love towards someone, or by direct effort make myself happy.  What then was entirely under the control of my will?  It seemed to me that the only thing that was even potentially so controlled was my attention.  I could not control what I saw when I looked in a certain direction, but I could, generally at least, control which direction I should look in.

And mostly, her attention and her joy were on the small moments of life.

When long-married couples are separated by death or disability, they often talk about missing the little things – the glass of wine after dinner, the game of Scrabble on Sunday afternoons, or the standing joke about who was going to wash the dishes.

Small pleasures should not crowd out the more important things in life (and this can begin to happen if we are not careful), but they should be valued for the fact that they often contribute to those more important things – chances to share love, restore our balance, touch base with who we are.

So, when young folks roll their eyes over our rituals and small attentions, just realize that they have a lot to learn.  And never neglect or take for granted the simple pleasures of life that last into old age.

The Borrowers, Old Age, and Memory

When I was a reading-obsessed child, there was a series of books called The Borrowers by Mary Norton – the first one was published in 1952 and won the Carnegie Medal.  The “Borrowers” are a family of tiny people who live by “borrowing” things from the people in the house – sometimes they return them, sometimes they don’t.  When things go missing in the house, they are blamed.  Norton uses maximum creativity in imagining what “borrowed” items might be used for by 6” people.  A thimble might become their stewpot, for example.

I do not know how we would characterize the Borrower books today; they are chapter books and Amazon describes them for children from 6-10; however, most children within that age range would have to have the books read to them (the writing includes words like philosophical and rheumatic).  The language level is surely at a par with what we term “young adult” novels now, but the subject matter is far tamer and probably far wiser.

The Borrower stories are told to the child Kate by the elderly Mrs. May, who was “some kind of relation” who lived with her younger family members in London.  There is this wonderful description of her in the first chapter:

Mrs. May was old, her joints were stiff, and she was – not strict exactly, but she had that inner certainty which does instead. Kate was never “wild” with Mrs. May, nor untidy, nor self-willed; and Mrs. May taught her many things besides crochet: how to wind wool into an egg-shaped ball; how to run-and-fell and plan a darn; how to tidy a drawer and to lay, like a blessing, above the contents, a sheet of rustling tissue against the dust.

How great is that passage?  Old Mrs. May had “inner certainty,” and she taught the little girl things, useful things.   Just being with Mrs. May made Kate into a better child – never “untidy” or “self-willed.”  If you read the Borrower books as a child, get one and read a couple of chapters.  Do this even if you didn’t read these books in your early years.  You will be charmed.  You will want to be like Mrs. May.

But back to “borrowing.”  We must have a family of Borrowers in our house, because I keep missing things – as well as names and words.  Is this the Borrowers too?  Things I have lost (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master”) do tend to show up sooner or later – usually just two days after they have been replaced.  They show up under a cushion on the couch, in the glove compartment, or set on a shelf in the linen closet.  The names of people and things that I have forgotten return too.  Where they have gone to is less obvious.  They are not gone forever, but seem to have sunken to the bottom of my consciousness, only to return when I no longer need them.  Oh, I will say to myself just as I am about to fall asleep, the name of that nice women in the grocery store was Jill.  Too late.  But where had Jill’s name hidden all afternoon?  Are there also borrowers of the mind?

Of course, there is inter-personal borrowing also.  I get aggravated at people in my life who borrow things and don’t return them.  And it is very uncomfortable to ask.  I loan out contemporary novels gladly, hoping they will never resurface in our house, which is always in need of more shelf space.  But important books are another thing.  I don’t begrudge the books themselves – most can be replaced for a pittance – but my marginal notes are precious (if only to me).  I must admit, though, that when I was going through books in anticipation of moving, I found more than one with the name of an old friend on the flyleaf.  Mea culpa.

My husband has his own answer to this dilemma.  He rarely, if ever, loans books, and never takes anything (even a plastic food container) to someone else’s house that he wants returned.  He has a skeptical view of human nature – or at least of human memory.

Of course, we also borrow memories from each other, which are also often appropriated and never returned.  We sometimes correct each other’s memories and often nudge each other into remembering past times that we had almost forgotten.  Sharing reminiscences can impress upon us how unreliable memory can be.  No family gathering is complete without an argument about exactly how something in the past happened.

In old age, we often say that we are living on “borrowed time.” But we have no intention of returning it.  And we may “borrow” from the past as well as the future.  I loved looking back at Mrs. May and her Borrower stories. Mrs. May knows what it means to lose something and what role the human imagination has in coping with it, making a story of it.  I wish I had Mrs. May’s “inner certainty.”

For an example of the borrowing and sharing of memories, you might look at my story “Boxing Day – A Vignette.”  Or, better yet, get a copy of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers out of the library.

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.