Tag: bucket list

Last Things and Reverse Bucket Lists

“Last things” can be hard to talk about.  We formulate bucket lists of fun and daring things we want to do before we die; generally, though, we assume those are one-time activities.  Just to see the Taj Mahal once, to feel what it is like to jump out of an airplane.  We assume the first time is the last time.  But what about the things we do all the time?  Will we even know when we are doing things for the last time? Most of us remember when we got a driver’s license and took a car out alone for the first time, but will we even know when we make that last trip at the steering wheel?  And surely, we have often had the death of a friend or loved one creep up on us unaware, and never realized that our last dinner with them was the “last” time we would see them.

Christianity says there are four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.  We give the dying faithful last rites, and we recall the last supper. Taverns have a last call  – which Leonard Cohen used metaphorically in his wonderful “Closing Time.” 

Rarely do artists admit that they have completed their last works, but there have been some exceptions.  A .E. Housman had a great success in his thirties with A Shropshire Lad, then did not publish much until Last Poems in his sixties. The latter is not much read, and many of the poems in it are unpublished poems of his younger days.  But this is one of my favorites in this volume from his later years:

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

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

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

This poem is a poem of endings, and our inability to make sense of it all.  Housman was forthright in the introduction to Last Poems; he was done.  Housman wrote:

I publish these poems, few though they are, because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my first book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came; and it is best that what I have written should be printed while I am here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation. 

No one wants to think about last things, but we might be happier if we did.  In fact, Housman did write one or two poems after he announced his retirement from the genre (he continued to work on his Latin scholarship).  Would it take the pressure off all of us if we admitted it was time for some “last” things – not in a pessimistic sort of way, but in a “goodbye to all that” kind of way? I had a friend once who – being an ambitious type – was always being tempted into new projects in her retirement.  She put a sign across the top of her computer screen which said, “You’ve already done all of that!”

Harold Bloom compiled a wonderful collection of what he calls A Gathering of Last Poems (highly recommended).  Some have the tone of being final but are not really the last; others were written just days before the poet’s passing.  I especially relished his commentary on Auden’s Aubade.  And there is the “Last Poem” of F. T. Prince which tells us that standing at the grave of “any common man or woman,” their “life becomes a poem.”  Yes.

Ah, but…  Yeats last poem was called “Politics,” but it was about anything but politics and about anything but acceptance and reconciliation with age:

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics,

Yet here’s a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there’s a politician

That has both read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war’s alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms.

One last thought.  I recently read the advice (in What Matters Most by Jim Manney) that we should compose a reverse bucket list – a list of all the things we can jettison from our lives, that we can resolve to have done for the last time.  This makes perfect sense to me.  Old age should be a stripping down.

I’ve written on this subject before (see the post, “A Diminished Thing”) and have posted one short story that captures an attempt to do this, “Nothing New.”  What, in your life, have you done for the last time?  What are you willing to say good-bye to before it is wrested from your arms?

A Different Kind of Bucket List

 

I have been thinking (and reading) about a different kind of bucket list.  Merriam Webster defines bucket list as “a list of things that one has not done before but wants to do before dying.”  The books I am reading – The Bright Book of Life  by Harold Bloom and Horizon by Barry Lopez –  are about the things or places or books that the authors wanted to revisit before they died. Both authors died within a year of writing their books.  Bloom wants to reread the books he has loved one more time; he says he is desperately lonely in his old age (having outlived so many friends) and goes “back to reread novels to find old friends still living and to make new ones.”    Barry Lopez, one of the great travelers of our time, is interested in going back to some of his favorite places (in mind if not always in body) to determine whether his journeys taught him anything: “Having seen so many parts of the world, what have I learned about human menace, human triumph, and human failings and fallibilities?”  Bloom and Lopez both invite us to come on their final journeys and to plan one of our own – back through experience, physical or textual.

A few years ago, Bloom published an anthology and commentary on late poems by various poets:  Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems.  Bloom looks for comfort, for answers, in these late poems, but says in the end: “Confronting illness, pain, and dying, we learn quickly that eloquence is not enough.  Neither are even the most authentic poems of consolation.  Still, the beauty and wisdom of these poems reverberate into the coming silence.”  However, he expects more from the novels that he reviews in his last book.  Its title (The Bright Book of Life) comes from an essay by D.H. Lawrence:

The novel is the one bright book of the life.  Books are not life.  They are only tremulations on the ether.  But the novel as a tremulation can make a whole man alive tremble.  Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do…. To be alive, to be man alive, to be the whole man alive: that is the point.  At its best, the novel, and novel supremely, can help you.  It can help you not to be a dead man in life.

One of Lopez’s abiding concerns is the state of the world we live in and the degree to which it has deteriorated in his lifetime.  He is a genuine and literate environmentalist, and not unaware that his own physical deterioration is natural, but that of the places and indigenous peoples he loves on the earth is not.  He can accept his mortality; he has trouble accepting what we have done to our home. 

Going back is not easy.  That place we loved when we were twenty may now be overdeveloped and all serenity replaced by noise and concrete.  The book that meant so much to us, that changed our lives, when we were adolescents may somehow now feel…  juvenile.  And yet it is a brave venture and one that might assist us in making some sense of the path of our lives.  Barry Lopez puts it very well:

There is no originality in this, of course.  We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there.  My further desire in planning this book was to create a narrative that would engage a reader intent on discovering a trajectory in her or his own life, a coherent and meaningful story, at a time in our cultural and biological history when it has become an attractive option to lose faith in the meaning of our lives.  At a time when many see little more on the horizon but the suggestion of a dark future.  

I have long been intrigued by the idea of limiting myself to rereading in my old age.  I have often thought old age would be a good time to revisit my favorite movies and television shows.  Maybe, if my memory is bad enough, I will laugh just as hard at reruns of The Office as I did the first time.  If my memory is good, maybe I will remember the laughter of the first time, and that will be a joy in itself.

 I even visualized this as a kind of spiritual practice in my story “Nothing New,” where one of the characters strikes anything new from her life in order to relish the old.    But that was probably going too far.  Yet, when I read Bloom and Lopez, I find myself making lists of books, music, drama, and places I want to revisit (at least) one more time.  Most of these intentions will never be realized; however, just creating the list is a useful exercise.  Try it.  And think about ignoring the best seller list in favor of something you already know is wonderful.

An Old Lady Returns from the Highlands

My husband and I just returned from Scotland – one of our favorite places in the world. But, on the long trip home, we admitted to each other that this might have been our last overseas trip. Scotland was gorgeous – we even lucked out and got an unheard-of two weeks of great weather, but was it worth it?

Air travel has become worse (if that is even possible), and we have become less resilient. Besides jet lag and the need to lift suitcases into overhead compartments, we have about a 50% infection rate – meaning at least half the time one or the other of us (or both) comes home with some kind of infection, presumably picked up on the plane. Sure enough, one of us is sick.

And it is not just our aging constitutions. Cognition is also not as sharp as it might once have been – in any case, driving on the left has not gotten any easier. Neither has deciphering maps or monetary conversion rates.

There is great pressure on the old to travel. In our rather aged community of many retirees, people travel far and often. There is much chatter about the best places to go and the best means to get there. Neighbors are often preparing to go somewhere or picking up the pieces when they come home to the unmown lawn.

Facebook accounts of our peers abound with selfies in exotic places, as the oldsters run through their bucket lists and their bank accounts. If one complains about the difficulties of travel, the solution is group tours, on which one can see foreign places while embedded with other Americans. No thanks. It is hard enough to get the flavor of a new place without seeing it through the lens of your peers and compatriots. One of the advantages of traveling on our own in Scotland was that we could avoid the places where the tour buses spilled out their tired clients. Plus (and most importantly), I am unsocial enough to find the possibility of being cooped up with a lot of strangers on a tour bus… terrifying. And, of course, we were in Heathrow earlier this week when pandemonium erupted as the biggest tour company in Great Britain went bankrupt and left hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded from Singapore to New Zealand.

And then there is this: while it is exciting to wait for an upcoming trip, can’t we all admit that after ten days or so we are simply pining for that flight home and wishing we had Dorothy’s ruby slippers? Don’t tell me it is otherwise. I know.

Of course, I may change my mind about travel. “Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.” True enough, Henry. Talk to me in another six months, when I have recovered from jet lag and bills from the last trip have been paid off, and I may have another opinion.

Even now I will admit that there are two true values of travel. First, travel makes you appreciate your own bed, friends who know you, food you recognize, and surroundings that are both boring and comforting. What Bertrand Russell called a “fruitful monotony.” Monotony that leaves time and energy for reflection.

Second, absence and return allows us to see the familiar in a different light. Like Thoreau, I am measuring the possibilities of seeing home with the eyes of a traveler. “It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village.” Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled widely giving lectures and garnering acclaim. He toured in Europe at least three times, seeing the sites and meeting the intellectual figures of his era. His friend Henry never left North America, and seldom ventured out of Concord – but what he saw every time he left his house was always new and always taught him something. Pick up his journals and open them anywhere.

The story for this post is “Again and Again and Again.” Some people dream of foreign places, but they are forced to swim in their own backyards. In HDT’s case, this was Walden Pond. “I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” Thoreau reminds us that characters were engraved on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: “‘Renew thyself completely each date; do it again, and again, and again.’” But it is, maybe, possible to do this without leaving home. At least that’s what Henry tells me and what I want to believe at the moment.