Tag: David Loy

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.”

What Old Folks Know About Miracles and Limits – “Speak Yet Again”

Do old folks have any wisdom to share? In King Lear, the Fool scolds Lear: “Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise.” (I, v,28) Are we wise? It occurs to me lately that we are wise about two especially important things.

I have been reading Wendell Berry’s book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition. Berry actually starts the book with this line that Edgar speaks to his father (Gloucester) after the blind old man, intent on suicide, has been tricked into thinking he has jumped off a cliff and survived: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” (IV, vi,55) Thy life’s a miracle. This is the first thing old folks know. Review your life and think about how it all could have gone differently – and more wrongly. Think about near-death experiences and medical procedures that saved or prolonged your life. Think about how lucky you were to have parents or caregivers who nurtured you until you could stand on your own two feet. Our old lives are miracles.

The other way that we know the miraculousness of life is through all that science has learned about the big bang, evolution, DNA, chance. Do you know that if the rate of expansion of the universe was different by even an iota, life on earth would not be possible? The multitude of variations and mutations that life had to go through to make us human? The number of sperm that were competing to be the person you became? Miraculous. Old people know this. “Thy life’s a miracle.” Truly, it is. In his old age, Henry Miller said: “The worst is not death, but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.”

The subtitle of Wendell Berry’s book is “An Essay against Modern Superstition.” For Berry, the “modern superstition” is that science can eventually know everything and everything can be dissected into… data and facts, I guess. It is a resistance to limits and promotes a world view that puts all faith in progress and assumes we can, eventually, understand and control almost everything. Berry says “the mystery surrounding our life is not significantly reducible. And so the question of how to act in ignorance is paramount.” This is the other thing we know.  Old people know there are limits to knowledge. We have learned this the hard way by making mistakes when we thought we had all the answers. And if we didn’t know this before, Covid-19 might have taught us a thing or two.

Old people know that not everything that can be defined as a “problem” with a definitive solution. I think of Schumacher’s differentiation between convergent and divergent problems in his Guide for the Perplexed. How to build a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and come up with an answer. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e. transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment?) is a divergent problem. Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions. Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.”

To summarize, I would posit that there are (at least) two things that old people know: 1) life is miraculous, and 2) there are limits on everything. And these two things are related. Every one of us has come up on limits again and again in our lives, and as we face old age and death, we are coming up on the biggest limit of them all. Yet, all of us have an increasing awareness of the miraculousness that we are here at all. No matter how many scientific books I read that try to scare me with their tales of how brief the existence of the earth will be, these cosmologists mostly just convince me of the miracle that I am here at all to experience it and appreciate it. (You might read Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” or “The Star-Splitter” in this regard.)

And there is another analogy one might make.

There are some Buddhist scholars (David Loy), Christian theologians (Thomas Berry) and renegade cosmologists (Brian Swimme) who muse that perhaps the universe has evolved humans to order to have a way for the cosmos to appreciate its own existence. This is a nice story. It could also be the story we tell about the old. From the far end of our existence, we can appreciate life in ways that young people cannot. We have come to appreciate life and all that it involves. We recognize the limits and respect them. And we acknowledge the miracle of it all and are in awe.

I recommend that you re-read King Lear and think about limits and miracles. To encourage yourself or for a way for thinking about the play later, you can read my piece “Lear at Great Books.”