Tag: Do not go gentle

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.

 

 

 

 

The Old Age of Odysseus

Everywhere I go, people are talking about Nolan’s The Odyssey.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I have a deep love for the text and wonder how many people realize that it is a book about old age?

Of course, Homer’s epic is about many things.  Most obviously, it is about a man trying to get home.  When I first read it, it reminded me of a recurring dream where I am trying to get somewhere and obstacles keep stopping me.  When I was a student, I was trying to get to class to take an exam in the dream.  As a young mother, I was trying to get home to feed some starving animals in my dream.  I think this interrupted journey is a kind of universal dream theme.  But in reading The Odyssey in my old age, it is evident to me that this is also a story of old age, a dream of… what?

Everyone agrees that Odysseus is an old man for his time (between 55 and 60) when he finally arrives back in Ithaca after many storms and seductions to impede his progress.  He is obviously still a strong and vital man, especially when contrasted with his wonderful old dog and his ancient father – who must have been about 80.  He battles the suitors, and then the relatives of the slain, until the gods negotiate a peace, and finally… what?  Well, it depends on whom you ask.

The text itself gives one answer.  When Odysseus is in the underworld he converses with the prophet Tiresias, who tells him exactly what will and should happen:

But once you have killed those suitors in your halls – /by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze – /go forth once more, you must … /carry your well-planed oar until you come /to a race of people who know nothing of the sea…. And here is your sign –/ unmistakable, dear, so clear you cannot miss it: /When another traveler falls in with you and calls /that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,/ then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, Poseidon…/ And at last your own death will steal upon you … /a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age /with all your people there in blessed peace around you. (Book XI, Fagles translation)

Toward the end of the Odyssey (Book 23), Odysseus repeats Tiresias’s entire prophesy to Penelope, including the manner of his death.  His wife takes it as a good omen:

“And so,” Penelope said, in her great wisdom,

“If the gods will really grant a happier old age,

There’s hope that we’ll escape our trials at last. (Fagles translation)

But the Western world was not content for Odysseus to fade into a peaceful old age.  In the Inferno, Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell for his “horse’s fraud that caused a breach” and other deceptions, and out of the burning flame where he is locked for eternity, he tells Dante and Virgil that he couldn’t stand a peaceful old age in Ithaca:

Neither my fondness for my son nor pity

For my old father nor the love I owed

Penelope, which would have gladdened her,

Was able to defeat me in the longing I had… (Mandelbaum translation)

So, Dante’s Odysseus gathered up his old comrades (the few that were left) and told them they were “not made to give your lives as brutes” but to follow a higher calling – and they followed him right out of the Mediterranean, into the southern hemisphere, and to their death in an eddy of the deep sea.  And what is the lesson there?

The lesson for Tennyson, when he penned his great poem “Ulysses” was that old men should be adventurers.  He starts his poem with Ulysses being bored with a peaceful life in Ithaca:

It little profits an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren craigs,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws to a savage race…

And so he riles up the old guys to take to the sea again:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of our heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There is a contradiction – the old men are to acknowledge what they “are,” but to override their age and weakness to strive and “not to yield.”  There is no acceptance here.  The deceptive Odysseus thinks he can somehow put one over on the natural order of things.  In our world of old men who seem determined “not to yield,” to fight one last war, and to build monuments of many kinds to themselves, Tennyson’s poem leaves a sour taste in my mouth.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  If some of these old men went a little gentler, whole civilizations might be saved.

I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s movie – I am waiting for it to come to my small screen where the violence will be less overwhelming.  It is my understanding that Nolan’s version has it’s very own ending, perhaps a little softened and de-misogynized for the modern viewer.  I will continue to believe that Tiresias knew what would and should happen.  Odysseus would turn his back on the sea, make sacrifices to appease the gods that haunted with him, and rule in Ithaca.  And then, like all men he would die.  And, like lucky men and women, he would die at peace with his family and the world.

For an excellent supplement to any reading of The Odyssey, try Helen Luke’s essay in Old Age: Journey Into Simplicity.   For reading about how The Odyssey can affect your life, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic and Norman Fischer’s Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life are both highly recommended.  Keep a copy of The Odyssey close at hand when you are reading, of course!