Tag: Emerson’s journals

Emerson and the Boundaries of Old Age

In rating influencers of American attitudes and culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson would come near the top of anyone’s list.  That is why it is productive to look at his evolving attitudes toward aging and what it says (and taught others) in the formative years of this country.  Emerson had a relatively long life for the 19th century; he reached the age of 79.    For most of his life he wrote prolifically, lectured, kept journals and wrote volumes of letters.  Yet his last decade was clouded by his gradual loss of memory and, finally, speech.  In Emerson, as in Jonathan Swift, we have a figure who lived long and thought about what old age meant.  Like Swift, he also had a difficult old age.

Swift, who made resolutions when he was young about how he would not behave when he got old, broke all his own rules.  In his youth, Emerson was sad for the very old who were in the papers for nothing more than being a year older.  “We do not count a man’s age until he has nothing left to count.”  In his essay “Circles,” Emerson wrote: “Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.”  And he resents the attitudes of his elders: “But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary, and talk down to the young.”  Somehow, he thinks we should be able to resist this: “Old age ought not to creep on a human mind.”  Emerson seems to give little force to the inevitable decay of the body; we must keep our minds young, even though “the surest poison is time.” Emerson knew some admirable old men and he thought they had their place, but old age requires, according to the younger Emerson, “fit surroundings.  Age is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state and ceremony, in council-chambers, in courts of justice, and historical societies.” But not on Broadway or in the mainstream of society: “The creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous.”  And perhaps it some ways it is.

Emerson took a kinder view of old age as he got into his fifties (don’t we all), but both Emerson and Swift suffered from an early aversion to growing older, which seemed to only make the process harder when they finally approached senescence.

As Emerson aged, he did mellow to the gifts of age.  They are gentler gifts than those delineated by T. S. Eliot.  First, there is the gift of relief that life has been (more or less) successfully weathered. “It were strange if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped.”   Second, ambition evaporates.  Emerson no longer frets about how he will be received, whether a project is a success or a failure.  Third, we do not have things hanging over our heads – we have had the career, the family, the house, the friends.  For good or bad, those days are past us.  “The ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.”  And the fourth and last benefit is a chance to “set its [old age’s] house in order, finish its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure.”   Emerson in his late fifties has a warmer view of old age than young Emerson.  But he is also mostly done writing the powerful essays that made him great, that we still read today.

Emerson wrote “Terminus,” one of the great poems about old age when he was 64.  Terminus was the Roman god of boundaries, and Emerson sees old age as a time for boundaries:

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

We don’t want to hear about limitations though, do we?  No boundaries for us boomers.  No acceptance of, as Robert Frost terms it, “a diminished thing.”  Many of us suffer from believing that all is possible in a time of life when that is not the truth.  In fact, it was never the truth; old age just hits us over the head with it.

The very old Emerson does note some compensations.  As he lost his memory, he posits that “increased power and means of generalization” partially makes up for the inability to remember a word or a name or a citation.  Emerson is glad to lose his sensitivity to what people think: “One capital advantage of old age is the absolute insignificance of a success more or less.  I went to town and read a lecture yesterday.  Thirty years ago it had really been a matter of importance to me whether it was good and effective.   Now it is of none in relation to me.” 

Emerson finally says of the aches and pains of old age that they come with the comfort that we will soon be out of them.  “Old age bring along with its uglinesses the comfort that you will soon be out of it, – which ought to be a substantial relief to such discontented pendulums are we are.” Yet, Emerson still feared death.  One of the last poems Emerson wrote follows Frost and Keats in asking stars for lessons in endurance and stability. 

Teach me your mood, O patient stars!
Who climb each night the ancient sky,
Leaving on space no shade, no scars,
No trace of age, no fear to die.

Emerson did write one piece about old age for The Atlantic when he was in his late fifties.  But a better way to see how his attitude modulated over time is to look at his journals (where most of my quotes come from), which Emerson kept from his teen years until a few years before he died.  The last notation in the copy I have is that the day is Thomas Carlyle’s 80th birthday.  Emerson may have been wondering if he would make it to 80, but we cannot know if he were hoping he would or  wishing he would not.  He did not.  He died at 79. 

 

The View from Old Age – Mono or Stereo, Black-and-White or Color, Analogue or Digital?

We old folks remember when televisions made the transition from monochrome to color, music moved from mono to stereo, and everything migrated from analogue to digital. We all remember the first family in the neighborhood to get a color television (not us!).   In each case, we were awed by the difference in quality – in a stereo symphony, in a technicolor movie, in digital accuracy.  We have had examples of how our perceptions were changed simply by the filter which technology put on things (or the filter it took away).

I was thinking about this the other day when I was re-reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces.  (Re-reading is one of the great gifts of old age – for the things you remember it is a deepening experience, for the things you don’t remember you get the pleasure of a first-time reader all over again!) I picked Campbell’s book up again because I have had it in mind for years to write a novel based on the “hero” experience, but with an older woman as the main character.  Stay tuned.  Anyway, in the end Campbell returns his hero from whence he came, but bringing him back to his old culture with a new dual perspective – the old mundane view and the new cosmic vision.  We all – even heroes – have to deal with the mundane world, but  the hero knows that it is only a reflection of, an emanation of, the “vital energy that feeds us all,” the universal chaos that we all came out of.  This knowledge cannot be verbalized; it can only be realized.

Campbell tells a story about Thomas Aquinas that I had never heard before.  The great writer and scholar had a mystical experience while at Mass about three months before he died, after which he

put his pen and ink on the shelf and left the last chapters of his Summa Theologica to be completed by another hand.  “My writing days,” he stated, “are over; for such things have been revealed to me that all I have written and taught seems but of small account to me…

Campbell, the man of myths, says that what is experienced at this point is “beyond myth,” beyond language; there is only silence.  We see this in the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna is speechless when Krishna finally reveals his true nature; we see it in the Book of Job when God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind and Job says he learned “of things beyond me which I did not know.”  In the myth, Job is rewarded with new children and cattle.  Beyond myth, perhaps, Job is awarded by a new expanded view of the world, in stereo and living color.

I don’t know about you, but as a younger person with children and ambition, I could not look beyond the mundane world.  My younger life was definitely a mono world – and nothing high def about it.  Get lunches made, make sure everyone has clean underwear, make it to the office on time – such were the parameters of my world.  I miss some things about those days (the things I can remember – it was such a blur), but my life has changed. Now, I have time to assimilate all that has happened to me, to ponder what I see and hear and read, time to digest.  In one Hindu myth, souls go to their appropriate level after death in order to think about the life they have just led and to extract lessons from it.  I am not so sure about counting on that opportunity after I am cremated; I want to do it in my old age.  I think that is one of things that old age is for.  It is the only kind of ambition I have left.

But unlike Thomas Aquinas – or maybe because I lack his level of mystical experience – I do want to try to write about it.  So here I am.  In Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, Lady Slane sees the ability to reflect on the past as “the last supreme luxury, a luxury she waited all her life to indulge.”  She goes back over her life, perhaps looking for the hero’s journey in it all.  “She could lie back against death and examine life.”

At the age of sixty-four, Emerson said in his journal that “the good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”  Is it Emerson’s “thread of the Universe” that Campbell’s hero discovers and which gives him an extra dimension (or two or three) from which to look at life?

We can see this reach for a more multi-dimensional view of life if we look at the late novels of Marilynne Robinson.  She published the wonderful Housekeeping in her thirties, and then did not publish another novel (although she did write non-fiction) until she was sixty-one.  There followed four novels that explore the same lives from different perspectives: Gilead, Home, Lila, and the recent Jack.  Many of her characters are elderly; many see themselves and their lives in tremendous perspective.  In the four novels, she circles around and around her characters (and wonderful characters they are) and around the very nature of existence.  After I read Jack, I decided to go back and re-read them in order.  It is turning out to be a good exercise, and I only hope that Robinson, now seventy-seven years old, has not written her last novel.

Proximity to death is necessary for the hero’s journey, according to Campbell.  Well, proximity to death is something we old people have. The hero must slay the dragon, outrun the wind, sail across an angry sea and defy the gods of his time.  In one form or another, many of us have performed these deeds.  What is the myth that we embody?  Is it different from one person to another?  Or is it, as Campbell claims, the same in essence if not in symbol?  Have we gained perspective? Acknowledged the universal chaos?  Have we moved from mono to stereo, from monochrome to technicolor, from a shortened perspective to a wider one?  Comments welcome.

To think about the value of re-reading, you might try my short story, “Nothing New.“

Second Growth

For anyone interested in the process of aging, one could do worse than perusing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals. Emerson lived to be almost seventy-nine, and kept a journal between the ages of seventeen and seventy-two. Not only do we read about his transit through time, but he relates the development and aging of his friends – and Emerson’s friends were wonderful people indeed.

I have conscientiously kept a journal for the past fifteen years; in the writing, it has been therapeutic; in its existence (particularly with the aid of the word processor’s search feature), it has been an aid to memory; in its chronology, it has helped me understand my own journey through time. I wish, though, that I had such documentation of earlier crises in my life, as I rely on my memory – both historical and emotional – to try to make some sense out of things retrospectively, which I believe is part of the mission of old age. And one’s own memory can be a sly fox. Of course, there remains the problem of what to do with the written details of one’s life and thought when the end of life (or mind) comes, but for now it is a priceless resource (to me). More on this in another post (as well as hints as to how to journal consistently), but back to Emerson.

In a journal entry that Emerson made in February 1862 (he was fifty-seven), he gives us his thoughts on a second growth in old age, as well as a comment from his friend Thoreau (what wouldn’t you give to go on a long walk with those two?):

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes came out late in life with a strong sustained growth for two or three years, like the old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, and at last begin to grow great. The Lowells come forward slowly, and Henry Thoreau remarks that men may have two growths like pear trees.

And this got me thinking about… dandelions. For one thing, it is that time of year in North Carolina. For another, dandelions have two “growths,” two “blossomings.” One day on a walk, I began wondering about dandelions (having seen a wonderful crop of them). How do they metamorphose from a yellow bloom to a white one with no “transitional” blossoms? As I got down on my haunches and investigated more closely, it seemed that the golden bloom closed up again and then reopened as the white feathery blossom – I found this diagram of the dandelion life cycle:

dandelion

 

So, the blossom is twice born – once to youth, beauty, color, and sexual purpose (attracting those bees), and the second time to lightness, airiness, ultimate dispersal, and perhaps rebirth. In-between, there is a period of rest, a closing down, a respite. It might behoove us to think of our whitening heads as such a second flowering.

For those of you interested in Emerson’s journals (which are voluminous), I recommend the abbreviated Heart of Emerson’s Journals, edited by Bliss Perry. For those of you interested in Emerson’s life, I recommend Mr. Emerson’s Wife, by my friend Amy Belding Brown.

For a story this week, you might go back to “Again and Again and Again” for a tale of Walden Pond, or you can read the prospectus for a novel (I actually did write the novel several years later), included here as “A New Fable of Old Age.” This started as a thought experiment in which the old are forced into a second growth. I apologize for my tardiness in posting this time; we have been visiting our elderly mothers. Perhaps more about that too at a later date.