Tag: environment

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.

 

Failing Bodies and the Failing Planet

First of all, you must read The Overstory by Richard Powers. It is a powerful novel –a story in the best and oldest sense of the word – about trees, nature, and the place of humanity in the cosmos. And it’s about psychology – how much we are affected by our peers, our culture, how hard it is to step aside, how dangerous it can be to think outside our conditioning, but also how necessary. The mood of the book is at once lyrical and dire. Humankind does not appreciate the intricacy and power of nature and seems not to want to learn.

As elders, we will be especially moved by this book and its characters, many of whom we follow into old age. We will want to warn the next generation. But how are the old (myself, the author, all of us) to tell the young and the disenfranchised that they cannot have what we had – new cars, wooden houses, air conditioning in home and vehicle, all of it?  And we had it without guilt. We had the advantage of not giving any thought to clearing a lot, building a house, driving a big car just for the fun of it, having as many children as we could afford to support – and never considering what the earth could support.

We know better now. In part, we learned from our own bodies. We are paying for our early smoking, drinking, drugs. We take statins, use inhalers, go to physical therapy. Athletes are getting joints replaced and hoping they did not land on their heads too many times. Surgeons replace arteries clogged with the fat we ingested thoughtlessly. Dayspring mishandled. And as we retire, we have time to look around at our devastated planet – a devastation that we funded with our new houses and cars and expectations that progress meant we could have more and more. Our bodies and minds know that perpetual progress is a myth. We know this as we nurse our knees and grope for that name we can’t remember. We know this by going back to the neighborhood where we grew up and looking for the woods we played in. The planet too has paid for our mistakes: global warming, plastic continents floating on the ocean, butterflies that never return.

In the middle ages there was the idea that the human body was a microcosm of the universal macrocosm – and each individual grew old in this post-lapsarian world just as the world also grew older, decayed from its Edenic beginnings. But the Enlightenment assured us the world was progressing, not regressing. In the seventeenth century, George Hakewill made an early appeal for the idea that life on earth, that earth, was improving, progressing – and yet even he realized what this meant for the idea of microcosm/macrocosm: “And though whiles I have laboured to free the world from old age, I feele it creeping upon my selfe.”

But the truth is, whether or not humans are accurate microcosms of creation, we are most definitely part of the macrocosm and most definitely not in charge – as much as it might temporarily seem so. In trying to overcome and overwhelm the natural world, we have forgotten we are only part of that world. Irretrievably imbedded in the macrocosm. It is true of a tree; it is true of homo sapiens.

One of my favorite characters in The Overstory is the (fictional) scientist Patricia Westerford – at one point she says: “Trees stand at the heart of ecology. And they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven. But people – oh, my word – people! People could be the heaven the Earth is trying to speak to.”

This novel is full of stories and statistics that will frighten you. They should frighten you. But it is also full of the glory of creation. There is a theory (from Carl Sagan among others) that if humanity was evolved by creation for a purpose, we are perhaps an effort by the cosmos to become aware of itself. Through us. Perhaps our task is not to overcome, but to appreciate. Old people should be good at this. We are also, perhaps (because elders have often stepped out of economic and romantic competition), capable of what one of the characters in Powers’ book calls unbinding. His question is this: Can people come to independent moral decisions that run counter to their tribe’s beliefs? Unbinding. Seeing things outside of cultural norms.

We have lived long enough to know the costs to the world we live in for the lives we have led. To recognize the difference between cost and value. Look around you. Unbind. And read the book. Richard Powers says it far better than I can.

And for more on trees, look at my “Fable About a Soccer Mom.”