Tag: Gilead

Young to Old – Do People Really Change?

It is a perennial question:  Do people ever really change?  The other night we watched Odd Couple II, a good but inferior sequel (1998) to the original movie (1968) based on the wonderful play by Neil Simon.  Neil Simon also wrote the movie versions.  The whole basis of the sequel is, of course, that Felix and Oscar have not changed over all these years.  They have made small adjustments to life, and life has had to make large adjustments to them. This all makes for good comedy.  But, of course, this is just a movie.  Do real people ever change? Are old people different from their younger selves?

People do make major changes in their exterior life.  They change careers, spouses, location.  They give up drinking, take up religion.  But do they really change?  We have all seen many dry drunks and unmerciful Christians.  Is there an age after which our personality loses much of its plasticity?  Everyone has friends who married people hoping to change them – often with disastrous results.  Change is not easy. 

If you have occasion to meet someone after many years (think of class reunions), you might converse with them as if it were yesterday, and remark – as if it were a compliment – that they “haven’t changed a bit.”  High school reunions are full of women who still act like beauty queens long after their looks are gone, and former athletes who have dropped the habit of exercise but retained the bravado of the football field.

Novels have been written about characters who only appear to change.  In Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, the mayor starts out bad, appears to reform, and ends up in the despicable state in which he started.  Shakespeare’s characters seldom change – Iago is Iago until the end, regardless of the consequences.  In Marilynne Robinson’s Gideon novels, the character Jack is a winsome man who makes other people suffer.  Such he is as a child and such he is until the end.  Jack is sorry sometimes, but he does not change.

There is some literature in which characters change – there is even a word for such characters in writer’s jargon.  They are called dynamic.  Some examples might be Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations or Eliot’s Silas Marner.  We like these stories (or the Hallmark versions of them) because we want to believe that people can change, that we ourselves can change.

I have often thought that in old age certain characteristics refine and crystallize themselves.  A frugal man becomes a tyrant over the purse strings and won’t permit so much as a tablespoon of mayonnaise to be wasted.  A woman who has spent most of her life worrying about how she looks, indulges in plastic surgery and spa treatments as the sags.  Worried young people become fretful elders.  I have a number of friends I have known since they were young; few have changed much and for that I am mostly grateful.

The brain is an amazing instrument.  In it are trapped all we have learned, all the tracks of our habits, and all the memories of the pleasant and painful.  If you have loved anyone with dementia, you know that the brain can change, personality can change – all without the consent of the individual.  AA says that sometimes drunks have to hit bottom to change.  Saints often changed after some kind of mystical experience.  Near collisions with death have known to be effective. But how much change can we control?  Interesting question.

I’ve written many stories about change, including a series modeled after the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which people literally change into other beings based on their just desserts in the minds of the gods.  The introduction to those stories is here; an example is my tale “What Crime is There in Error.”   Most of my stories, though, do not assume that the people change; characters often have realizations about themselves and others, but there are no miraculous conversions on the road to Damascus – or the road to old age. 

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.“