Tag: Gulliver

One More Adventure – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Odysseus, and Me

Daniel Defoe published the first volume of Robinson Crusoe at 59, close to the age of his hero when he finally returns from his island.  When Crusoe rejoins the civilized world, he is 61, and has spent 35 years marooned.  Neither Defoe nor Crusoe was through though; Defoe took the story into Crusoe’s old age in The Farther (sometimes printed Further) Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and subtitled: Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe. 

Crusoe came home with the intention of settling down; he gets married and has children, but he finds it hard to be stable, to stay put.  The Farther Adventures starts with Crusoe’s acknowledgement that “That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz. ‘That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh,’ was never more verified than in the story of my Life.”  He wants to roam some more, he wants to go back to his island, he wants to see new places.  Fortunately (for him) his wife dies and releases him for more adventures. And he has them.  Finally, at the end of the second volume, he is 72 and says he is ready to settle down:

And here, resolving to harass myself no more, I am preparing for a longer journey than all these, having lived 72 years a life of infinite variety, and learnt sufficiently to know the value of retirement, and the blessing of ending our days in peace.

We don’t believe him.

Defoe himself lived to be about 70, but published a variety of fiction and non-fiction books all through his 60s. Novels like Moll Flanders follow characters into their old age, but Defoe also wrote pamphlets and tracts about the treatment of the elderly; he outlines a system of old age and disability pensions and caretaking facilities (which don’t sound like pleasant places).  However, the interesting thing is that age alone is not a criterion for needing help – one must be old and disabled.  Defoe frames his project as a benefit for those that are “Lame, Aged, Bedrid, or by real Infirmity of the Body (the Pox excepted) are unable to Work;” nowhere is a given age sufficient proof of “inability to work.”

Robinson Crusoe is not disabled, but – at the end of the second set of adventures – he is looking for “the blessings of ending our days in peace.”

Just after Defoe wrote Crusoe, Jonathan Swift published his work about an older man who went on extensive travels and also had a hard time adjusting to home life.  Like Defoe, Swift created a character that was exactly the author’s age and had him embark on adventure after adventure. At the end of the book, Gulliver is fifty-nine, “a Man late in Life,” the same age that Swift was when he completed the work.  The Travels can be seen as a journey through time as well as space. As Gulliver travels and shares his discoveries, he ages.  Gulliver survives it all, but staying home after it was over was the hardest part. He finds human beings, even his family, nothing but a bunch of Yahoos.

One might also think of Odysseus/Ulysses, who comes back to Ithaca after twenty years, slays the suitors, sets out to rule his domain and enjoy his family, only to feel the lure of one last adventure.

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees… (from “Ulysses,” by Tennyson)

According to Tennyson, Ulysses goes to sea.  This is in accordance with Dante’s version of what happens to Ulysses; in Homer we get a prophecy that Ulysses will take a final land journey.  No matter where he goes; he is not content to stay at home in his old age.

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, . . .

I guess I am thinking about old age and adventures because at 75 and 73, my husband and I are headed for one more adventure – one that feels much more difficult than it should be.  We have decided to move closer to family; one last long-distance move – one more house to buy and one to sell.  We’ve done it several times, but it is so much harder now and I have often felt despair about whether we could pull it off.  In the middle of it all we got Covid for the first time, followed by pneumonia in my husband’s case.  And yet, we have plowed ahead.  But I do not have the energy or courage of Crusoe.  I am more than ready for some peace.  Soon.

 

Planned Obsolescence – Appliances, Knowledge, People

We just had a lesson at our house about planned obsolescence.  After struggling to replace a range in a width no longer manufactured (one form of planned obsolescence), we finally gave in and had a new kitchen counter put in to fit a standard size, then bought a new range.  Three years later, the warranty had expired and so had something in the oven, for it now had no idea when to stop heating – rather scary.  Unplugging it and forcing a computer reset worked for a while, but soon there was no controlling the demon machine.   Because computer boards were involved, the cost of fixing the “new” range was $600 – just a few hundred dollars less than we paid for it.  Our repairman sympathized and told us (after the fact) that we should have just kept repairing the old range, which – although twenty years old – was probably superior in every way to the new one.  We have all been told this about cars, refrigerators, dishwashers – and yet…

Even knowledge seems to have an expiration date.  Like many of our generation, I spent most of my working life learning to use new computer programs – programs for communication, finance, planning.  I would just begin to feel proficient with a new system, and another one (better, faster, and supposedly necessary) would come along.  One of my greatest joys on my last day at work was to put that all behind me – or so I thought.  Little did I know that even in my old age I would have to learn how to use social media, stream movies on my smart television, and deal with the replacement of real people with AI in almost all my encounters outside the home.  For the very old or computer-averse, life is very difficult these days.  From the outside, we are also an example of planned obsolescence, time-dated from the previous century.  Not a pleasant feeling.

All of which reminds me of two elderly characters from literature – one from Gulliver’s Travels (almost three centuries ago) and one from Fairy Tale, the most recent novel of Stephen King.

In the third book of Gulliver, we find the heroic Lord Munodi, who counts himself among the “very few, such as were old and wilful, and weak like himself.” These “old and wilful” are not caught in the movement to put “all Arts, Sciences, Languages, and mechanics upon a new Foot through an ‘Academy of Projectors.’” But, “that, for himself, being not of an enterprising Spirit, he was content to go on in the old Forms.”  For his recalcitrance, and despite earlier service to the government, the aging Munodi is “universally reckoned the most ignorant and stupid Person among them.”  Munodi is pressured to tear down his gracious and functional house to make way for the more modern, and to replace time-tested farming methods with new ones that deplete the soil.  But under the pressure of science and technology, he knows he will lose and is just trying to hang on to what he can of the old world until he dies.  His is a sad and hopeless case. Later in Gulliver, we meet the immortal and pathetic Struldbruggs, who have fallen so far behind the times, so obsolete, that they can hardly understand the language spoken around them; they have become “foreigners in their own country.”  I think I know how they felt.

In the first portion of Stephen King’s latest fantasy, Fairy Tale, we meet Mr. Bowditch, who is very old indeed, and lives with his ancient dog Radar in a rundown Gothic house.  Since he keeps to himself (think Boo Radley), scary myths about him abound.  The main character, a young man named Charlie, finds himself in Mr. Bowditch’s story.  The novel is too large to talk about in depth here (and I don’t want to give any spoilers), but what Charlie discovers – to his own awe and incredulity – is that not only does Mr. Bowditch not have a cell phone or a computer, but he has a television with vacuum tubes and does most of his business (including ordering new tubes when the television malfunctions) by mail and without a credit card.  Charlie is mystified: Mr. Bowditch is perfectly happy with things as they are.  I loved Mr. Bowditch.  But Charlie is never quite persuaded that, perhaps, there is much value in longevity – of things or people.

This is how Wikipedia defines planned obsolescence: “The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as ‘shortening the replacement cycle’). It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements.” We are in an era of such comprehensive and rapid planned obsolescence that people begin to feel obsolete too.   I don’t know about you, but whether I am capable of adapting or not, I do not want to spend my remaining years trying to figure out new ways to listen to my favorite symphony or communicate with my bank or carry on a conversation with my grandchildren.  Or repairing appliances.  But it doesn’t look like I’ll have much choice.

If you want to think about what refusing to accommodate unrelenting change might look like, you might try my story, “Nothing New,” or my earlier blog post, “Possessing That Which Was Mine.”

Lists: Reading About Old Age

Over the next few weeks, I am going to post some lists of books, articles, poems, and other works about old age that I have found helpful (and fascinating) in trying to comprehend old age. I am interested in understanding both the evolution of how we regard old age and the variety of individual stances regarding senescence. I compiled these lists (sometimes with assistance) for a variety of purposes: research for my dissertation on aspects of the literature of old age (which particularly explored changes engendered by the Western Enlightenment project), reading lists for Great Books and senior groups, reminders of works I would like to read or re-read. There are texts that I have discovered and loved which have old people as predominant characters, and works that were written by fairly old people. There is a mixture of genre in these lists: fiction and non-fiction, classics and science fiction, plays, poems, and essays. I even include some works of art and musical compositions – think of Beethoven’s late quartets!

There are, of course, some good anthologies of works about old age. There is, for example, Helen Nearing’s Light on Aging and Dying. If you are of my generation and remember fondly Helen and Scott Nearing’s book on Living the Good Life, you might also enjoy her book about Scott’s death, Loving and Leaving the Good Life. Wayne Booth compiled a wonderful anthology with commentary entitled The Art of Growing Older: Writers on Living and Aging. Harold Bloom gathered his favorite “last poems” in 2010, in a rich volume entitled Till I End My Song. Bloom’s musings are almost as good as the poems. And there is the wonderful Helen Luke’s meditations on literature and late life in Old Age: Journey into Simplicity. But these compendiums are only a start.

I also seek out works by older authors. I have been very young, but I have never been very old (getting there fast). I want to know what those ahead of us have to tell. For example, I just finished (and would highly recommend) Amos Oz’s Judas, which he wrote in his mid-seventies and wherein one of the principal characters is also of that age. I will put together such a list of books by old authors about… living while old.

I have my favorites – most of which I have noted here before. There is Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, about the old gentlewoman (Lady Slane), whom I would like to be in my extreme old age. There are the poems of the old ages of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Thomas Hardy. There are the journal entries of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s old age. We need not go through it alone.

I am posting today the extensive bibliography for the dissertation I finished a number of years ago, which was entitled “Foreigners in Their Own Country”: The Struldbruggs and the Changing Language of Aging in Swift’s World. It is an interesting list because it spans the history of Western literature on aging, up to and including the era of Jonathan Swift. If you have not read (or do not remember) the Struldbrugg section of Gulliver’s Travels, please go back and find it! (It’s in Book 3.) If you read Gulliver when you were young, you probably will react a little differently now to this episode about the extremely old. On this list I would especially recommend the works from the Greek and Roman world and the late Middle Ages/Early Renaissance. Of particular note would be Cicero’s “On Old Age,” Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. For a look at some of the earliest books on living a long life, one could take a peek at Cornaro’s Art of Living Long or Cheynes, Essay of Health and Long Life. Luigi Cornaro died at the age of 100 in the sixteenth century; Cheyne was a physician in the early eighteenth century with an eager audience for advice on longevity.

I have also posted the abstract from my dissertation so you can see the territory I was exploring. When I researched and wrote it, I became convinced that the Enlightenment and western faith in science changed the way we look at the cycles of life; I have not significantly altered my opinion. (More on that later.) And I closely reviewed much material at that time. And yet, as I grow older, there is still much that surprises me about senescence, both individually and culturally. These lists are just a way to put material out there for others exploring this new (old) territory. Next time, I will post some lists for book groups (for seniors and potential seniors) and talk about my experience in that regard.