Tag: Jonathan Swift

Slowness in Old Age – Perhaps a Gentle Blessing?

I have always been interested in the concept of time, at once fascinated with it and threatened by it.  Back in graduate school, I wrote essays about the depiction of time in literature from different time periods.  For example, in The Canterbury Tales we find multiple ways of telling time.  The new technology (mechanical clocks) was so recent that it had not had time, as yet, to eradicate prior knowledge (unlike our current era, when many children growing up in the digital age cannot tell time on an analogue clock).  In one short passage, Chaucer refers to the time in at least four different ways: as a portion of the “artificial day”, by the length of the shadows, by the degrees of inclination of the sun, and by the hour of the “clokke.”  The clock in this case was probably read by ear, by the chimes, and emanated often from the local monastery, reminding all that all time was God’s time.  It is of note that early Christians did not believe in usury because, among other reasons, it involved making money through time and time belonged to God.

By Jonathan Swift’s era, however, usury was accepted, and time was dominated by mechanical devices.  Not only did clocks have faces and more exact calibration, but they were even carried in one’s pocket, something which puzzled the Lilliputians when they encountered Gulliver:

He [Gulliver] put this engine [pocket watch] into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did anything without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.

I was always a creature of the clock.  When I was a working mother with two children, I had no choice.  Every moment was scheduled.  I was good at it, and it became a habit.  What I am apparently not so good at is slowing down.  There is a quote that is making the rounds these days from the Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.”  He also said that “The idea of slowing down is not about getting answers, it is about questioning our questions.”  Akomolafe is talking about global humanitarian issues like climate change and refugee displacement, but slowness is also, it seems to me, necessary to navigate old age.  First of all, we are no longer built for speed.  Almost every fall that my mother took in the latter part of her life happened when she was rushing to answer a phone, tending to a barking dog, or some such non-emergency.  Secondly, haste makes waste.  We don’t have the energy or money to cope with larger mistakes.  Lastly, we are approaching the end.  It is time to put on the brakes and look around us before we become stardust again.

All of this makes sense, but – nevertheless – old habits and values don’t change easily.  For a simple example, I find myself frustrated with fast pieces on the piano.  I can play them, but not at accepted tempo, not fast enough.  I am just playing for myself (and my husband who, locked in his study, is an involuntary audience).  Would I rather play the piece well but very slowly or fast with mistakes and frustrations? Slow practice has always been recommended. “If you practice something slowly, you forget it slowly. If you practice something fast, you forget it fast,” advised Itzhak Perlman.  And then there is this from Saint-Saens: “One must practice slowly, then more slowly, and finally slowly.”  Since all the piano playing I do could be labeled as “practice,” slow is fine with me and enables me to play pieces that would ordinarily be beyond me.  It is a trick, however, to go slowly and keep an even tempo; this is true both on the piano and in life, I think.

The same is true for reading and writing.  There is this from an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

The really annoying part of the aging process is not what happens externally—one has plenty of time to get prepared for that—but what happens internally,” he says. “One knows one isn’t quite as good. One’s energies are lower. When I was writing my major books, I would do between 3,000 and 4,000 words in the morning, between 8 and 11:30. Now I’m very happy to do 1,500 or 2,000 words.

“Now I’m very happy to ….”  There is an acceptance of reality in Mumford that is graceful and wise.  And the thought that goes into that smaller word count may make for better prose than the facile writing of our youth.  Early readers (before the 17th century) spoke words aloud as they read.  Until recently writers used pen and paper to write and revised with cross-outs and clipped-on inserts.  These practices were slower, but surely made for better understanding.

Slowness is in the air.  We are now being told that slow learning is better than fast; slow thought is a necessary balance to fast intuitive thinking.  And, of course, slow food is better than fast food. One of my children recently told me that he couldn’t imagine spending the time we spend on food shopping, planning, preparation and clean-up.  I could have argued that, once you have a personal catalogue of recipes and experience in preparing them, it does not take that much more time than driving to a restaurant, waiting for your server, etc.  But the real answer is that preparing food is a worthwhile activity in itself – and what would you be doing if you weren’t slicing vegetables for tonight’s stew?  I could go on and on, but talking to younger people almost never convinces them, and I have better things to do.

“Quickening” is the term we use for the very first detectible movement of a fetus in its mother’s womb.  It is a big moment for pregnant mothers and marks the first independent action of a new life.  If the beginning of life is “quickening,” maybe we need an equivalent “slowening” for the last part of life. And perhaps, by accepting our slowness, by appreciating it, we are accepting one of the greatest gifts of old age.

If you are interested in the development of timekeeping, Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization is highly recommended, although I believe it is out of print.  Anything by Mumford is highly recommended.  I have also posted here my old essay on the depiction of time in The Canterbury Tales.

And lastly, I just read this morning’s New York Times Magazine, where there is an article on the peace and joy of slow driving.  I am already a right lane person.

“Like Foreigners in Their Own Country”

I have been thinking a bit about language these days for at least four reasons.  First, I have been taking a French class at the local senior center.  I passed a French translation test for a graduate degree, but that was decades ago, and I never learned to speak it very well.  Second, I have been rereading my old journals, and realizing how much my memories diverge from the words that I wrote down at the time.   Third, I have been dealing with communicating with my grandchildren (ranging in age from five to sixteen) and recognizing that we are seldom speaking exactly the same language.  And, lastly, having embarked on my “rereading” project, I have realized how language changes in the context of its historical period and in the context of the age of the reader.

Learning a new language in old age is supposed to be good brain exercise.  OK – I hope that’s true.  More importantly, spending time with another language’s constructs and idioms makes you realize that all language is more arbitrary than we realize.  It is not only the words that are different, but the structure is also different.  In French, for example, the pronoun “ils” (meaning “they”) applies to groups of men or groups of men and women – even if women are in the majority.  Groups of women (only) are “elles.”  Even one male in the group changes the pronoun.  It makes me pause and consider more seriously the messages encoded in all language.

Reading old diary entries has reminded me of how slippery language and memory are.  It is not unlike the old game we used to call “Telephone” or “Gossip,” where a message whispered in ear after ear in a big circle comes out differently at the other end.   Words that were written down at the time and survive are intact, and I must believe they represent what I experienced at the time.  However, some memories have apparently morphed to become perhaps more interesting or easier to bear.  I have been amazed.

Language changes over time are nothing new.  My maternal grandmother, who never learned to drive, called their car “the machine.”  Movies were “the pictures,” and the radio was “the wireless.”  When her granddaughter took to wearing blue jeans in college, she insisted on calling them “dungarees” and elongated the word so it was clear what she thought about dungarees as female attire.  With my own grandchildren, I am struggling with my pronouns, my technological ignorance, and a lack of words to describe the kind of relationships teenagers have these days.  Some of their truisms drive me to distraction – like “it is what it is” or “whatever.”  And when did wait and sales staff begin to answer any question with “of course”?

Reading old books is a challenge; can we really understand the context – not just of the vocabulary – but of the situation? Of course, one can more properly understand Shakespeare or Chaucer with notes to explain what certain words meant at the time they were written. But can we realize what it might have felt like to be pregnant and unwed at the time of Tess or imprisoned in the England of Moll Flanders?  Also, the age at which we read a book matters.  As I re-read books that I first opened in my youth, I find that they are totally different – because I am totally different?

This is nothing new.  Montaigne (whose essays I have been rereading as part of my “nothing new” project) said that he realized his words were not eternal:

I write my book for few men and for few years.  If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now? It slips out of our hands every day, and has halfway changed since I have been alive.  We say that at this moment it is perfected.  Every century says as much of its own… (Essays, Book III)

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has his hero visit the eternal Struldbruggs, who – like poor mythical Tithonus – get old but never die.  After a number of years, however, they cannot communicate with those around them:

The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another . . . and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country.

One of the Buddhist daily reminders is that my body will age and decay.  So will my language.  AI wants to bring me up to date; it will gladly edit my work so it doesn’t seem so … old-fashioned.   Incidentally, it would also like to bring Montaigne up to date.  Cosmetic surgery for the written word.  Spare me.  What is all around me might be a “foreign” language, but, again, all the research shows me that struggling to understand a foreign language is good for old people.  And it doesn’t mean I have to give up my native tongue.

For one of my stories that thinks about language, you might try, “Why My Aunt Josie Has a Limited Vocabulary.”  If you want to surprise yourself, look at a diary entry or letter you might have sent about an event that happened a decade or more ago.  Does your memory fit the facts?  And what does that mean?  Should we school ourselves to accept reality or take refuge in our edited memories?

Picardy Thirds and the Need for a Happy Ending

If you are not a musician, you may not know what a Picardy Third is.  Put simply, it means that when a piece is in a minor key (think somewhat melancholy), it is the major third chord that the composer uses at the end of the piece to give it a … happy ending.  Bach did this all the time.  It is also often done in hymns: things may be sad, they may be tough, but it is all going to be alright (assuming you behave yourself and go to the right place when you die).

Humans have always wanted happy endings, even when they weren’t there.  Samuel Johnson famously lamented about Shakespeare’s King Lear that

I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.   

Because many agreed with this sentiment, Nahum Tate’s revision, The History of King Lear (1681), with a “happy ending” was amazingly successful.  Lear gets to be king again and Cordelia lives happily ever after.  Tate’s redaction was of negligible literary value as compared to the original; however, it was almost the only version produced for about 150 years.  As Samuel Johnson said in reference to the revision, “the publick has decided” for the version where Cordelia “retired with victory and felicity.”  Well, there is a victory for sentiment over great literature.

We’ve been groomed to want and expect a happy ending.  If you are my age, you might remember watching Lassie on Sunday nights.  Lassie always had a scary problem to solve (child and/or dog in trouble) but it always ended happily (rescue, reunion, smiles all around).  Lassie was followed by Disney, where even Grimm’s Fairy Tales were cleaned up enough for our innocent minds.

But we all do it, don’t we?  We want to end on a major third, a happy ending, a victory lap.  But life isn’t like that.  Life ends in death; we might accept the end, but making a victory out of it is something else.  (I won’t talk about religion here, but you can see the connection.)

We have always known that there is something inherently tragic about life: It ends in death.   Jonathan Swift once wrote to a bereaved acquaintance, “Life is a tragedy, where we sit as spectators a while and then act our own part in it.”  Spinoza characterized most of life as “vain and futile,” but admitted that he was looking for a system that would allow him “unending happiness.”

If life has always been tragic, it somehow seems more so these days.  Many decades ago, Aldous Huxley predicted our current situation: “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”  As I read this, I could not help but think that “planned obsolescence” applied not just to appliances, computers, and human bodies, but also to the planet that nurtures us.

We are looking for that Picardy Third to end on, but it seems more and more elusive.  As Kafka says, “There is infinite hope, only not for us.”

If you want to hear a short piece of music that ends on a Picardy Third, try listening here.  If you want a happy ending, you are going to miss a lot of great literature, great music, and the abundance of your life in its major and minor keys.  I would rather be living in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies than pretending in the worlds of Tate and Disney.

My short stories do not often end in a Picardy Third.  You might try “Closing Time” or “Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind.”

Ishmael, Odysseus, and Seeing a Friend after 40+ Years

Ishmael, Odysseus, and Seeing a Friend after 40+ Years

In Moby-Dick, we don’t know how much time has elapsed before Ishmael – the only one who survives the voyage of the Pequod – tells his tale.  “And I only alone am escaped to tell thee” is the quote from the Book of Job which opens the Epilogue.  Ishmael has to remember, but there is no one left to keep him honest.

I recently had the experience of having lunch with someone I hadn’t seen for over forty years.  We were young wives and mothers together, and very close over a period of seven or eight years, but then moves, divorces, and misunderstandings drove us apart.  There was no internet in those times for casual contact, no Facebook to keep track of our families.  In addition, I knew this friend through my ex-husband’s family; she had been a lifeline when I had felt isolated in a new marriage.  But after the divorce, she drifted away with all the distanced in-laws.  After all those years, I finally told her how grateful I was for her friendship.

But how do you summarize forty years of your life? Especially, how do you do that with someone you once were close to? There are the facts of relocations, jobs, divorces, marriages, deaths.  There are the milestones of the children and grandchildren.  Ten or twenty minutes took care of the timelines; on what was really important in our lives, I think we barely got started.

And there is the question of what is important.  Seven or eight years into his trip home to Ithaca from Troy, Odysseus is washed up on the island of Phaeacia and the local king gives him a banquet.  He asks Odysseus to tell the guests about himself.  Odysseus had been king of Ithaca, he had been ten years at the war in Troy, and many years at sea.  He responds with these questions (which might very well have been Homer’s questions to himself when he started writing his epic): “What shall I say first?  What shall I keep until the end?”  These are the questions I asked myself when I sat across the booth from my old friend.  These are the questions that I ask myself when I think about my life.

I have done a lot of writing in my life   – novels, blogs, stories, reports – most of which were for my own amusement.  This blog is the only location where I share. And I have never written straight-forward memoir.  As I get older, however, I have had the urge to go back and try to make sense of the sweep of my life.  An autobiography, of sorts – or at least fragments of one.  But trying to piece my life together for my friend reminded me of how difficult that would be.

First, how honest could I be?  I found myself not sharing the more uncomplimentary pieces of my life.  Understandable, but regrettable.  If we don’t share our mistakes, we don’t bless the mistakes of others.  Secondly, I wonder how reliable my memory really is.  With friends, with family, we have all had the experience of recalling an event that no one remembers or that everyone remembers differently.  I brought up some things this week with my old friend that she had no recollection of and vice versa.  Did they really happen?  When biographers piece together a life, they look at documentary evidence of dates, events, truth.  Should we do the same with our own memories?  It should be noted, of course, that even if some of these events never really happened, they shaped our lives because we think they did.

Melville is, of course, writing fiction.  He slips in and out of Ishmael’s perspective and had to have a survivor of Ahab’s tragedy in order to have a frame for his tale.  Melville knew how the tale would end and what he wanted to include to come to that terminus.  We are trying to make sense of a life that, perhaps, does not make any sense.  We may be honorably trying to tell the truth, but our truths are more complicated than can be corroborated by documentary evidence.

I have tackled memoir-like writing at times, but always hidden behind the mask of fiction.  I wrote a novel about a woman visited by the ghost of Jonathan Swift.  By having to explain her life (and the last few centuries to him), she is forced to recapitulate and justify her life.  I also wrote a fanciful piece about a middle-aged woman and child trying to co-write – at the instigation of the child – a rule book for the best way to live (excerpt here).  I published neither, but learned a lot in writing them.  I’m with Montaigne, who said, “What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.” But, still, there was cloak of fiction, of story.  Was I being honest with myself?

Borges says that part of the problem is words. Words reduce the ineffable to the mundane.   In “Aleph,” Borges talks about seeing life as a whole, but the tragedy of having to move it into “successive language:” Yet, in his powerful poem, “Everness,” the master tries to convince us that nothing is completely lost:

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.

“God saves the metal and he saves the dross.”  God may save, but we must sort out the “metal and the dross” for ourselves. Borge’s poem reminds me of a line from Shakespeare’s powerful Sonnet 146: “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;” I don’t know of a better credo for life.  But to do this, we must be able to identify the dross, and honest memoir writing would probably help.

Meanwhile, how would you explain the last forty or fifty years if you ran into a very old friend?  How would you explain it to yourself?

About five years ago, I wrote a blog relaying some suggestions as to how to write a life review: “Feast on Your Life.”  Maybe it could help us as we think about it again.

The Aging Buddha and the Aging-Resistant Tech Boys

The news in the Sunday NYTimes last weekend was challenging, to say the least.  To make it worse, there was an article on the front page entitled “Gilgamesh, Ponce and the Quest to Live Forever.”  Besides the lack of an Oxford comma, the article was just a reminder how hard the tech boys out in Silicon Valley are working to make 90 the new 50, to make their minds outlive their bodies, to challenge nature.  There was an even more alarming article in the New Yorker a few years ago appropriately entitled “The God Pill.”  The tech boys (and this group is mostly male) are treating old age as a disease to be eradicated.  You might think about that.

The death and aging-resistant tech boys seem to be divided into two camps: the Meat Puppets (who think that we can “fix” the biology and thus stay in our bodies) and the Robocops (who think that our “essence” will move to mechanical bodies/brains).  Both methodologies are attracting huge investment from rich people, presumably in lieu of donating money to soup kitchens.

The technology and the money are new (the article says that “any scientific breakthrough that added another decade to global life expectancy would be worth $367 trillion”), but the sentiments are not.  People (again, mostly men like Gilgamesh, Ponce de Leon, and Isaac Newton) have been fighting old age for centuries.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  But does warring against the inevitable really change anything?  And at what cost?

The Buddha, that truly enlightened being, grew to be very old – into his eighties we think.  He made adjustments: he taught while lying down because he had a bad back, he had disciples deliver his talks when he wasn’t up to it.  Here is an exchange between the Buddha and his bumbling but lovable assistant Ananda:

Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One, massaged the Blessed One’s limbs with his hand and said, “It’s amazing, lord. It’s astounding, how the Blessed One’s complexion is no longer so clear & bright; his limbs are flabby & wrinkled; his back, bent forward; there’s a discernible change in his faculties — the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body.”  

“That’s the way it is, Ananda. When young, one is subject to aging; when healthy, subject to illness; when alive, subject to death…” (translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

Acceptance that things will change is what the Buddha is preaching.  I recently read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

“The really annoying part of the aging process is not what happens externally—one has plenty of time to get prepared for that—but what happens internally,” he says. “One knows one isn’t quite as good. One’s energies are lower. When I was writing my major books, I would do between 3,000 and 4,000 words in the morning, between 8 and 11:30. Now I’m very happy to do 1,500 or 2,000 words.”

“Now I’m very happy to …”  This is an acceptance of reality that is graceful and wise.

The Buddha and Mumford have learned one of the most important lessons of life – to live with and adapt to reality.  I have recommended the Buddha’s five daily recollections before, but one of them is that the body is “of the nature to grow old and decay.”  I would guess that the Silicon Valley boys might delay the inevitable, but they are going to be pretty miserable if they don’t accept it at some point.  And even if they manage to live long, they will still outlive their time – think of Swift’s Struldbruggs, who outlived the language and culture around them and became “foreigners in their own country.”  Trying to talk to my grandchildren, I know what that feels like.

None of this means we have to like everything or anything about old age.  The Buddha spoke the following poem (memorized by the monks and later transcribed):

I spit on you, old age —

old age that makes for ugliness.

The bodily image, so charming,

is trampled by old age.

Even those who live to a hundred

are headed — all — to an end in death,

which spares no one,

which tramples all.

And, as for the tech boys, they might want longevity, but they don’t necessarily want everyone to have it (link here): 

“I don’t think we should have people live for a very long time,” Musk says (in a WELT Documentary interview). “It would cause ossification of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind; they just die. And so, if they don’t die, we’ll be stuck with old ideas, and society won’t advance. I think we already have quite a serious issue with the gerontocracy, where the leaders of so many countries are extremely old. Look at the U.S.—its very ancient leadership. It’s just impossible to stay in touch with the people if you’re many generations older than them.”

Like the Struldbruggs.  Or maybe like some of the people Musk has been hanging around with lately.

If you want to know more about the Struldbruggs, try Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X), and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”  I also wrote about them in my blog from a few years ago, “Covid-19 and the Generational Wars.”

`

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.

 

New Year’s Re-Solutions

Those of you who have been following me for the past six years, know that I have written many times about old age and the New Year – I recommend particularly “Baby New Year and Old Father Time” and “New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age.”  This blog – When I Come to Be Old –  is titled after a list of resolutions that Jonathan Swift wrote in 1699 when he was a young man; one of them, of course, is “Not to tell the same story over and over to the same people.”  So I will refrain from repeating my previous comments about the year becoming new as we continue to get old.

However, I did have some thoughts about New Year’s resolutions.  Every January, I fill a page of my journal with new resolutions.  I falter on some, but I keep many.  I haven’t missed a day of French on Duolingo since last January; I have read the books I promised myself to get to.  But even re-solutions kept are not solutions.  It is right in the word.  Resolutions are things we have to do over and over again, trying to find a way to make life better (or longer or more fun).  Maybe the most effective resolution is to come to a sense of peace with our life as it is.

I did write a new story for the new year, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse,” which is – in a way – about new beginnings.  Happy New Year to all.  I wish us all peace and solutions.

I Am What I Am

 

When I was a small child in Rhode Island, Salty Brine and his collie named Jeff hosted a children’s program which, among other entertainments, ran the black and white cartoons of an indomitable, spinach-eating sailor.  Popeye had made his own peace with life and sang out his philosophy: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am, I’m Popeye the sailor man.”  Of course, in Popeye’s seagoing dialect, it came out “I yam what I yam,” which is how Robin Williams sang it when he played Popeye in 1980.  As a child, I loved Popeye and hated Bluto.  Life was simpler then.

But the phrase, “I am what I am,” has been rattling around in my head again lately.  It is, of course, primarily Biblical.  When Moses beholds the burning bush and talks to his Maker, he is concerned about how to convey the reality of his theodicy to his fellow Hebrews. “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”  God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”  Then, in case Moses is still confused, God adds: “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”  Poor Moses took this strange message down to the people.

We get the phrase again in the New Testament – this time from Paul in his letter to the Corinthians.  “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.”  Paul is talking about the fact that Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus.  It seems a strange statement, for surely we all are what we are?  What does he mean?  One might wonder.  Ben Franklin seems to have his tongue firmly in his cheek when he asks: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am and if I’m supposed to be somebody else, why do I look like me?” 

But the speaker of this phrase that I have mostly been fixated on for the past week is that of Jonathan Swift.  As many of you know, I have spent much of my life pondering Swift; this blog is titled after his own resolutions about old age. But that list was compiled long before Swift entered his own raving and often very public senescence. Here is a story from the year before he died, recounted by his grandnephew, Deane Swift:

On Sunday the 17th of March [1744], as he [Jonathan Swift] sat in his chair, upon the housekeeper’s moving a knife from him as he was going to catch at it, he shrugged his shoulders, and rocking himself, said I am what I am, I am what I am: and, about six minutes afterwards, repeated the same words two or three times over.

Swift’s cry seems to erupt from someone who does not feel understood and yet wants to be accepted. It is the cry of someone who has changed beyond even his own recognition, but wants to find peace.   Swift raged in Biblical language because it is his language – he is the Rector of St. Patrick’s, after all, and well steeped in the King James Bible.  While God knows that Moses can never understand God’s nature but yet wants a relationship with him, Swift cries out in the same way to the people around him.

 Jorge Borges was also intrigued by Swift’s words.  Borges lists the following possibilities: “He may have felt, I will be miserable but I am, and I am a part of the universe, as inevitable and necessary as the others, and I am what God wants me to be, I am what the universal laws have made of me, and perhaps To be is to be all.” Borges combines these interpretations with the inclusive and; all possibilities are accepted (including that of being miserable) and all possibilities include acceptance of the inevitable.  One might take this existential statement to indicate that Swift has accepted his fate, the face in the mirror.  But he does not necessarily like it.  While God’s “I am” is presumably a statement of changelessness, Swift’s is perhaps the acceptance of change.  When Swift was a bit younger, he told a fellow writer that he was like some trees, in that he would “die from the top.”  One might wonder if he knew what was happening to him.

I think that “I am what I am” is a strong phrase, but it is painfully close to a phrase I hate: “It is what it is.”  When the latter slogan became ubiquitous at the turn of the twenty-first century, the word-czar William Safire coined the term “tautophrase” to describe such a self-evident statement.  “Facts are facts,” “what’s done is done,” and “it is what it is” are all inane tautophrases.  And so is, “I am what I am.”  And yet.  The phrase elicits some essence of our being that withstands age and circumstance.  It also calls for acceptance of all these things: our essence, our age, and our circumstances.  “I am what I am,” says the old lady.  “Obviously,” says William Safire.

 

Old Age, Jonathan Swift, and Me

When I was in my fifties, I decided to finish my doctorate in English literature.  I was working in college administration as a Chief Financial Officer, and had accumulated a BA and MA in literature, an MBA, and completed various coursework and other prerequisites for a PhD but realized that I would need a year or two of full-time effort to complete coursework and a dissertation.  I had the good fortune of being able to do this, and I joined a small cohort of much younger students in trying to complete this hurdle (more on that cohort later).

I decided to research the changes (as I perceived them) in the portrayal of old age in literature during the Enlightenment era (sound impressive?), and I elected to do this through the lens of a writer who experienced an infamous old age himself, and who wrote his most famous book at about my age – Jonathan Swift.  During Swift’s lifetime, science was turning old age from a theological phenomenon to a pathological one; statistics of life expectancy were just beginning to be accumulated, and increasing literacy was displacing old memories as the source of history and information.  It turned out to be an interesting study (abstract found here).  Now, almost twenty years later, I find myself revisiting some of my conclusions and wondering if I would have a different perspective now.

I might have been middle-aged when I finished graduate school, but being thrown in with a cohort of twenty-somethings made me feel older.  I never felt that they were that much brighter than I was (although some surely were), but I was massively more effectual.  I turned papers in on time while my classmates had a sea of incompletes.  I got my dissertation chapters and rewrites to my committee faster than they probably wanted and had no problems ticking off the hurdles to getting to my final defense.  I researched all my own citations and even word-processed my final document myself (in compliance with the University’s picky standards).  Research and study were so much easier than working that it was during this period of time that I also started writing fiction.  It was a happy time.

The issues of aging I identified in Swift’s writing and in his life are still with us.  Gulliver’s episode with the immortal but aging Struldbruggs depict what happens when longevity outraces competence, when technology, language, and culture leave the long-lived behind.  The Enlightenment era saw the first spate of self-help books on extending one’s life span and the implied assumption that, perhaps, the length of your life span was within your control and not necessarily the total prerogative of the Almighty.  Swift himself lived to be 77, and before he died, he lost most of his friends, his lady-love Stella, and just enough of his mind that he had trouble communicating but seemed to be aware of that sad fact.  Swift was a difficult character all his life, but, as I age, I have more sympathy for him. When he was sixty-four, he wrote his own humorous elegy in almost 500 lines of rhyme, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.”  The poem is hilarious and humbling.

Besides, his memory decays:

He recollects not what he says;

He cannot call his friends to mind:

Forgets the place where last he din’d;

Plies you with stories o’er and o’er;

He told them fifty times before.

How does he fancy we can sit

To hear his out-of-fashion’d wit?

Swift was not overly lovable, but how can you not have a soft spot for a man who looks so calmly into the face of the eccentricities of his own old age?  I ended up being fond of the pompous old geezer and was loathe to part with him when my academic work was over.

I turned some of my knowledge of Swift into a draft novel, What Shall I Say First?   In it, a middle-aged academic is visited by the ghost of the old Dean himself.  But again, this was written a number of years ago.  I may revisit that manuscript and my dissertation to see if, twenty years later, Jonathan Swift, Dean of Saint Patrick’s, has anything new to teach me.  Can old dogs teach old dogs? Stay tuned.  Meanwhile, read the Struldbrugg episode in Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X) and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”

New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age

The title of my blog site (When I Come to be Old) comes from a list of Jonathan Swift’s resolutions, made when he was a young adult, about how he was determined to act (or more specifically not to act) when he was old.  His list is worth reviewing by us seniors, just to see how the younger set may perceive us (no comfort there).  This new year, however, I am more interested in thinking about what kind of resolutions old folks should make about themselves?

What kinds of resolutions should old people make?  If you do a search on the web, most of what you will find are suggestions to improve your mental or physical health: take up crosswords, walk at least a mile a day, eat more vegetables.  Yes, of course.  These are common sense maintenance items, and we all are fully aware that learning a foreign language will work our brain harder than watching Brit Box.  I surely make such resolutions, but they usually (in my case) take the form of the negative.  No more than an hour of TV per day, no dessert unless I have walked three miles that day, no more than one restaurant meal a week – and so on.  Games we play with ourselves which (hopefully) make us a little healthier without undue deprivation.

On my doctor’s suggestion upon my query about any possibility of avoiding my mother’s dementia, I have gone back to French. (I once knew enough to pass a translation exam for a graduate degree, but those brain cells seem to have disappeared.) I am using Duolingo and pledged myself to a modest fifteen minutes a day.  I don’t have to worry about reminders; Duo is a pest.  I also continually contrive and amend reading lists and rules (e.g., at least one literary work of fiction or nonfiction for every mystery novel).

But how about other hopes and goals other than those aimed at life extension?  There are at least a couple of other categories.  How about creative endeavors?  Not to be published or hung on our grandchildren’s walls, but for our own satisfaction in doing something which draws on our experience, something, perhaps, that we have always wanted to do.  Most of us know what that means for us – which could be anything from adventuresome cooking to bonsai gardening to a full-length novel.  Here, too, I have found it necessary to set concrete goals for an enterprise which is not concrete at all in its reason or its results.  When I first started to keep a journal over twenty years ago, my resolution was ten single-spaced pages per month – and if I put it off, I had to write all ten on the last day.  It never came to that – but since that time I have produced the minimum (usually far more).  Similarly, when I started a blog, it was with the determination to post a blog at least twice a month and a new story every six weeks.  I have succeeded, at least on the average.

But there are more personal ambitions to do with our states of mind – our souls, if you will.  One of my resolutions this year is to start going back and reviewing my journal from the beginning to see what I can learn about myself.  (See my blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for the wonderful Marion Milner’s advice in this regard.)

And how about resolutions that have to do with the very fact that we are aging, facing changes we cannot (wholly at least) control, coming closer to the end, however we might define it?  “Do not go gentle into that good night” was a resolve, made not by an old man, but by a younger man (Dylan Thomas) on behalf of his dying father.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my children making resolutions for me.  And I don’t want to spend my last years in a “burning and raging” against the “dying of the light.”

Kay Boyle was already old when she formulated her “Advice to the Old (Including Myself).” Boyle, like Swift, warns us about not dwelling on old times or regaling others with our aches or disappointments – but she ends with a challenge to battle despair:

Have no communion with despair; and, at the end,

Take the old fury in your empty arms, sever its veins,

And bear it fiercely, fiercely to the wild beast’s lair.

This is a different kind of battle – not against inevitable death and age, but against self-generated despair, not against the reality of existence but against an antagonistic attitude toward what is.  For me, it is not so much a battle (who wants life to be a battle?) as a matter of – resolution.

Resolution is a word with many meanings; at the new year, we often mean it in the sense of “firmness of purpose.”  But it can also mean the “solution to a problem” (as in “the dentist resolved my toothache”) or the “degree of sharpness with which we can see something” (think of the resolution level of your monitor or TV).  All the senses of resolution are related: firmness of purpose is only of use if we can see sharply enough to define the issue we are trying to resolve, and know what action on our part will “resolve” it.

Old age is, in itself, not a problem.  Grief or despair about the changes that old age brings can be a problem and is worth resolving.   But before we can resolve it, we must examine and define it.  Yes, bad habits can come with age and these need to be guarded against (just ask Jonathan Swift), but that is true of all times of life.  And again, perhaps the real sin is to despair at the facts of existence. I spent my childhood wishing to be older; I spent much of my middle age looking forward to retirement.  I am trying hard not to miss the opportunity to enjoy and make the most of my old age.  My resolutions will be to understand my own nature and changes (read the old journals), learn (French and patience, although not necessarily in that order), and work toward some form of resolution with age, provisional though it may be.

For a fictionalized account of a different kind of resolution, you might try “Nothing New.“