Tag: King Lear

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.”

Shakespeare’s Lessons in How to Get Old – King Lear and The Tempest

Shakespeare seems to have started seriously thinking about old age when he was just over 40 and writing King Lear.  Forty was the “old” sixty or seventy; in 1606, when Lear was produced, Shakespeare had already substantially outlived his life expectancy and would retire and die within the next ten years.  He continued to ponder the problems of aging and mortality. Six years later, he wrote The Tempest.  I would argue that Lear showed us how not to get old, and The Tempest gave us a template for a better way.  And I am always looking for a better way.

First, let me make a plug for the BBC versions of the Shakespeare plays made in the late seventies through the eighties.  Watch them with the subtitles on – not because the sound quality is bad, but because the language is so dense that you don’t want to miss anything.  View both the ones you know well and the ones you don’t remember; from our altered/aged perspective, they will not be the same plays we studied in college.

Back to Shakespeare’s old men.  Lear claims that he is ready for retirement: “And ‘tis our fast intent / To share all cares and business from our age, / conferring them on younger strengths while we/ Unburdened crawl toward death.”  But Lear does not mean what he says.  He wants to distribute his kingdom to his heirs, but with strings attached.  He wants to be unburdened, but don’t take his horses or his men or his status away from him.  Good luck with that.  He also wants pledges of love from his daughters – and, as one learns in life, those quickest to promise are the one who take their promises the least seriously.  Lear loses his daughters, his horses, his kingdom, and, of course, becomes a broken old man.  Even in the end, he wants to take Cordelia off to prison with him, “Come, let’s away to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.”  Lear still wants to control his daughter, to have her to himself.  When Lear dies, the loyal Kent says, “the wonder is that he hath endured so long. / He but usurped his life.”  What does “usurping his life” mean?  If usurp means to take something one has no right to, does this imply that Lear was somehow interfering with the natural flow of life?

Many have read the lesson here as being that one should never retire, never distribute one’s assets, never trust the younger generation.  The real lesson is that we should never renunciate (more on this word below) until we can do it fully.  We cannot take the gifts of old age without giving up the advantages of youth. And thus we move to The Tempest.

The Tempest, written in 1612 when Shakespeare was 48 and about to go back home to rest and die, is thought of as the author’s farewell play, with the epilogue being Shakespeare’s last words to his audience.

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have ’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now ’tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.

Applause please!  The Bard wants recognition from his audience for his past contributions, but then he wants to step aside.  And here we have a completely different view of old age.  Prospero is determined to tie up loose ends – get off the island, get his kingdom back – but he is also willing to give up everything: his spirit Ariel, his slave Caliban, the exclusive love of his daughter, his books, his magic, and even his vengeance toward his brother and others who have done him wrong.  His magic causes the shipwreck that brings his former enemies to the island, but he is determined not to hurt them.  Prospero fully expects his daughter to transfer her loyalty to her husband, Ariel to fly away to live their own life, Caliban to pursue whatever kind of existence he can manage, for his own days of power to come to an end.

In deciding whether to act, Hamlet says “Readiness is all.”  In Lear, Edgar is sure that “Men must endure /Their going hence, even as their coming thither;/ Ripeness is all.”  In The Tempest, the aging Shakespeare realizes that there must be both readiness and ripeness. (See an old blog on ripeness and readiness here.)

Buddhism has the concept of a renunciant, and particularly a tradition of elders “going forth” and becoming renunciants in their old age.  These old folks take nothing with them and have no expectations.

Who so has turned to renunciation,
Turned to detachment of the mind,
Is filled with all-embracing love
And freed from thirsting after life. (AN 5.55)

If you still have expectations, need adulation, need control – you are not ready.  There is a tragedy when one is ripe (very old) but not ready, and an equal tragedy in being ready but not ripe.  But, make the right decision, and be “filled with all-embracing love.”

I am not just talking about retirement decisions here; old age is full of questions of renunciation.  Some are forced on us as we lose abilities and resources; some are moral issues. Medical treatment decisions are a good example. But we must both know what to do and have the mindset to do it gracefully.

In an earlier play, As You Like It, Shakespeare has his character Jacques list the seven ages of man.  I am probably in stage 6 as I still have (more or less) control of my faculties, and have not reached the point of “mere oblivion, /Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”  But this is the rub, isn’t it?  We need “control of our faculties” to judge when to take the next step, before we enter into “mere oblivion.”  Otherwise, we are in an eternal loop – trying to be old without giving up anything.  Not only is that hard, but it is silly. And, as we in the United States are learning, there is a price for such foolishness.

For a fanciful piece of fiction about different ways to grow old, you might try “Tale of Two Grannies.”

Old Parents and Prodigal Children

Perhaps the story of the Prodigal Son means something different when we are old.   Will we take our children back when they fail or falter?  How many times?  With or without their children in tow?  In the story of the prodigal son, we are left to think that everything ends up ok – except perhaps, for the resentment of the older and more responsible brother.  The story (from Luke 15) ends with the father telling his “good” son why he has killed the fatted calf for his wayward sibling:

 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.

But in real life, this is seldom the end of it.  Does the prodigal son stay on the straight and narrow or does he wake his father coming in drunk every night?  Has he sired children that are looking for support?  If he runs away a second time, will he be taken in again? In “Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said that: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.”

How many times?  How many fatted calves? How much money?  How much heartache?  Surely, parenthood is a lifetime job, but we protected them when they were vulnerable – who is protecting the old couple who have frayed their nerves and spent their nest egg for the prodigal son or daughter who just keeps returning?  It is surely a question for our time.

Recently, I mentioned the story of the prodigal son to a parent who has had to exercise some tough love with an adult child, but seems to feel painfully guilty about it.  She pointed out to me that the father in the story represents God, not a typical parent.  Ah, I sighed, you are surely right.  But don’t we all see that gracious parent in Luke as the model of the endlessly forgiving parent?  Killing those fatted calves whenever there is a glimmer of light?

Because, here is the thing.  It is terribly difficult to renounce parenthood.  Harder than divorce, harder even than becoming estranged from your parents.  Your children can cut you out, but it is extremely difficult to cut them out – even when you have run out of energy and fatted calves.

There was a grand essay by Rebecca Solnit in Harpers entitled, “The Mother of All Questions.”  The question she poses is whether to have children.  (She has none.) And, of course, this is a weighty question, particularly in these days of economic distress and climate crisis.  But, when most of us made the decision to procreate (or neglected to make it and just let nature take its course), we were not possessed of our full maturity or even our right minds.

So here is the harder question: “Is it ever too late not to have children?”  To cut yourself off from your children?  Or, less extreme, is it ever too late to not make parenthood a primary identity?  Not to feel like we have to have the patience of the prodigal’s father, of Job, of God, in the face of the relentless demands of adult children?  It is not a question I have had to answer in any but the most minor ways, but I have watched the anguish that prodigal sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, can cause.

Here is another strange thing.  There are few novels, plays, or poems about good parents with bad children.  There is Balzac’s Pere Goriot, William March’s The Bad Seed, and a few other horror stories – however, novels and poems about bad parents abound. (Think of Philip Larkin’s wonderful “This Be the Verse.”)  Culture is on the side of the children.  While our offspring are children, that is the way it should be.  But what about when they are fifty and we are seventy?  There is no right answer to this question, but I find myself with great empathy for those who are asking it.

For a view of differing attitudes toward parents, you could try my story “Tale of Two Grannies” or look at “Snickerdoodles.”  Neither of these tales, however, depicts the extreme situations I am discussing.  It is probably no accident that most of the stories of “bad children” are tales of horror.  Again, I empathize and only hope it is never a situation I experience.

Are We Taking the Wrong Message from King Lear?

I had just finished working on two piano duets with a good friend, when I asked her what else she was practicing.  She and I belong to a small group who meet periodically to play for each other and encourage each other in our endeavors at the piano.  Until I retired, and even for a period afterwards, I took piano lessons.  Our meetings and the preparation for them fulfills the same need with less pressure, more support, and less expense. 

In any case, after a discussion of which pieces we were each working on, I told my friend that I was torn in my old age between playing pieces easily within my limited capabilities or challenging myself.  At this particular time I was challenging myself with a Chopin waltz which required so much repetition and concentration that I was not really enjoying the music. 

It was the phrase, “in my old age,” that provoked an immediate reaction.  This kind of statement to any of my (older) friends usually starts with the kind and sincere words, “But you’re not old!”  I remonstrated that 70 is old, that I remember how my mother and grandmother seemed to me when they were 70, and – in any case – my body, which was at that time aching in various places (including my wrist from playing too much piano), was there to remind me.  As are my young grandchildren, who are great tellers of truth.  “Nana, why do you have those little things under your eyes?”  My children and grandchildren never challenge my description of myself as old.

 Once we were past the preliminary quibble over terminology, we then debated the value of challenging ourselves as we get older, and the discussion continued when our piano group met a week later.  The topic has been much on my mind. 

Among other things it has made me revisit King Lear.  Is it possible we all took the wrong message from Shakespeare’s great play?  Generally, people remember that Lear retired too soon, gave his money away without guarantees, and left himself to the mercy of his merciless daughters – at least the two daughters who inherited.  “Hang on to it all as long as you can” is the commonly received message.  Hang on to your power, your money, your ability to do what you always did.   But maybe that is not the message.  Maybe the message is that in the interests of retaining power, Lear spurned the love of Cordelia, his youngest and most honest offspring.  And he insisted on a retinue of hundreds of knights even in his retirement.  Lear wanted it both ways – to be relieved of responsibility but to retain control. 

I have written elsewhere of how we are increasingly governed by the very old. No one wants to give up power.  No one wants to admit that they might be too old.  Our President is old, the Speaker is elderly, politicians are increasingly staying on into their eighties and nineties.  In my lifetime we have gone from inaugurating our youngest President (Kennedy) to our oldest (Biden).  The baby boom generation is not giving up easily.  For a generation that didn’t trust anyone over thirty, they seem to be having a hard time assessing their own capabilities.  Is this a good thing?  The Fool admonishes Lear, “Thou shouldst  not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”  Maybe Lear cannot be wise when he is so concerned with exerting the control and power that he always did.

I can’t help but thinking about Greta Thunberg and her assessment that the older generation has failed the young, has made a mess of things.  She also reminds me of FDR’s comment that “War is young men dying and old men talking.”

Lear learns.  In the end he just wants to retire somewhere quiet with Cordelia and contemplate the world.  But it is too late; he has already made a mess of things (leading to the demise of both).

What does all this have to do with difficult piano pieces?  Good question.  But I guess that it made me think about what happens when we will not acknowledge our own limitations.  At the end of our discussion, my piano group agreed that some middle ground was probably the answer – sometimes challenge ourselves, sometimes give ourselves a break. 

This can mean different things.  Play difficult pieces slower.  Play them very slowly.  Slowing down can be an art form in itself. And tolerate playing less than perfectly.  Slowing down and tolerating a less than perfect performance are, in general, good exercises for people of any age; for the elderly, they are the limitations within which we can enjoy this last part of life.  Don’t look for the media to agree with me though; all things are possible according to Madison Avenue and the self-help experts.

For more on Lear, you could look at my short story, “Lear at Great Books” or my earlier post, “Ripeness and Readiness.”

What is the Place of Longevity?

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life – longevity has its place.”– from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech

Lately, the place of longevity has been in politics.  Joseph Biden has just been elected to the presidency at age 77 (about which I am thrilled for reasons that have nothing to do with his age).  Up to this point, the oldest age at which any President had left office had been 77 (Ronald Reagan).  Over the years the median age of election to our highest office has been 55.

Joe is not the only one.  There will be a regular old folks home in the capitol.  Nancy Pelosi is 80 and Mitch McConnell is 78.  The three of them will probably hold power together over the next couple of years (barring an upset in the Georgia senate races).  What does it mean when old folks are in charge?  I am a great believer in the value of old age, but what exactly should be the place of longevity?

Most workers tend to retire in their 60’s if they can afford it.  The average age of retirement in the United States is 62, with 64% of the working population retiring between 55 and 64.  Retirement cannot be mandated (with some exceptions – the military for example). In 1978, mandatory retirement ages below 70 were made illegal; in 1986 Congress got rid of mandatory retirement ages altogether.

And I know what you’ll say: 70 is the new 60, 80 is the new 65.  Maybe.  We stay alive longer; medicine can fix our hearts, open our blood vessels, and replace our arthritic joints.  And in the old days (before the 19th century), it was deemed inappropriate to quit just because you got old.  In that era, age was not a legitimate excuse for retirement from the English House of Lords; men were not free from conscription until they were 61.  King Lear is a parable on the problems with retiring too early (or at all).  Dante condemned a Pope to Limbo because of what he called “The Great Refusal” – retiring from the papacy because of age.  Plato did not think anyone was even fit to rule until they were at least 50, and he gave no retirement age.

So, I’ve been thinking again about what it means to have the old folks in charge.  Over a decade ago, I was mulling this over as I wrote a novel (The Last Quartet) about a world where a flu (yes, indeed!) killed off everyone except the very old (who had gotten the first round of vaccinations) and the very young (babies who were born with some level of immunity).  I tried to imagine old folks raising children and building a new world from the ground up as the loss of almost all working people meant that technology and infrastructure fell apart.  (You can read a short story I wrote as an abstract for the book here.)  In my imagination, the old folks rose to the occasion; they had no choice.  And the young knew no other world, so they accepted the leadership of their extreme elders.  At least for a while.

But, back to Washington and the leadership there.   I do not have the energy that I used to have, and clearly our current leaders do not either.  More, they did not grow up in the same world as most of their constituents.  They may have wisdom (some of them surely do – others I’m not so sure), but wisdom is exercised through careful consideration and not the hectic pace of daily agendas and crises.  Aging gracefully is, in itself, a kind of wisdom.  I think of Jimmy Carter as a model of this. 

In Galenson’s wonderful book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, the author divides the more capable among us as either conceptual geniuses who do there innovative work early (think physicists) or experimentalists, whose work is the product of the slow accretion of learning, experience and reflection.  The latter group does their better work in later years.  Where does politics fit into this model?  Or, one might ask, who in politics has any time for reflection and the slow accretion of learning?

In any case, we are about to witness the oldest leadership this country has ever seen at the same time that we are living in an age when change has never been faster.  You know by now that I think the old have much to offer to those around us, that old age can be a wonderful time of life.  But there are limits.  In the daily reminders or reflections of Buddhism, there is this: It is the nature of the body to decay and grow old.   We can deny it; we can push ourselves.  We can do well within the constraints of our age.  But it is a constraint – both to ourselves and our ability to relate to those around us.  And then there is the question of why we are seeing such longevity in our leaders; it could be they feel they have much to offer, but it could also be that power is sticky and difficult to shake off.  Or to want to shake off.  But elderly they are, and we will see.  I wrote my novel as a thought experiment; we are witnessing a real experiment.

In The Last Quartet, I was also thinking about the ability of the old to pass on wisdom, rather than knowledge.  You can read the prelude to that book here, but you need to come to your own conclusions.

What Old Folks Know About Miracles and Limits – “Speak Yet Again”

Do old folks have any wisdom to share? In King Lear, the Fool scolds Lear: “Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise.” (I, v,28) Are we wise? It occurs to me lately that we are wise about two especially important things.

I have been reading Wendell Berry’s book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition. Berry actually starts the book with this line that Edgar speaks to his father (Gloucester) after the blind old man, intent on suicide, has been tricked into thinking he has jumped off a cliff and survived: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” (IV, vi,55) Thy life’s a miracle. This is the first thing old folks know. Review your life and think about how it all could have gone differently – and more wrongly. Think about near-death experiences and medical procedures that saved or prolonged your life. Think about how lucky you were to have parents or caregivers who nurtured you until you could stand on your own two feet. Our old lives are miracles.

The other way that we know the miraculousness of life is through all that science has learned about the big bang, evolution, DNA, chance. Do you know that if the rate of expansion of the universe was different by even an iota, life on earth would not be possible? The multitude of variations and mutations that life had to go through to make us human? The number of sperm that were competing to be the person you became? Miraculous. Old people know this. “Thy life’s a miracle.” Truly, it is. In his old age, Henry Miller said: “The worst is not death, but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.”

The subtitle of Wendell Berry’s book is “An Essay against Modern Superstition.” For Berry, the “modern superstition” is that science can eventually know everything and everything can be dissected into… data and facts, I guess. It is a resistance to limits and promotes a world view that puts all faith in progress and assumes we can, eventually, understand and control almost everything. Berry says “the mystery surrounding our life is not significantly reducible. And so the question of how to act in ignorance is paramount.” This is the other thing we know.  Old people know there are limits to knowledge. We have learned this the hard way by making mistakes when we thought we had all the answers. And if we didn’t know this before, Covid-19 might have taught us a thing or two.

Old people know that not everything that can be defined as a “problem” with a definitive solution. I think of Schumacher’s differentiation between convergent and divergent problems in his Guide for the Perplexed. How to build a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and come up with an answer. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e. transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment?) is a divergent problem. Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions. Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.”

To summarize, I would posit that there are (at least) two things that old people know: 1) life is miraculous, and 2) there are limits on everything. And these two things are related. Every one of us has come up on limits again and again in our lives, and as we face old age and death, we are coming up on the biggest limit of them all. Yet, all of us have an increasing awareness of the miraculousness that we are here at all. No matter how many scientific books I read that try to scare me with their tales of how brief the existence of the earth will be, these cosmologists mostly just convince me of the miracle that I am here at all to experience it and appreciate it. (You might read Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” or “The Star-Splitter” in this regard.)

And there is another analogy one might make.

There are some Buddhist scholars (David Loy), Christian theologians (Thomas Berry) and renegade cosmologists (Brian Swimme) who muse that perhaps the universe has evolved humans to order to have a way for the cosmos to appreciate its own existence. This is a nice story. It could also be the story we tell about the old. From the far end of our existence, we can appreciate life in ways that young people cannot. We have come to appreciate life and all that it involves. We recognize the limits and respect them. And we acknowledge the miracle of it all and are in awe.

I recommend that you re-read King Lear and think about limits and miracles. To encourage yourself or for a way for thinking about the play later, you can read my piece “Lear at Great Books.”