Tag: Learning in Old Age

Old People as Their Own Best Teachers?

In my random reading this morning I ran across this quote from Yeats: “When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.”  The sentiment reminds me of James’ Beast in the Jungle – we spend life in preparation for some event, some epiphany, some revelation.

Bibliophiles like me have read a lot of books by the time they get old.  They might not remember all of them, but they have spent vast swaths of their lives living in a state of immersion in the reading experience.  As Ecclesiastes says, “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”  And now, like the preacher at the end of Ecclesiastes, I am old and am only too aware of the “weariness of the flesh.”   It seems to me that there should be a time to stop reading and to try to make sense of what we have read, what we have learned.  Montaigne wonders when the old man will stop learning and be wise in what he has learned, and it seems to me that his own essays were an attempt to do just that.

But it is hard to give up.  The internet assures me that this one new book will explain things to me once and for all.  Or that the latest novel will change the way I think of the world, or I must read a newly translated book that was never-before available in English.  And it is not just the push-marketing of Amazon and the like; when I look something up on Wiki or do a Google search, I am presented with lists of books that will elucidate the very subject which I am interested in – and I can have an electronic version of said book within seconds. And then there are the prize-winning books, the best seller lists, the books I keep seeing people walking around with.  Surely, of the “making many books there is no end.”

But even without our buying books, myriads of books are available to us.  Libraries have a far vaster array of offerings than they used to have, as they pool their resources and make what we used to call inter-library loans so easy.  Anything we want is available one way or another – anything we want except the answers that will enable us to stop looking.

One of my early blogs (“Possessing That Which Was Mine”) was about a vow I made to read nothing new – to go back and reread what I had read for a second time and to take time to process what I had learned.  That did not last long.  After a few months, someone recommended something that “I absolutely had to read,” and I was off.

In addition, I have cabinets full of daily journals that go back 21 years, and sporadic journal entries and autobiographical fragments going back to my childhood.  I have manuscripts of novels and short stories that I have been meaning to edit for years, but never do.  I clearly like writing more than I like revision. just as I like reading a new book better than really taking time to absorb an old one.  I am getting to an age at which I either need to use this material or recycle it.  Do I really want my children to read my journals? (Not that they would have any interest.)

There are various ways to handle such material.  I have a friend who, cleaning out his own artwork, offered to send all his friends a piece.  I happily accepted.  Other friends have reduced their written work to one flash drive that they can slip in their pocket and jettison before death if they don’t want their heirs pouring through the story of their lives.

But I am not ready to jettison my precious words without review.  So, I have decided to do a moderated version of Swedish death cleaning with the recorded experiences and ideas in my life.  First of all, I am going to try to stick to re-reading rather than reading.  For light reading (which for me means mostly mysteries), having long forgotten the “who-done-it” for novels I read over thirty years ago, I have the joys of Ngaio Marsh, Amandra Cross, and Agatha Christie to look forward to again.  For more serious reading, I will start with the novels that have meant the most to me over the years, probably first going back to Herman Hesse, Jorge Borges, and George Eliot.  For non-fiction, I am currently rereading David Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, and will soon move on to Thoreau and Montaigne.

And as for my manuscripts, about ten years ago I drafted a novel (The Order of the Stock Farm Jesus – excerpt here) about an old woman who encounters a young girl who, for reasons of her own, wants to collaborate on writing a list of rules for life.  What are the rules you live by?  What is the difference between what you do and what you think you should do?  Writing this novel was a good exercise then, but ten years later it seems an even better one.  In conjunction with that project, I will start reading my own voluminous journals (young to old) to see what the lessons of my life were.  What can I teach myself?  Have I learned anything?  Can I put what I have learned into words?  More importantly, have I internalized these learnings and started to act accordingly? (Can you teach an old dog new tricks?)

Virginia Woolf kept journals, and – although she never got very old – said that she wrote precisely so that her older self could read her younger self: “Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920, will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost…”  Marion Milner (A Life of One’s Own) started keeping journals in a desperate attempt to find out what it was in life that made her really happy.  Thoreau went to Walden and kept a journal to “front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”  I’ll let you know how my project goes, and – if you have attempted anything similar – please tell me about it!

I have written before on keeping journals in old age, “Journaling in Old Age.”  It’s not too late!  I didn’t start doing it seriously until I was 53, but I am so glad I did.  The benefits accrue not just in having a record, but in the very process of sorting out your thoughts every day, at transferring your experiences into words.  Try it.

If you have been journaling, you might look at an old blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for ideas about how to mine your own words for life lessons.  You might also look at my fanciful short story, “Nothing New.”

Wisdom and the Rose-Apple Tree

I have spent a considerable amount of time speculating about whether we get wiser as we get older, and – if so – can that wisdom be communicated?  But what if the end of learning, of trying, of experience, is to simply realize what we knew in the beginning?  Stay with me.

After the future Buddha had pursued years of ascetic training and sacrifice, he was still not enlightened. He asked himself whether there might not be a better way.  Immediately he had the memory of sitting as a child under the shade of a rose-apple tree watching a ploughing ceremony his father was participating in.  He remembered the relaxed joy and communion his younger self felt with the world around him and immediately knew that this was the way to Enlightenment – back to that simple childhood awareness.

I recently came across this quote from a Japanese Zen master (thank you Tim Miller) who was writing just a few days before his death about how he had finally come to faith and resolution about life:

One might ask if it wasn’t just an accident that I came to faith after engagement in strenuous study, but I would say it was not an accident. It was essential that I should do it this way. My faith has within it a conviction that all my self-power efforts are futile. But in order to be convinced of this futility of self-power, it was necessary to exhaust all my intellectual resources and get to the point where they would not reassert themselves. This was a most strenuous business. Before I reached the end of it there were quite a few times when I thought I had acquired a religious faith. Yet, time and again my conclusions were shattered. As long as one tries to build up a religion on the basis of logic and intellectual study, one cannot escape this difficulty.

This idea that one only understands by “giving up” or looking back to what one knew before one started comes up again and again in wisdom literature.  We could recall the motto of Socrates:  “I know only one thing–that I know nothing.” One might think of Job, who tried to figure God out, only to be struck down in simple awe at the end.  Or Saint Teresa of Avila who entered joyful trances as a child by twirling around with her brother chanting “Forever, ever, ever” – a level of contemplative ecstasy she only came back to in later life. But it would seem that we must go through the process of trying to get there.  But (and this is one of those big buts), then, we must step back.  I have often talked about the value of quiet and reflection in old age, and maybe that is the purpose of such reflection.

Then there is my friend Spinoza.  Spinoza wrote an entire book (Ethics) trying to use the geometric/logical method to figure out the nature of man and the best way to live.  It is full of axioms, propositions, and postulates.  It is a great book.  But in the end, we get this: “The greatest striving of the mind, and its greatest virtue is understanding things by the third kind of knowledge.”  And what is the third kind of knowledge?   It is intuitive knowledge.    And yet, the last paragraph of the Ethics cautions us: “If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found.  And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard.”  So it would seem that Spinoza agrees with my Japanese monk – study hard and then – step away?

One of my favorite pieces by Spinoza is the manifesto he wrote as he started out as a young man.  It delineates what he was looking for (“knowledge of the union existing between and mind and all of nature”) and how he is going to live and work as he gets there (great rules of life).  As far as I can tell (and I am no Spinoza scholar), he followed those rules and tried to find out how humankind fit into the scheme of things. He studied hard, thought much, and wrote it all down.  But he ends up by talking about intuition.

Here’s a story.  When I went back to piano lessons as an adult, I told my wonderful teacher that I loved to play but had no ear and was almost incapable of memorization.  After a few lessons, he told me I was mistaken – he had been watching me play and said I seldom looked at the music.  I did not believe him.  I believed – to some extent still believe – what I was told as a child.  You have no ear.  Maybe the trick is to clear away things we were told, not keep adding to the logjam of debris in our minds.  To let go.  Clear the decks.  Get back to the rose-apple tree.  It’s not easy though.

Fiction reading for this week is a new story, “Reflections,” which thinks about ways that our younger selves can (sometimes) pull us back to our centers.   It is about physical reflections and mental reflections. Enjoy.

Learning in Old Age – What Do You Say?

Learning is good, you say.  Our culture encourages old people to pick up new skills, new knowledge.  And there are countless “senior” universities and elder learning/travel programs to help us along.  OK.  But let’s think for a minute about what Seneca said (and Montaigne quoted in his wonderful essay, “All Things in Their Season”):  “An old man learning his ABC is a disgraceful and absurd object; the young man must store up, the old man must use.”  Seneca is commenting here on Cato’s learning Greek for the first time in his old age.  And Montaigne goes on to say “the greatest vice they [the wise] observe in us [old people] is that our desires incessantly grow young again; we are always re-beginning to live.”

The current popular opinion is it is never too late to learn something (if not everything) and this is a very American sentiment.  Here is Emerson at age sixty-nine writing in his journal:  “I thought to-day, in these rare seaside woods, that if absolute leisure were offered me, I should run to the college or the scientific school which offered [the] best lectures on Geology, Chemistry, Minerals, Botany, and seek to make the alphabets of those sciences clear to me.  How could leisure or labour be better employed?”  And so we go on educational cruises and enroll in sign language classes, spending our money and filling our time.  Me too.  There’s nothing really wrong with it, but it bears thinking about.  “The young man must store up, the old man must use.”  That phrase haunts me.

Maybe there is a middle way.  In an essay on reading the classics, Italo Calvino recommends:

There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth.  Even if the books have remained the same… we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing…Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.

Rediscovering what we already knew – and doing it ourselves without being told what the academy thinks it means.  For anyone interested in such an endeavor, I recommend finding a Great Books group (all the people in it will be old, I can assure you) in which you deal with the text and there are no experts or outside sources.  Similarly, I moved from taking piano lessons to meeting monthly with other amateurs like myself; we learn pieces to play for each other and discuss.   I participate in a neighborhood yoga group which is simply a group of willing participants.  In all these groups, we teach each other and we teach ourselves.

I am not denigrating classes and travel; I am trying to differentiate learning as a distraction from plumbing the depths of our experience to realize what, perhaps, we already know.  I want to distinguish between taking in regurgitated “professional” knowledge and developing our own capabilities, our own wisdom.  What did the fool say to Lear?  “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”  Perhaps I will try to define wisdom in some future post, but I think we know what it feels like.

In a different essay, Seneca discusses people who are looking for gems as they read, wrapping up nuggets of learning to represent their effort – something that is fine for children, but the older person should be doing something else:

But for a man advanced in study to hunt such gems is disgraceful; he is using a handful of clichés for a prop and leaning on his memory; by now he should stand on his own two feet.  He should be producing bons mots, not remembering them.  It is disgraceful for an old man or one in sight of old age to be wise by the book.  “Zeno said this.”  What do you say?  “This Cleanthes said.”  What do you say?

What do you say?

Note: To preempt your justified criticism, I know I am guilty of relying on “nuggets of learning.”  Most of them come from notes and journals I have been keeping for decades, but I endeavor to contemplate them rather than “lean” on them!