Tag: Montaigne

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.

Rules of One’s Own

I keep a journal and highly recommend the practice. (See my post on journaling in old age.) But, if you ask me why I keep a journal I cannot give you as good an answer as Marion Milner supplied. Marion Milner had a very specific purpose in keeping a journal for seven years: to “find out what kind of experience made me [her] happy.” You see, Marion was becoming aware that her “life was not as I [she] would like it and it might be in my [her] power to make it different.” And her first step was attempting to note every day what kind of things made her happy. You see, like many of us, Marion could not easily articulate what made her happy and was therefore unable to securely answer questions about what her aims in life should be.

The book that Marion Milner (initially under the name of Joanna Field) eventually wrote about this project is entitled A Life of One’s Own. It is a book that I heartily recommend with one caveat – one must persevere through the first couple of chapters. But then… it is a delight. It is not a book that gives you any answers – it is, however, a book that might help you find your own answers. And do not look for this book to pop up on the bestseller list; it was written in 1934. You will probably not even find it in the library, but that does not matter – you will want to own it. Luckily, it is still in print.

Milner gets inspiration from Montaigne and Robinson Crusoe. Montaigne had tried a similar exercise, similarly looking for rules that applied to himself and not necessarily to all mankind. Defoe’s Crusoe lands on a deserted island and has to figure out how to live. And so do we all. The title presumably alludes to Woolf’s A Room of Her One’s Own, which was published just a few years before Milner wrote her book.

Milner finds some surprises. She is much taken with evidence that her happiness seems to not to depend so much on events as it does on the attitude with which she approaches things. She finds that “there were a multitude of ways of perceiving, ways that were controllable by what I can only describe as an internal gesture of the mind.” Internal gesture of the mind. One thinks of Montaigne’s comment that “what matters is not what we see but how we see it.” And Milner considers how to use this discovery; more important, she takes us along on her journey to implement this knowledge. And on the way, she gives us as good a manual on mindfulness (without exactly using the current trendy terminology) as I have read to date.

Of course, Milner soon realized that finding happiness involves exploring the roadblocks to happiness. Fear, she found, kept her running in circles. It was her “taskmaster from hell,” and she expends much effort trying to pinpoint what she is afraid of. Death, of course, but more:

Then I began to see it as a fear that my personal identity would be swallowed up and then, gradually, I began to feel that it was this fear which had made me purpose-driven. I felt I had been continually distracted with a life and death issue, I had the desire to always to be getting things done to prove to myself that I existed as a person at all. So it was only very rarely that I had felt safe enough to give up striving, particularly as the enemy was really within my own gates.

Montaigne – long before Churchill – said that his greatest fear was fear. Do you know what you are afraid of?

Your way may not be Marion Milner’s way; she does not expect it to be. But Milner – who later became a renowned psychoanalyst and a distinguished scholar – gives us some advice, a methodology, and great encouragement. When A Life of One’s Own was published, it was well received. Stephen Spender entitled his positive review “The Road to Happiness;” W.H. Auden said that it was “as exciting as a detective story.” And it is. Particularly if, like Jeannette Winterson, you feel that the question “How shall I live” is the most “fierce” and fundamental problem there is. Again, there are no generic answers. Thank goodness.

The story this week is “My Neighbor Opposite,” which portrays another way of realizing what our heart’s desire is. While Milner’s methodology is preferable, there are probably many paths.

Aging Deliberately

I have always been challenged by Thoreau’s ambition to live life intentionally, with purpose and awareness: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” To live life deliberately. It seems like such an obvious and worthwhile goal.

I first read Walden in college. By then, it was too late to live my childhood deliberately – and is that even possible? For most of us, choices as to how we lived were severely limited until we were emancipated from our families. Our diets, our activities, our free time were all greatly prescribed. And the nuclear family meant that we often were not even aware that other choices existed. Do you remember how shocked you were when you ate a meal or spent the night at a friend’s house and realized that people did things differently? At six years old, I visited a house where the children were allowed to operate the television by themselves! Who knew?

During adolescence and young adulthood, hormones and the drive for emancipation drove me, drove most of us. And then, quickly enough, I was driven by my career and children. And too busy to think about much else. How else does one get through those years but by ploughing ahead with blinders on? When I visit my children now and watch them cope with young children and jobs and all the juggling of such a life, I still couldn’t tell you how it’s done – except that, under the circumstances, one has to suspend doubt that one can do it.

It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I really had time to pause and think about the shape of my life. There wasn’t much that I could do about the past (except make sure I was telling myself a truthful story – but more on that another time), but the future stood out as a time of … my own. Soon I would not have to work anymore, would not have to live in a given place or a prescribed way, would not have direct responsibility for anyone except my partner and myself. But didn’t Janice Joplin warn us: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”? Freedom itself can lead to futility, despair.

Jeannette Winterson says that the “question, ‘How shall I live?’ is fierce.” It is perhaps the only question. For so much of our lives things seem out of our control, and in our latter years we are, of course, subject to the decay and disease of our bodies. And yet. Surely facing deterioration and death is among the things we can do deliberately, unless we are robbed of this ability by dementia (which is just one of the things that is heartbreaking about that condition).

Here is Montaigne in his essay “Experience”:

We are great fools. “He has passed his life in idleness,” say we: “I have done nothing today.” What? Have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. “Had I been put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I could do.” “Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? You have performed the greatest work of all.” … Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken empires and cities.

So as we retire, we might ask ourselves Montaigne’s implied question, “Have you known how to take repose?” and realize its importance. In his repose, Montaigne looked inward and wrote his essays.

Of course, not all courses are open to us. How we (or the vagaries of life) have prepared our bodies and minds for this last part of life is consequential. Lord Bolingbroke who was forced into retirement in 1735 at age 57, wrote a treatise on study and retirement.  He reminds us such study “would have been agreeable and easy if he had accustomed himself to it early, will be unpleasant and impracticable late: such men lose their intellectual powers for want of exerting them, and, having trifled away youth, are reduced to the necessity of trifling away age. It fares with the mind just as it does with the body.” Cicero expresses similar concerns about dayspring mishandled in his essay on old age. But within the limits of our bodies and minds and preparation, choices still must be made. Old age is different from youth; to ignore the opportunities and challenges it presents will lead us to senescence mishandled.

Carl Jung always insisted that the stages of life had different purposes. “We cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” You can read Jung’s “Stages of Life” for his advice on how to spend your old age, but, hey, we’ve lived a long time. Maybe we can figure it out for ourselves. And then do it. Deliberately.

This week’s story, “Essentials,” is not about old age, but it is about the challenge we face at every stage of life – how to make life meaningful. How to live – within the parameters with which we are faced – with intensity and deliberation and good intent.

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!