Tag: Old Age

Who Am I? Why Am I So Afraid of AI?

Here is one truth about aging that we don’t talk about often: we are much more ashamed of signs of mental decline than we are of the physical decay of our bodies.  We don’t like our aging spots or wrinkles, but they don’t make us feel inadequate in the same way that forgetting a name or an appointment does.   Why is it that none of the physical infirmities of old age shame me?  I am not ashamed of my grey hair or the fact that I can no longer hike six miles.  I don’t like the brown spots on my hands, but I am not really ashamed of them.  But the mind is different.  When I forget a name or a common word and have to fish for it, I can exclaim, “Senior Moment!” and laugh – but I really do not think it is funny.  I think it is a profound loss.  And that is not good for the serenity I have been seeking.

Last week my husband came in after a morning errand to tell me that I had forgotten to put the gas cap on and close the little door after I filled up the car the day before.  I had also neglected to notice the message on my dashboard that would have reminded me to go do it.  I felt awful.  I occasionally leave a burner on or leave a light burning when I go to bed.  And, of course, I fish around for names and sometimes ordinary words.  I have always been somewhat absent-minded (as was my mother before me), but it seems to be getting a little worse and more mortifying.

The aging of my physical body does not please me, but it does not mortify me.  I stopped dyeing my hair a dozen years ago; I wear little makeup and have not explored plastic surgery, although I did have my upper eyelids lifted when I started having trouble seeing beyond their droop. Why the difference?

We clearly don’t identify our selves with our aging bodies.  There is Freud’s recollection of catching an unexpected glimpse of himself in a mirror:

Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. (from “The Uncanny”)

Similarly, Jonathan Swift, upon being led across a room in his dotage, caught sight of himself in a mirror and cried out “O poor old man.”  And so cry we all. And yet, loss of the mind – even in bits and pieces – is worse.  Many of us fear it more than physical death.  Is the reason we are afraid to die not the loss of the body, but the fact that the body will take our consciousness, our sense of identity with it?

And is our source of identity the reason that AI scares us so much?  Artificial hips or implanted lenses don’t scare us.  We are grateful for them.  We don’t mind using motorized scooters if we can’t walk or using hearing aids when we can’t hear. No one is afraid of wearing glasses.  But do we want technology to replace our brain? If we could implant something in our brain to “help” us remember names, would we want to do it?

One of the best sources of how AI was developed is a small book, The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut.  He tells the story of Johnny von Neumann, which leads into the story of Demis Hassabis, a developer of AI and the founder of DeepMind.  I strongly recommend this book – a lucid read on a difficult subject.  Hassabis finds no problem with developing a machine that can think better than we can, and he does.  One of the proofs is that his AI can beat chess masters, and also the masters of Go, a game developed in China over 2,500 years ago, with a system of grand masters known for their wisdom as well as their skill.  In 2016, his AI program took on the master Lee Sedol in Korea for the best of five games with the understanding that all five games would be played regardless of outcome.  AI handily won the first three.  Sedol was demoralized, but persevered and somehow beat AI in the fourth game.  The crowd exploded:

Outside the hotel, Lee’s fans were running in the streets of Seoul, chanting and celebrating their hero’s victory.  Even the team at DeepMind, who had lost, rather embarrassingly, were amazed at Lee’s stunning ability to create something out of nothing.  How could a man, however smart, defeat a computer like AlphaGo, able to calculate over two hundred million positions a second.  Surely it was a feat that would go down in history… something that all mankind could truly celebrate.  (The Maniac)

Why were they so happy?  Sedol had already lost the tournament.  They were happy because AI threatens our very identity, our purpose, our souls.  Needless to say, Hassabis was not happy.  DeepMind fixed AlphaGo and Lee Sedol retired a short time later calling AI “an entity that cannot be defeated.”  He said his “entire world had collapsed.”  Why would anyone play Go again? (I’ll come back to that.)

AI will not get old and forget names and leave the gas cap off.  It will get more and more perfect as my brain probably gets more and more unreliable.  But it is my brain.  It has brought me this far with its own memories and capacities.  If it were fixed, I would not be me.

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke had taken up the subject of personal identity, connecting personhood to consciousness and memory:

For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things: in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being.  And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.  (II: xxvii: 9)

Linking consciousness and memory to identity is problematic in relation to old age, when changes in cognitive abilities may challenge our assurance of continuous identity.  I will have to accept that.  But that same consciousness is my personal identity.  To lose that identity to a machine would be a living death.

I do what I can for my memory.  I push myself to read difficult books, I do puzzles, I enroll in a French class. I create appointment reminders.  I check the stove before I go to bed.  But it is a little silly to accept that the body is changing while refusing to believe that our gray matter is affected too.  And perhaps it is even sillier to think we can patch up our minds with computer chips and not lose our selves in the process.  In the end I am less afraid of my aging mind than I am of AI.

And I continue to enjoy doing the things that AI could do for me.  I play the piano when I could stream Glen Gould playing Bach, I knit hats that computerized mills can make much more quickly and error-free. I do not use AI to write my blog.  There is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in doing such things.  But I had these habits before the advent of AI; I despair for the children.

In Capek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots and where the term robot originated), about the takeover of robots as they first serve mankind and then get rid of them, one of the humans cries that the only solution is to “help people return to their former worries and labor…there is nothing more terrible than giving people paradise on earth.”  Because earth is not paradise and our minds and bodies are not eternal.  And there is some comfort in that.

For more discussion of identity, you might try my past blog, “Was She Someone?”

 

Taking Secrets to the Grave?

I am still thinking about ways to achieve serenity in these elder years, to find a taste of heaven before I die.  One barrier to serenity, it seems to me, is secrets.  Things we don’t talk about, perhaps we don’t even want to think about.  I have them.  I would guess that you do too.

Several recent books [spoiler alert here]– The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, John of John by Douglas Stuart, and Whistler by Ann Patchett – are stories about such truths: facts that finally surface (or fail to surface) at the end of life.  In Strout’s book, the true paternity of the son is known by all but not admitted to each other, while in Stuart’s novel, the Bible-thumping father is gay, and he is living with a son who is also hiding his sexuality.  Patchett gives us the story of a father and his beloved stepdaughter, whom a divorce separated from him many years ago.  The reasons for the failure of the marriage are learned by the stepdaughter, who has pined for her missing stepfather for years.  All of these secrets involve sexuality in some ways – adultery, homosexuality – things that seem important when we are young, but when we get old – not so much.  I think.  But still hidden truths fester – and they are not all about sexuality.  Some are about much more important things.  You know the ones I mean.

In The Things We Never Say the main character, Artie Dam (A.Dam?), has found out he is not his son’s biological father.  He means to confront his wife about it, but he… can’t.  And he sees his false position in parallel with the world around him, with Trump newly re-elected, and doing things that… no one wants to talk about.

Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true:  His country was committing suicide.

He loses interest in all things that used to mean something to him.  The discovery of a hidden truth has pushed him off balance and politics is keeping him that way. His son leaves the country to work for the EU and cautions Artie to talk to him only on burner phones.  He has a breakdown in his classroom and finally, during a heatwave when they have lost their power, Artie goes to lie down.  “When Evie went upstairs she found Artie in his undershorts lying on the bed, his arms splayed out as though he was sunbathing, dead.”  The image of Christ on the cross.  Sacrificed on the altar of getting through life without making a scene.  An autopsy reveals that his heart failed, but we knew that.

The father in John of John has hidden his sexuality from almost everyone except his ex-wife.  Living on the Scottish Isle of Lewis, he is the psalmist for a conservative Christian congregation.  His son, who is also gay but knows nothing about his father’s orientation, comes home with the need and fear of telling some truths to his father.  In the end, it is the father who has the most trouble accepting the truth of his own life – but isn’t that often the case?

Anne Patchett slowly unveils the truths that her characters are hiding.  Those who were children at the time had no clue what was going on – and mistakenly felt responsible for the anguish of the adults around them.  Some people think children know more than they seem to, but there was a lot my childhood self didn’t know, and it seemed that the adults in my life were going to make sure I stayed confused.  Telling such truths to people who were once children in our lives is often a true gift to them.  But it is not easy.

I should mention here that keeping secrets is harder than it used to be.  Ubiquitous DNA testing and data “matching” means that if you tell a lie about a child’s paternity, the child is probably going to find out about it.  Similarly, databases of newspapers, government records, census information, and criminal activity mean that if someone wants to know about us, there are a lot of places to look.  A friend of mine never told her children about an early brief marriage; they discovered simultaneously about both the marriage and the fact that their mother was not always truthful with them.  Secrets need to be weighed carefully against issues of need to know, trust, and the cost of revelation.

Time is running out for we elders – pretty soon keeping mum will not be up to us; that decision will be pre-empted by the run-up to death, or Death itself which “seals up all in rest.” (Sonnet 73)  Some people push it off until after their death – leaving behind letters to explain their past actions and money as atonement – but that is not a solution.  And remember, secrets do not have to be something locked in a real or psychological safe; they might just be things we prefer not to talk about.

In a reading about the Tao this morning I came across this description of the only goal we all have in common: “A gracious death with no regrets.”  We might keep secrets for good reasons, and we should have no regrets there.  But if secrets are impinging on the serenity of late life, it would not hurt to consider exposing some of the truths we keep from others and from ourselves.

For a story about some good deathbed counsel, you might try my story, “The More Loving One.”  And hats off to Auden.

All three novels referenced above are recommended.

 

The Old Age of Odysseus

Everywhere I go, people are talking about Nolan’s The Odyssey.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I have a deep love for the text and wonder how many people realize that it is a book about old age?

Of course, Homer’s epic is about many things.  Most obviously, it is about a man trying to get home.  When I first read it, it reminded me of a recurring dream where I am trying to get somewhere and obstacles keep stopping me.  When I was a student, I was trying to get to class to take an exam in the dream.  As a young mother, I was trying to get home to feed some starving animals in my dream.  I think this interrupted journey is a kind of universal dream theme.  But in reading The Odyssey in my old age, it is evident to me that this is also a story of old age, a dream of… what?

Everyone agrees that Odysseus is an old man for his time (between 55 and 60) when he finally arrives back in Ithaca after many storms and seductions to impede his progress.  He is obviously still a strong and vital man, especially when contrasted with his wonderful old dog and his ancient father – who must have been about 80.  He battles the suitors, and then the relatives of the slain, until the gods negotiate a peace, and finally… what?  Well, it depends on whom you ask.

The text itself gives one answer.  When Odysseus is in the underworld he converses with the prophet Tiresias, who tells him exactly what will and should happen:

But once you have killed those suitors in your halls – /by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze – /go forth once more, you must … /carry your well-planed oar until you come /to a race of people who know nothing of the sea…. And here is your sign –/ unmistakable, dear, so clear you cannot miss it: /When another traveler falls in with you and calls /that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,/ then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, Poseidon…/ And at last your own death will steal upon you … /a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age /with all your people there in blessed peace around you. (Book XI, Fagles translation)

Toward the end of the Odyssey (Book 23), Odysseus repeats Tiresias’s entire prophesy to Penelope, including the manner of his death.  His wife takes it as a good omen:

“And so,” Penelope said, in her great wisdom,

“If the gods will really grant a happier old age,

There’s hope that we’ll escape our trials at last. (Fagles translation)

But the Western world was not content for Odysseus to fade into a peaceful old age.  In the Inferno, Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell for his “horse’s fraud that caused a breach” and other deceptions, and out of the burning flame where he is locked for eternity, he tells Dante and Virgil that he couldn’t stand a peaceful old age in Ithaca:

Neither my fondness for my son nor pity

For my old father nor the love I owed

Penelope, which would have gladdened her,

Was able to defeat me in the longing I had… (Mandelbaum translation)

So, Dante’s Odysseus gathered up his old comrades (the few that were left) and told them they were “not made to give your lives as brutes” but to follow a higher calling – and they followed him right out of the Mediterranean, into the southern hemisphere, and to their death in an eddy of the deep sea.  And what is the lesson there?

The lesson for Tennyson, when he penned his great poem “Ulysses” was that old men should be adventurers.  He starts his poem with Ulysses being bored with a peaceful life in Ithaca:

It little profits an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren craigs,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws to a savage race…

And so he riles up the old guys to take to the sea again:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of our heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There is a contradiction – the old men are to acknowledge what they “are,” but to override their age and weakness to strive and “not to yield.”  There is no acceptance here.  The deceptive Odysseus thinks he can somehow put one over on the natural order of things.  In our world of old men who seem determined “not to yield,” to fight one last war, and to build monuments of many kinds to themselves, Tennyson’s poem leaves a sour taste in my mouth.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  If some of these old men went a little gentler, whole civilizations might be saved.

I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s movie – I am waiting for it to come to my small screen where the violence will be less overwhelming.  It is my understanding that Nolan’s version has it’s very own ending, perhaps a little softened and de-misogynized for the modern viewer.  I will continue to believe that Tiresias knew what would and should happen.  Odysseus would turn his back on the sea, make sacrifices to appease the gods that haunted with him, and rule in Ithaca.  And then, like all men he would die.  And, like lucky men and women, he would die at peace with his family and the world.

For an excellent supplement to any reading of The Odyssey, try Helen Luke’s essay in Old Age: Journey Into Simplicity.   For reading about how The Odyssey can affect your life, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic and Norman Fischer’s Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life are both highly recommended.  Keep a copy of The Odyssey close at hand when you are reading, of course!

 

 

 

 

 

Constructive Forgetting

I’m still thinking about single-pointedness and the mass of things we need to “unlearn” in our old age.  As Philip Larkin said in a poem of his own old age, left unpublished at his death:

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints… (“The Winter Palace”)

“Unlearning” sounds like something bad, a sin against progress – and yet it is probably the only way to comprehend and accept old age and death.  And one of the things we have to unlearn is both the ability and the desire to multitask.

Our generation learned to multitask with a vengeance.  Women (like me) were trying to figure out how to raise kids and have a career, while dealing with cascading technology – all at the same time.  Men were discovering that they weren’t married to their mothers and that they had no models for the new family life.  Frequent divorces amongst the baby boomers (the highest rate of any generation) meant that single parents had to figure out yet another set of staggering complexities.  Radios and televisions were constantly on – radios in the car and TVs at home – adding a level of input to already frenetic lives.  We were (at the same time) proud of our ability to talk to the babysitter on the phone while writing a report at work, yet increasingly frantic about coping.

When the kids left home (if they did), life got a little easier, but not much.  There was always a new computer system to learn at work, social media emerged as a distraction, and life was still messy.  And finally, we retired.  Time to meditate, concentrate on the important things – except we had forgotten how.

I don’t know about you, but my ability to be single-minded, one-pointed, to concentrate over long periods of time was shot.  I am fine doing Wordle, making supper, or doing other “short” tasks, but even with lots of quiet time on my hands, I have trouble sustaining “long” concentration. and I am not the only one.  Elizabeth Bishop bemoaned the “Art of Losing” as one grew older, but I put my hat in Larkin’s ring.  There are many things I would like to lose.

Many elders do continue to proudly multitask, as we keep ourselves busy juggling our pickleball, travel schedule, volunteer jobs, and Botox appointments.  Or we throw ourselves into the lives of our children and grandchildren. And remember that even having the TV on in the background puts you in multi-tasking mode! There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but I’m not sure that it really helps us to “know more as [we] get older.”

In his Convivio, Dante pictures the course of life as a parabola. We go up and we come down.  The “high point” of the parabola is around age thirty-five, a date Dante arrives at based on Christ’s death in this thirty-fourth year. “It was not fitting that his divinity should be present in something that was in decline.”  What, exactly, is “in decline” in the latter part of life?  What is “diminishing”?  I can give you a long list: teeth, endurance, bone density, strength – and you may add your own infirmities.  But, is there something waxing that compensates for that which is waning?  There is nothing very positive about losing your hair or teeth, but in losing reflexive multi-tasking, I think there is a gain.

My grandparents were wary of new technology; they finally bought a black and white TV, but it wasn’t on often and they spent hours just sitting on the back porch.  Papa often smoked his pipe and Nana picked at some knitting or embroidery, but for long periods of time the pipe and the needles just sat on their laps.  As a child, I couldn’t begin to imagine what they were thinking about.  Now I wish I could ask them.

Looking back over experience is one thing that time and concentration allow.  In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the “slow” review of experience is extolled:

The compensation of growing old…was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

And in Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, Lady Slane calls “looking back on the girl she had once been” as the “last, supreme luxury…. She could lie back against death and examine life.”

There is more than memory than one-pointedness allows, but it is hard to get there.  For reading, it is recommended that longer and more difficult books be tried in stages.  And so it is with concentration.  It is not a matter of fighting distractions.  It is a matter of acknowledging them and putting them away as no longer needed, I think.  But any suggestions are welcome.  I’ll leave you with this excerpt from “New Year’s Resolve” by May Sarton:

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

I am in constant search of “still water.”

For a story about remembering and forgetting, you might try my “Amnesia at the Airport.”

 

 

 

 

Heart Appreciation

I am still on my “serenity or die” project.  (Maybe it should be called my “last chance for peace project?”) In any case, rather than my usual course of examining those things that steal my serenity, I have tried to focus on those few moments when I do feel… serene (or something akin to it).  I got this idea from Marion Milner’s wonderful book, A Life of One’s Own, which I have written about before.  Milner uses journaling as an instructional path to serenity, a tool for examining what makes her happy in life.  One of the things that Milner says about her own search for happiness is that it somehow helped if she put her awareness in her heart rather than her head.  She calls it an internal gesture.  “I began to understand that my powers of perceiving could be altered, not by directly trying to look, or trying to listen, but by this special internal gesture.”  Sounds silly, but I encourage you to try this change in perspective.

In ancient times (Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew), people thought the seat of the soul was in the heart rather than the head – the Egyptians even threw out the useless brain during mummification, but left the heart as the departed would have need of it.  Hippocrates thought it was the brain where consciousness occurred, but Aristotle was sure that it was the heart.  Science agreed with Hippocrates.  Descartes even “identified” the soul in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain.  Yet, Pascal reminded us that “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”

Of course, my husband’s recent heart attack has us thinking of that vital organ, of heart rates and blood pressure (which we measure every other day).  And surely the heart responds to our mental moods.  I recalled how, when I first was learning to meditate, an instructor had us hold the bulb of a “hand thermometer” to demonstrate how blood flow increased to the skin as heart rate decreased when we were deep within ourselves.  A calm mind helps the heart function.  Is the reverse also true?

Grace Paley wrote a good and true story about old age called “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” in which the father gives the following advice:

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say—maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

Of course, talk of the heart leads me back to the mind/body connection, and the fact that I read over and over again that stress is a killer. “Stress can wreak havoc on your mind and body” says the Mayo Clinic.   It is not great for serenity either.  Stress can be caused by real challenges, but the body reacts just as strongly to the imagined ones – including all our catastrophic thinking.  I have spent a lot of useless time trying to change the nature of my thinking – but after reading how Milner cast her consciousness into her heart (metaphorically), I was ready to try circumventing the brain.  As a frequent victim of migraines, I don’t need to be reminded that the brain can be the enemy.

We all know that our brain cannot reason ourselves out of fear.  Camus told us that, in the eyes of reason, being alive is an absurd project. Reason does not help.  (And for that reason, AI probably isn’t going to help either.)  Hard as my brain has tried, it has been unable to think itself into serenity. Milner’s trick of casting our awareness into the heart is one way to side-step the mind and its Gestapo tactics.  Casting your awareness into another part of your body provides a new focus.  My heart is the part of the body that works best for me in that regard.  It is not a permanent solution, but it is a motivating foretaste of what I am after.

Maybe it’s time to give our head a rest.  “When you get up in the morning you need to take your heart into your two hands.”  And once you have done that, cast your mind into your heart.  It is easier than you think.

For a story about leading with the heart, you might try “The More Loving One.”

 

“No More Dying Then” – Resurrections of All Kinds

 

Spring is full of resurrections.  We watch trees come back to life and flowers peek through the dead leaves.  Spring brings Easter, of course, with its stories and promises of resurrection.  This Easter, I reread D.H. Lawrence’s novella, The Man Who Died, an alternate spin on the empty tomb, a lovely counter-tale about the missing body of Jesus.  In its way, it is as sacramental as the Biblical version.  Lawrence’s Jesus lies in a farmer’s yard, healing and thinking about his second chance at life, about the trap of language (“The Word is the midge that bites at evening”), and about the release of being reborn (“How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and be beyond it.  Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig-tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich”).  As Jesus hides in the farmyard, he befriends a feisty cock (rooster) that throbs with life – and he heads out for his next chapter with the cock under his arm.  (A little symbolism there!)  Another kind of resurrection.

And there are resurrections closer to home.  After the close call of a cardiac arrest this winter, my husband has taken to calling this his “bonus time.”  Unlike many heart attack victims, he has not seemed to suffer depression, but rather seems to bask in this resurrection time with gratitude.  One more spring.  His appreciation of life has rubbed off on me.

Of course, resurrection does not always happen.  Our granddaughter had the hard experience this year of working over the body of a fellow choir member when he fell beside her as they processed down the aisle. She had been trained in CPR, and if he had survived it might have been a wonderful experience for her.  As it happened, he did not and the death was very hard to process.  But isn’t that why resurrections are so joyful – because they might not have happened?

There are many kinds of resurrections.  In his autobiography, G. K. Chesterton said that he became a Roman Catholic because he adored the rites of confession, penitence, and the washing away of sin, a weekly process for the resurrection of the soul:

Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning ….  He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in his own image.  He is now a new experiment of the Creator.  He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old…. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.

That last bit is lovely with the vision of an oldster facing the world anew, feisty as a young lamb.

Shakespeare, as usual, has his own take on resurrection and immortality.  We think of his sonnets as love letters, but there are a very few that tackle other challenges of life.  I think most often in this regard of Sonnett 146, one of my favorites:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Fooled by] these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

I like Shakespeare’s form of “resurrection” because it is an awakening to a new way of life, that not only frees us from the hold of the body and other earthly possessions, but simultaneously frees us from fear of death.  The imperative, “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross,” could be a touchstone for one’s entire life! I love the way the final couplet takes a sharp turn from fear of death (“that feeds on men”) to a kind of immortality where death has no sting (“no more dying then”).  I might note that there was an error in the second line of the original printing of this poem, so we are left to guess what the Bard meant to say.  You will see many versions out there, but I prefer this one.

So, may we all have a resurrection of sorts this spring.  May we value properly our “hours of dross” and wash away our sins and cares.  Do you remember, as Chesterton seems to, what it felt like to be five years old in a field full of daisies and dandelions?

For perhaps real resurrection – enlightenment, peace, whatever you want to call it – comes not from rising from the dead, but from escaping from the fear of death and all the death-like things – past mistakes, regrets, losses and future fears of all kinds.   Old age brings us both closer to the brink and possibly closer to acceptance. Once we get past our terror of the end, we are the (resurrected) fearless five-year-old again.  May it be so for you.

For other kinds of resurrection, you might try my tales, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse” or “A Balm in Gilead.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“When Will They (We) Ever Learn?”

In these dark days, when the moral compass of this country has gone amok, I keep remembering the words of a hero of my hippy days.  “When will they ever learn?” was the chorus of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Dolly Parton, with the most iconic version being that of Peter, Paul and Mary.

And now my generation is in charge (although some of them should have long since segued into assisted living) and, clearly, we have never learned.  We were angry in the 1960s, but we were also hopeful.  I am no longer hopeful.  It is our generation that comprises Fox News’ largest audience segment, with the median viewing age being in their late 60s.  An impressive majority of those over 65 voted for Trump.  When will we ever learn?  And here we go – blundering into Iran, killing people and bulldozing flowers, while the entire world holds its breath and hopes there are not radioactive repercussions in addition to the disastrous economic impacts.

Seeger’s question can be looked at in two ways.  We could refer to each individual one of us.  We have all had the experience of watching someone in our lives make the same mistake (the friend who marries the same kind of man) over and over again. We do it ourselves.  We say, after the fact, that we should have known better – and yet.

But the we is also collective.  Our country has made the same mistakes over and over again.  Viet Nam apparently didn’t teach us anything; nor did the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Despite extensive postmortems after these initiatives… we do it again.  Off we march with optimistic hopes to spread democracy and make the world safer for mankind.  But there is no democracy and the world is less and less safe.  And we kill our own as well as theirs – the difference is that they kill our soldiers, while we kill men, women, children – whoever is in our way.  And now we are saying that even the most rudimentary (and humane) rules of war do not apply to us.

S. Eliot wrote a wonderful play about the death of Thomas Becket called Death in the Cathedral. In a key moment, as his death approaches, we get these lines from Beckett:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns.  Sever

The cord, shed the scale.  Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

“Men learn little from others’ experience.”  A depressingly true statement.

And then there are the last lines, which seem to sum up the whole problem: “The fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheels on which he turns.”  It seems to me that we have become more and more foolish.  Washington thinks it can fix our problems by killing people.  Silicon Valley thinks they can overcome aging and death.  And here we sit as children are bombed, people die for lack of health insurance, and innocent children go to detention camps.

One more example.  Scientists have had a pretty good idea that global warming was happening and what was causing it since at least 1938 when Guy Callendar assembled statistics going back into the 19th century.  And even if we didn’t believe in global warming, we knew that the availability of oil and gas was a disruptive factor, particularly when the gas shortages of the 1970s (1973 kicked off by an Arab embargo after the Yom Kippur war, and 1979 set off by the Iranian Revolution) Our generation sat in line for enough fuel to at least get us to work. (We were hippies no longer.)  There was much talk about alternative energy sources at that point – over 40 years ago!  Clearly no lessons were learned.  And the planet, indeed, has suffered.  Where have all the flowers gone?

Our generation did learn some things.  We stopped smoking, we learned to use a PC (and a cell phone, a tablet, and a smart TV).  We learned how to support ourselves (more or less), and we learned to exercise – and we learned that a little discipline is not always a bad thing.  But we didn’t learn how to stop wars, greed, and amoral leadership.

In her book about aging (The Last Gift of Time), Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the young can learn little from the old, but the old can learn from the young.  I am not ready to learn from Generation Z, but maybe we could all profit from learning from our younger selves.  We thought we could change things.  Perhaps we need to tap into our long-gone hippie selves and see what is left of a generation that genuinely thought that the answer to “when will we ever learn?” was “when our generation is in charge.”  Oh, the pity!  And surely our generation is in charge.  Old people rule our country, elders who have not gotten wise like the ancient Yoda, but only wrinkled and bald like him.  (Of course, Yoda had 900 years to learn what he knew, a luxury of time neither we nor our planet has.)

As Eliot has the chorus say at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, “Lord, have mercy on us.”

 

 

 

 

Golden Years?

We have come to talk about old age and retirement as the “golden years.”  The current use of this term is relatively recent (1959) and usually dated to advertisements by Del Webb for the new “Sun Cities” sprouting up in Arizona and elsewhere.  In the past, however, the “Golden Age” referred to earlier and better times of men. Things were perfect in the Garden of Eden – and it was all downhill from there.

According to Ovid and the mythology of even earlier civilizations, including the Hindu and Judaic (Book of Daniel), the first age of man was the Golden Age, from which we have degenerated through the Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages.  Over time, according to ancient law, things got worse instead of better (as in the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

This was, in part, because early man hadn’t developed the cult of progress.  Until the Age of “Enlightenment,” there was no assumption that the world was “progressing.”  In fact, there had been an accepted notion that culture was deteriorating from an earlier “golden” time as noted above.  The Enlightenment changed that; progress was real, progress was good, progress became a god.  But, for the aged, this reversal also produced the paradox of a cultural ideology of progress juxtaposed with the reality of the aging body. (Think about that!)  But back to the “golden years.”

Of course, golden also has connotations of wealth.  And we often conflate a good old age with a financially rich one.  Theo of Golden, a recent bestseller, is a good read about an admirable elder, yes, but Theo is an old man with endless riches at his disposal.  And while it is true that Theo often uses his riches to help others, it is also true that he is not on a budget, nor does he worry about what happens if the cost of heating his house goes up dramatically.  Is money necessary for a good old age?  Do you need to have enough to buy friends and a house in Sun City?  “Better to go down dignified/With boughten friendship at your side/Than none at all. Provide, provide!” says the hag of Frost’s poem.

In years past, old people with money were generally depicted as misers.  One might think of Silas Marner, Scrooge, Uriah Heap, or Mr. Potter of It’s a Wonderful Life.  Now, gold is looked on as a necessity and not a flaw in old age.  Of course, capitalism has encouraged such a change – don’t hoard your money, spend it!

The highly underrated G. K. Chesterton had more naturalistic take (long before 1959) on the golden glow of old age:

Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.

Here, gold is a matter of perception, specifically a change in appreciation that comes with age – or so we would hope.  And the notion of progress is meaningless in the face of the cycles of nature.

Of course, we might also nod to Robert Frost again, who brings us back to the golden age being at the beginning of life and reminds us that the true gold is nothing that we can grasp:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Our memories of early days are often golden.  We are nostalgic for our past, but our childhood Edens cannot stay nor be re-created.  They can only be recognized and remembered.  But it might be the wisdom of old age that makes us remember and finally realize that the real gold is in all Chesterton’s leaves and faces.  And that, perhaps, for us and for our planet, progress is overrated.

For other of my posts about the golden autumn of old age, you might try “Accepting the Season” or “Bare Ruin’d Choirs.”

“Something Good” – Wendell Berry and Remembering When We Made a Difference

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good. (from “Something Good,” The Sound of Music)

Last week, I wrote about the regrets that we all have about our pasts and wondered about the best way to handle them in our old age.  Reading Wendell Berry’s new book, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, made me think about the “good” things from the past.  If you’re like me, you spend much more time with your shames and regrets than you do with “worthy” acts.  What things in our lives have been for the good, what experiences have we had and stories have we told that made a positive difference, which resulted in “something good”?  The fortunate among us have had an old friend, student, or co-worker thank us years later for something we did not even remember doing for them or for kind words that we can’t even recall at all.  It would probably do us all good to dwell more often on the positive aspects of our lives and less often on our (numerous) regrets.

Berry’s book is narrated by Andy, the very elderly grandson of Marce Catlett.  Long ago, Marc stood up to the Duke Tobacco interests by sharing his experience with his neighbors.  His oft-repeated story of one day, told over and over, shaped the lives of all those around him in the wonderful world of Port William.  The day was devastating, but the main part of the story is about how Marce immediately picked up and carried on and worked with fellow farmers so that such a day would never happen to them again.

First, let me say that Wendell Berry just published this book at the age of 91, and it is a true gift for all of us.  Marce Catlett  is a spare book written with a sledgehammer, and not just a story about 1917.  Berry has a pretty good idea about not only what is wrong in Washington these days, but what is wrong with all of us.  And our children.    The novel can be read in a day, but it would take much longer than a day to forget it – and so it was with Marce Catlett’s story about coming home from a tobacco auction with less money in his pocket than it had taken him to grow the crop.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful writer about wonderful things; many of us know his poetry (think of “The Peace of Wild Things” or “How to be A Poet).   We also have read his essays, which go back to the 1960s and include gems like “Living in the Presence of Fear” and “Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer.”  But it is his fiction – the novels and stories of Port William – that future generations will look back on for a prophetic voice that was seldom heeded.  Marce Catlett is simply the culmination of this story.  You do not have to have read any of the others to appreciate this latest (but hopefully not last) work though; Berry fills us in.  I was greatly disappointed not to find it listed in this week’s NYTimes Book Review as among the best of 2025; they are wrong.  It is probably the very best of 2025.  And relevant to us elders – written by an elder, narrated by a very old man, and insistently recalling the valuable parts of a world gone by.

And I might add one more thing here.  In Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson we have two writers who give us alternative views (alternative to both evangelical and mainstream religion) of the place of Christianity in human life.  For those of us whose symbols, music, and history are steeped in the Christian faith, such alternatives are much needed and hard to come by.  I don’t know if this will be Berry’s last novel, but it is precious cargo, nevertheless.

Almost all of Berry’s fiction – like most of Faulkner’s – takes place in a well-defined place and gives priority to the work that is done in that place.  Like the descriptions of whaling in Moby-Dick, which ground us in the real and creates a community among the participants, in Berry’s latest book we get the details of raising a certain kind of tobacco.  We all spent much of our lives working – often in jobs that do not even exist anymore. Berry reminds us that the work was real. The lives were real.  At one point he catalogues the buildings and equipment on the old farms and says he is not writing a requiem for all that, but for “the way that once lived among them, the paths worn and wearing day by day, which connected them to one man’s effort and desire” (145).  This tribute to a careful kind of farming stands alongside a description of a careful kind of living that we don’t encounter very often these days.  It also reminds us that the memory of the old – for instance, about how to grow a crop or prepare a recipe – used to be greatly valued.  Now we are more likely to go to AI than Grandpa for such knowledge.

The book is also a diatribe against greed.  “Greed has passed to and fro over the whole earth, reducing life to matter and matter to price.  Though time and change bring sorrow, they belong to the seasons, to fecundity and health, and greed is a mortal disease” (150).  Indeed.  My guess is that was the reason Wendall Berry penned another book in his ninetieth year was to make precisely this point in a world that is sacrificing everything to… greed.

In the end, Andy comes “at last to see his grandfather Catlett, his father, and himself as three aged brothers.”  In his own old age, he now understands their old age.  I often think of my grandparents in this regard and wish I had appreciated them more.  They too had their stories of survival that come back to me – like the one about how, during the Depression, they rented out their house and lived in a neighbor’s garret in order to realize some desperately needed marginal income.  They laughed when they told the tale; they were proud that they had found a way to get through.  I see lessons there that I did not see when I was younger – including a lesson from the laughter.

I was very disappointed that Berry’s new book was not included in the NYTimes notable books for 2025, but there is a poem by Wendell Berry (“The Loved Ones”) in a recent New Yorker.  And, if you like Marce Catlett, there is reading for the rest of your lifetime in the stories of the people of Port William.  These books will change you.  They will inspire you.  And, hopefully, they will nudge you to recall the stories of your life that made a positive difference.  You “must have done something good.”  Yes.

In relation to old age, I would also particularly recommend Berry’s short stories “Fidelity” and “The Inheritors.”  The first is about the end of the life of one man and the effect on those who loved him.  It will get you thinking about technology and death and community.  The other is a portrait of an active man entering into the diminishments of old age and yet keeping his spirit whole.  Read them. 

Three Stories About Old People with Regrets

I read a couple of books and watched a movie lately about old people at the end of their lives who are trying to deal with a major regret.  I would recommend these stories highly – any of them are perfect for a cold winter’s evening.  The books are The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, and the movie is The Great Escaper (on Amazon). I’ll try to talk about these stories without spoiling the endings – and, in these cases, the endings are true endings.  They are all about elders trying to deal with regrets, mistakes, and profound guilt.  It seems to me that this is a prevalent and profound problem of old age; in old age we have a lot of time to think and a tendency to look back.  If you are exempt from major regrets, you are privileged indeed.  I surely have moments in my past that I regret, that I am still trying to deal with, and which flare up from the embers of my memories.  What to do with them?

Religion or AA might tell us that we need to atone, or, at least, apologize.  But the older we are the more likely it is that the actions are long buried along with many of the participants.  How do we deal with those regrets, guilts?  Make a deathbed confession?  Ask a priest or someone else we trust to absolve us?  Must we realize, finally, that they were the product of where we were at the time and chalk it up to karma – and assume we will pay or have paid for our transgressions one way or another?  I was recently thinking of Dryden’s riff on Horace – “Happy the Man” – but that speaker is “secure within” and satisfied that he has “had his hour.”  What if we regret the hour?  And how do we adjust the scales so everything comes out alright?  As the clerk at the Marigold Hotel reiterates, “Everything will be alright in the end, so if it is not alright, it is not the end.”

Each of these three stories concern an older person who sincerely regrets something in their past.  And, in at least two of the cases, they surely have committed (or given tacit approval to) a grievous act.  The third case is situational, where a soldier does what he has to do, but there are dire consequences.  All of these incidents happened many years ago, but shadow the rest of the lives of these characters. What to do?  What can be done?

Let me tell you how the characters in these stories deal with it.  The protagonist in The Correspondent, Sybil, (unsurprisingly) writes letters, letters she sends and letters she does not send.  Besides having mortality breathing down her back, she is dealing with the imminent loss of her sight.  This is a woman who is deeply attached to the written word in all its forms, and it is the word that keeps her going.  Sybil writes to famous people (like Joan Didion), some of whom even write back.  She writes to her children, old friends, and herself.  She writes to living people and dead people and, in the process, she slowly seems to sort things out.  It will make you mourn the lost art of letter writing; it will make you want to write letters.  Or a journal.  Do it.

Ian McEwan waited until he was in his mid-seventies to write one of his finest books.  Earlier in his life, of course, he wrote the classic Atonement, about guilt and absolution.  In Atonement, a woman spends a lifetime trying, at least partially by writing, to make sense of a youthful mistake.  In What We Can Know, there is an academic mystery being researched in the far future.  Where is the lost poem, the renowned corona of which there was only one copy?  The book sets itself up as a literary mystery, which is resolved by the “last testament” of the poet’s elderly wife – she has produced one piece of writing and destroyed another, in revenge and atonement.  The novel asks questions about the words and deeds we leave behind; the title morphs from What We Can Know to “what can we know?” This story got me thinking (again) about what to do with all my old journals.

(Incidentally, the novel looks backward, but it is framed in a time period a hundred years hence, and we get this caution from our narrator:  “I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them in the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.  Do not trust the keyboard and screen.  If you do, we’ll know everything.” Fair warning.)

The Great Escaper stars the very old Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson.  Jackson died shortly after the film was made.  Both stars were closing in on ninety when the filming was done, which was only appropriate as the story is about a 90-year-old man.  I have to admit that at first it is very hard to watch those very old bodies – much older than we usually see on the screen – but the film soon sweeps you away with both the love between the two oldsters and the heroic effort that Bernie makes to understand and atone for his actions at the beach at Normandy seventy years before. When I was young, I would not have believed someone could be so tormented by things that they did seven decades ago; now I know better.   And when Bernie gets to the 70th commemoration of the Normandy invasion, he finds that he is not the only one who is abashed to be treated as a hero when he feels like a traitor.  But, back on the beach and at the military cemetery, he faces his demons.  Those demons might not be completely vanquished, but they are at least acknowledged and shared.

These stories do not display miraculous cures for our trespasses; even if our sins are forgiven, we still cannot ever forget them.  Sybil, the letter-writer in The Correspondent, has made a pen pal of Joan Didion, and she quotes her: “What I have made for myself is personal, but it is not exactly peace.”  Stephen Crane put it more crudely: “But I like it/Because it is bitter, /And because it is my heart.”  Our regrets are personal, they are bitter, but when we at least acknowledge them, we might be able to accept them as part of who we are.

I’ll end with one of my favorite poems, “The Ideal,” by James Fenton.

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

For one of my stories about regret, you might try “Shrove Tuesday.“