Tag: Old Age

An Old Lady’s Take on the True Danger of AI

Sunday’s NYTimes was full of articles about the economic danger of the AI bubble, and I am sure that it is a possible economic hazard for the companies involved. But I am much more concerned with the moral hazard, the risk that will be passed on to others, to us.  I think the danger is substantial, and so let me unpack it a little.

Every time I think about why AI scares me, I end up pondering what it means to be human. Human beings have always been greatly invested in proving that we are more than animals (think Scopes trial). The Bible spends a lot of time making sure we know we are in charge – and a step above the animals.  This of course has blessed us in using animals any way we wish. But, is there really such a difference between us and the animals?  Or is it just a great chain of being with a slight dotted line between man and apes?

Aristotle says that the difference is that humans are rational.  But surely AI is more rational than we are!  Descartes said that animals are akin to automatons or robots – merely mechanical, but that humans had souls.  Does the computer have a soul?  How would we know?  Another commonly repeated differentiation between men and animal is that animals adapt to their environments or die, while human beings are capable of changing their environment.  But, these days, it looks like changing our environment might be killing us, so maybe it all comes to the same thing. Maybe all we can say about all of this is that human beings need to feel special, we need to feel superior to animals, and we really haven’t worked out our relationship to a really smart machine.

The further I explored this issue, the more I intuited that the true danger of AI was the loss of any sense of worth or efficacy that we could do things ourselves.  I could, for example, have AI write my blogs.  I could just give AI a topic and set it loose. You might not even notice the difference.  You might even think that my writing has improved. But.  I would have abandoned the maintenance of a discipline, a sense of self-worth, a lifeline of true connection with those who read it.  And so it is with other things in our lives.  I play Bach rather badly, but I continue doing it, although I could listen Glenn Gould’s magic through my earphones. My husband and I still do almost all our cooking from scratch, including bread and desserts.  Not long ago, my son told me that he couldn’t imagine spending the time that we spend planning, shopping for, cooking, and cleaning up after meals, as if those were worthless things that should be discarded as soon as possible.  Surely the project of feeding ourselves could be outsourced in some way?  Yes, we could order takeout or go out to eat.  We would save time, perhaps, and some mental energy (but not money).   What would we replace those hours with?  Word games, news feeds, slick TV comedies and soapy dramas?  No thank you.  I understand that people will succumb.  I sometimes succumb, and, as I grow older, I may yet totally capitulate.  But it is not just about self-esteem and good home cooking.  It is about a sense of discipline. A sense of being in control of our selves – could this be what is meant by soul?

Let me just begin by saying that we have allowed discipline to become a bad word.  Michael Foucault and other modern thinkers helped in this regard, with the emphasis on discipline from without rather than Benjamin Franklin’s stress on self-discipline.  Discipline used to be valued, prized.  Discipline used to be seen as a way of living a better life.  Monasteries had disciplines, so did the Methodist Church.  Jesus had disciples.  Buddhism has a discipline called the Vinaya.  I never made much of my life until I learned a certain level of discipline, and I am sure most of us would say the same.

It is always hard to explain to younger folks that we study some things not in order to learn them, but to learn discipline.  I have never used calculus in my adult life, but I learned a lot about logic and determination by studying it when I was young.  I am currently studying French – not because Google Translate can’t meet all of my meager translation needs, but because the study itself keeps my mind active and teaches me something about the very nature of words and language.  Similarly, I write a blog not just for my readers (although I thoroughly appreciate you!), but for the discipline of having to read and think a little more deeply.  The process forces me to actually sit at my computer a few times a month to organize my thoughts.

Sloth and torpor are sins in most religions.  We might be reminded that we have given animals we eat a life of sloth and torpor – we feed them, house them, make all their decisions for them.  And then we see a picture of someone who has “liberated” a cow or pig and it is cavorting in the pasture.  Do we think it misses its sense of security? Do we think it preferred to have us doing its thinking for it?  “Taking care” of it?

AI wants to take our work, particularly our mental work, away from us.  For some, it is taking real work away.  We already have two middle-aged adults in our family who have lost jobs in which it is very likely that they will be replaced by some version of AI.  And such losses have only begun – why would businesses invest big money in AI if they don’t anticipate that it will save them money elsewhere (salaries)?

This is not the first time that our generation has seen technology replace our work. We went to school in the days of blue book exams and math without a calculator (except for the trusty slide rule).  But then things started to change rapidly, and my generation accepted those changes willingly.  I remember when dishwashers became common, and when I used my first garage door opener.  So much of the work-replacement seemed common sense – we didn’t even think about it.  Who wouldn’t want to replace the drudgery of cloth diapers with disposable ones?  But now we need to think, and thinking is exactly what AI is trying to take away from us.  It wants to program our reading and listening (it knows what we like!) and rescue us from the messy business of… living.

I am as lazy as the next person.  I know that, and I know it is a problem.  Much of the meaning of my life involves fighting inertia.  I used to be my own worst enemy, but now I think I’ve got a more formidable one.

I do not think that the danger is that AI will get rid of pesky humans; I think that we will become less human all on our own.  I will fight my personal battle on this, but it will take all the discipline I have – discipline I learned doing calc by hand and hanging cloth diapers on the line.

One of my favorite stories about technology is Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.”  He got his title from Sara Teasdale’s poem (also relevant), “There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time).”   And, Happy Thanksgiving!  For all my old lady grumbling, I am exceedingly grateful for my life and my loyal readers.  And this message was not brought to you by AI!

“Remember, You Must Die”

In Muriel Spark’s comic/tragic novel Memento Mori, old folks keep getting strange phone calls telling them nothing more than “Remember, you must die!”  The elders, rich and poor, male and female, are alarmed by the unwanted reminder and even recruit a detective to try to track down the culprit.  But the voices on the phone vary, and one of the characters decides that it must be Death that is calling them.  One might wonder why old folks would find such “news” upsetting.

In much earlier times, death was so common that people needed few reminders.  Buddhism recommends meditating on one’s own death daily, and monks often went to charnel houses to do so.  In the West, memento mori were common.  Paintings often included skulls and household objects were crafted to look like coffins.  It was considered good to be reminded of how brief and miraculous our being was.  In his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud intimated that people lived more authentic lives in times of war when the specter of death was always present, hard to ignore.  These days, the specter and certainty of death have surely receded. Silicon Valley is not even convinced that it is inevitable – they are “solving death.”  If Freud is right that acceptance of death makes a more authentic life, one might worry.

Lately I was reminded that we ourselves, we elders, are a kind of unappreciated memento mori for younger folk.  I was at a wedding last weekend, and surely was one of the four or five oldest persons there.  I thought again of Larkin’s poem “The Old Fools,” which he wrote when he was about 50, and begins as the poet looks at some of the elders around him:

What do they think has happened, the old fools,

To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose

It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,

And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember

Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,

They could alter things back to when they danced all night,

Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?

Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,

And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,

Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming

Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;

Why aren’t they screaming?

We are the memento mori now.  But are the young folks more afraid of death or of getting old? When Gulliver meets, in his Travels, the Struldbruggs – who age and age but are immortal – he sees them as a way of reconciling himself to death.  Gulliver swears that “no Tyrant could invent a Death into which I would not run with Pleasure from such a life [that of a Struldbrugg].” Gulliver decides that this amelioration of the mortal fear of death (which is far preferable to aging) is the only possible use for the immortals, and he considers bringing some specimens home with him “to arm our People against the Fear of Death.”

And why aren’t we “screaming”?  Well, some of us are as we run around cramming in travel and surgeries and whatever it takes to stop the reminders of our aging, but most of us accept it.  Some of us even like it.  In a way, our own bodies remind us that we are not going to last forever as bits and pieces wither, are surgically removed, or metamorphose into something we hardly recognize.  So, most of us have death on our horizon. I keep the memorial cards from loved ones who have passed away around the house where I can see their pictures daily and remember those who have passed ahead of me.  There is an old cemetery on my regular walking route, and one of the common headstone inscriptions is: “As you are now so once was I, as I am now so shall you be. Remember me as you pass by, prepare for death and follow me.”  Indeed.

Additionally, we have learned something in the process of getting older.  “Do they fancy there’s really been no change?” asks Philip Larkin sarcastically.  No, we know about the physical changes, but we also know that there is something that does not change very much at all. Don’t ask me to define it, but it is still there.  We aren’t screaming – not because we are looking forward to death – but because many of us have reconciled ourselves to it.  And, as Freud posited, we are better off for it.

I would note that one of Larkin’s very last poems, “Aubade,” is about the fear of death:

And so it [death] stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Poor Philip!  I would contrast his fear with Stevie Smith’s poem “Black March” about her welcoming relationship with death or Maya Angelou’s wonderful “On Aging.”

For one of my short stories about approaches to death, you might try “A Perfect Ending.”  Other blogs on this subject include “Memento Mori” and “The Purpose of Old Age.”  Jorge Borges wrote a story (“August 25, 1983”) imagining his own death, which I tried to emulate in my story “May 12, 2036.” It makes death very concrete when you pick a date!  Try it!

Or you might try Chapter 10 in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels.

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.”

Charlotte Brontë, Luddites, and AI

After Charlotte Brontë wowed her world with Jane Eyre in 1847, she disappointed her reading audience by stepping away from Gothic romance to write Shirley, at least in part about the Luddites of the early 19th century.  (Both books were published under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell.) The Luddites, you might remember, were a group of craftsmen who were protesting the installation of semi-automated weaving machines, making skilled weavers redundant.  Shirley, as it turns out, is more about gender, class and economic roles and less about the Luddites per se, and yet is a truly wonderful book with notable and quotable insights on all facets of life.  But, in the end, it shows us a world that is capitulating to technology with the same inevitability that our own world is.

I reread Shirley because I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence.  AI is everywhere.  AI is trying to help me (go away!) write this blog.  The very existence of AI makes me doubt the pictures I see and facts I read.  In the past, mechanization and automation have threatened manual workers and artisans the most (think about type setters), but AI threatens the white-collar worker, the computer programmer, the teacher, the content provider.  The Luddites in Brontë’s novel flail against “progress” to almost no avail.   Similarly, it is beginning to look like the creeping hegemony of AI is inevitable.

But back to Shirley.  When the Luddites initially destroy a loom in transit, this message is sent to the mill owner: “Take this as a warning from men who were starving, and have starving wives and children to go home to when they have done this deed.”  And not all the children are at home, as the mills take root and hire the cheapest unskilled labor:

The mill windows were alight [because it was still dark out], the bell still rung loud, and now the little children can running in,  in too great a hurry, let us hope, to feel very much nipped by the inclement air; and indeed, by contrast, perhaps the morning appeared rather favourable to them than otherwise, for they had often come to their work that winter through snowstorms, through heavy rain, through hard frost….

[Later] It was eight o’clock; the mill lights were all extinguished; the signal was given for breakfast; the children, released for half an hour from toil, betook themselves to the little tin cans which held their coffee, and to the small baskets which contained their allowance of bread.  Let us hope they have enough to eat; it would be a pity otherwise.  (from Chapter V)

Our anonymous but omniscient narrator clearly has his tongue in his cheek.  These children never have enough to eat.  And yet the mills expand, the new equipment is finally delivered, and we move from the plight of hungry children to the romantic interests of the local gentry, including the mill owner.

In fact, Shirley ends in a double-wedding and a brilliant future for the local textile mill.  Brontë’s narrator wraps up by looking into the future and telling us about his visit to the area long after the weddings and the new machinery:

The other day I passed the Hollow, which tradition says was once green, and lone, and wild; and there I saw the manufacturer’s daydreams embodied in substantial stone and brick and ashes – the cinder-black highway, the cottages, and the cottage gardens; there I saw a mighty mill, and a chimney ambitious as the tower of Babel…. (from Chapter XXXVII)

Yes, there are worker’s cottages with gardens, but there is also the chimney and the ash in this once green corner of England.

For many years, optimistic thinkers envisioned labor-saving technology as helping to create a kind of utopia, as giving everyone a chance to use their minds instead of their bodies. Manual workers would unbend their backs and pick up a book or a musical instrument.   Eric Hoffer envisioned university-like campuses for adults, freed from the workplace, who wanted to study in any area they were interested in.  Edward Bellamy imagined a world full of music, books, study, and communal dining.  But instead of having technology free us up to use our minds, it appears that we will have no need of our minds – AI will take care of it.   It might also be noted that Samuel Butler and William Morris wrote utopias where technology is strictly controlled for the benefit of humankind.

Just as the pastoral town in Brontë’s book ultimately and inevitably succumbs to the mill, I have recently watched one area of life after another capitulate to AI.  You might look at the front-page article in today’s NYTimes: “AI on Campus Casting Chatbot as Study Buddy.” The most disappointing defeat has been the way AI has been accepted by educators.  “The students are going to use it anyway,” they often plead, “so we might as well encourage them to use it well.”  That might be true, but I’m suspicious that it would be AI doing the “using” and not the student.  If things are made too easy for us, we get soft – in mind and body.  And if we don’t resist AI now, it is unlikely we will have the mental resources to do it years from now.  The Luddites lost and they lost badly.  But, at least, they realized what they were losing.  And they tried to do something about it.

For a story about how artificial intelligence is not always the answer, you might try my “Two New Apps,” or read almost anything by Ray Bradbury.

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.”

Anxiety in Old Age and the Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments of Second Mate Stubbs

I suffer from anxiety (ask anyone around me), but so do most old people.  And, of course, these are troubling times in every way.  I had always hoped that old age – assuming sufficient income and reasonable health – would be a time when I could finally relax; it is disappointing to find myself so anxious. I feel I should be old enough to know better, and surely old enough to realize that worry and anxiety (and one might throw in remorse) are useless states of mind.

There are things to worry about – I can give you lists of my concerns on the personal, national, and cosmic levels.  Of course we must try, as Niebuhr says, to “change the things that we can.” But worry and anxiety, in themselves, are ineffective against everything from tariff chaos to aging disorders. After we have done “what we can,” it is a matter of acceptance and control.  Some people find this through religion (Julian of Norwich assures us that “all things shall be well”), but that doesn’t work always or for everyone.  I tend to turn to Spinoza, who cautions us to rely on our rational capacities to keep ourselves on a calm and optimistic path (more on that here.)  Recently I found echoes of Spinoza in a self-help book by Judson Brewer: Unwinding Anxiety.  Brewer asserts that anxiety is a habit (I agree), and as old people we have had a long time to make sure that our habits are firmly entrenched.  How much of our day is unsettled by worry?  How much of our life?  My days are dwindling down to “those precious few.”  I don’t want “She Worried” sandblasted on my tombstone or on the memories of those I leave behind.

Brewer suggests breaking down anxiety into steps – Trigger, Behavior, Result.  In my case, the trigger is often a random thought, something that has just drifted through my poor brain to worry about.  My memory may be going, but my imagination has never been more ferocious.  So, one might say that most of my anxiety is self-inflicted.  No surprises there.  Of course, the trigger can be external: the stock market, an unexpected expense, or a change in health.  Whatever the trigger, the behavior is incessant worrying and generalized anxiety.  And the result is rumination, sleeplessness, inattentiveness, a mad search for distraction, and a generally bad day.  Brewer’s contention is that just by realizing what is going on, by stopping to identify each step in the process, we can be smart and inventive enough to change it.

It all sounds good, but it necessitates changing some pretty well-entrenched habits, habits written on our minds like wrinkles written on our faces.  Habits might have started in childhood as coping mechanisms and never got discarded.  But I am trying.  I have the time and the will, and I certainly have the triggers.

As you all know by now, I have been wallowing a bit in Moby-Dick lately.  I am reminded of the easy-going Stubbs, second mate of the Pequod, stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a dangerously fanatical captain (sound familiar?).  How does Stubbs keep smiling?  For one thing, he greatly enjoys the little pleasures of life, like eating the first steak cut from a killed whale:

Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.

“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!”

But one might wonder how Stubbs keeps his appetite for such pleasures amid the challenges around him.  Melville knew we would wonder and, after an unfortunate encounter with Ahab, Stubbs gives us his rules of life:

“Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth — ”

Of course, we should think.  I read Stubbs’ 11th commandment as “worry not.”  And I am firmly in favor of his twelfth; although, as I age, I find going to sleep much easier than staying asleep, for if worry and anxiety are not useful, are not good for you, they are even deadlier in the wee hours.

Brewer and Spinoza both exhort us to use our rational powers to counter anxiety.  Again, I try.  I guess the most effective rational argument for me is this reflection:  How many of the things that I worried about have come to pass?  Almost none.  The tree never fell on the house, the stock market rebounded, I was never fired.  Did worrying help prevent any of these things?  It did not.  Most of the calamities that have affected my life could not have been anticipated.  I am old and I know all this.  Now I just have to convince my habit-chained brain to recognize the truth and listen to Stubbs.

I recently saw an old video clip of Huston Smith interviewing Mark Van Doren (here).  I recommend it.  In the course of the interview, Van Doren asserts that we have a duty to be happy.  (Again, I am reminded of Spinoza and his exhortation to be cheerful.)  Van Doren insists that we realize and accept the nature of the world around us.  In fact, he says that this is the function of literature: simply to lay out the world as it is, so that we have no illusions.  Literature should not be didactic, he says; but it should be true.  I will never accept everything, but I also know that I am often tilting at windmills, at things that cannot be changed.  And I suffer for it.  Stubbs and Spinoza help.

Meanwhile, we all deal with anxiety in our own way.  You might try my story, “A Spoonful of Sugar,” to see one way that some of us cope (or distract ourselves).

Golden Nuggets From Melville

I have been re-reading Moby-Dick lately – very slowly and not for the plot.  An early critic of the novel (in a very negative review, of which there were many) said that Melville tried to combine two books – a work of tragic fiction and an informational text about whales and whaling.  I would suggest that Melville actually gives us three books and I’m grateful for it: 1) the fictional, 2) the informational, and 3) the philosophical.  Almost every chapter contains some nugget of wisdom, some spiritual musings, some explanation of the inexplicable, that makes rereading worthwhile.

Contrary to general belief, Moby-Dick does not start with the narrator saying, “Call me Ishmael.”  It begins with a brief section on etymology and a longer section entitled “extracts,” wherein Melville gives us a multitude of passages that he says were provided by a “Sub-Sub-Librarian.”  In this spirit, I will share some “extracts” from Melville over the next few months.  In the days before digital books and search engines, readers often kept a “commonplace book, wherein they wrote ‘extracts’ of anything they read that they wanted to remember, and thoughts about the same.”  So, here are some notations relating to old age from by commonplace book on Moby-Dick.

The first “golden nugget” is from Chapter 11, “Nightgown,” wherein Queequeg and Ishmael are cuddled up in bed trying to keep warm; it is December in New Bedford and there is no central heating.  Having just moved back to New England after many years, I can sympathize.  At least I have a mattress warmer (and central heating!).  Anyway, buried among the bed clothes was this little explanation of why we need to have a point of hardship to enjoy pleasure:

The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.  Nothing exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason, a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.

“There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”  Is this why assisted living homes cloy?  Why retirement isn’t always the unmitigated joy that we thought it would be?  Is this why many people look at the poverty of their youth as a “good time”?  Oh, to have wandered the Berkshire Hills with Melville and Hawthorne (to whom Moby-Dick was dedicated) and discuss such subjects!

Here is a second little gleaning from Moby-Dick.  This one comes from Chapter 29, “Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb.”  (Note that the chapter titles sometimes read as stage directions – Melville thinks he is writing a Shakespearean tragedy, and he is right.) This one is about Ahab’s age and sleeplessness:

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.  Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into one’s tomb,” – he would mutter to himself, – “for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle [hatchway], to go to my grave-dug berth.”

Do we resist sleep in old age because it is too much like its “near enemy” death?  Or is it just that we are not living so hard during the day, not wrung out by the pace of life?  For myself, going to bed is not the biggest problem.  After dinner, an hour of television, and a couple of chapters of a good book, I turn into protoplasm.  But I cannot stay asleep, and those early morning hours are brutal. (If this is you, try reading Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” to know that you are not alone.)  Soon I am up and roaming the decks like Ahab, and congratulating myself that the night is over, and I have made it to another day.

As a last note, Melville wrote a whole chapter on whiteness: “The Whiteness of the Whale.”  He talks about whiteness as a source of horror (think ghosts and albino monsters like the whale), purity (think brides), beauty (think pearls), and as a symbol of the “benignity of old age.”  This got me thinking about the “white hairs” among us.

White hair used to carry the air of wisdom or power; white wigs were worn by powerful men during the 17th and 18th centuries. “White hairs” is also sometimes used as a derogatory term, a term of generational resentment. Our politicians (I refrain from calling them statesmen) have gotten old and older – but often blonder rather than whiter.  When I go to church or classical music concerts, I am often amazed at the sea of white hair and pale skin.  Melville did, later in his life, write a poem about old age in which the last image compares the white of skim milk (old age), with the rich color of cream (youth):

Old Age in his ailing
At youth will be railing
It scorns youth’s regaling
Pooh-pooh it does, silly dream;
But me, the fool, save
From waxing so grave
As, reduced to skimmed milk, to slander the cream.

I guess it just matters where you are in time’s continuum.  Melville only lived to 72; he is fairly white-haired in his last portrait, taken at the time of his retirement from the custom house at age 66.   Like Hardy, he mostly abandoned novels for poetry in his old age, and the reading public almost completely abandoned him.  It was their loss, but it doesn’t have to be ours. Pick up Moby-Dick (you probably have a copy in the house!) and open it anywhere.  You will be rewarded.

The Aging Buddha and the Aging-Resistant Tech Boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spit on you, old age —

old age that makes for ugliness.

The bodily image, so charming,

is trampled by old age.

Even those who live to a hundred

are headed — all — to an end in death,

which spares no one,

which tramples all.

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

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

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

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

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Happy Holidays

A few years ago, someone referred me to the opinion pieces of Richard Groves.  His column for Christmas (found here or here) is entitled “In the Beginning, There Were Stories.”  Christmas is surely the time for stories – some of our finest literature is in the form of Christmas stories.  One thinks of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales or Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory.  There is, of course, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and my favorite – Little Women, where we begin with Jo moaning that “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”  As I age, stories are the Christmas presents that I most want – to remember them, to create them.

I love Christmas movies too, but over the last couple of weeks we have had some really bad luck with recent Christmas movies.  Last night, however, we watched “Christmas in Connecticut” from 1945 and enjoyed it thoroughly.  It was silly, sentimental, and predictable – just like Christmas should be.  I also recommend “The Bishop’s Wife.”

I have posted holiday blogs and stories over the years.  Three years ago, I posted “Holidays, Holy Days, and Old Saint Nick.”  For the new year, you might try “Baby New Year and Old Father Time,” or “New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age.”  If you are in the mood for fictional stories (or perhaps quasi-fictional), you might look at “Epiphany,” “Cookie Crumbs,” or “Boxing Day.”  “A Tale of Two Grannies” is not, strictly speaking, a Christmas story, but it is in the mood of the season.

However, if you want the best of all holiday treats in this hectic and over-commercialized season, read Robert Frost’s little poem, “Christmas Trees.”

I wish all the best to my readers this holiday season.  It is our first Christmas back up north, and with the temperature in single digits and a slight snow covering, it looks like it will be a white Christmas for us.  Here’s to a meaningful holiday season and a peaceful and healthy new year – “may your days be merry and bright.”  Thanks for sharing this space with me for another year.

An Old Lady Thinks About Population Statistics

One of the “constructive hobbies” that I have taken up in old age is reviving my French.  I have never (despite years of instruction in high school and college) been able to speak it, but I once learned to read it well enough to pass a language requirement for a graduate degree. However, I had long forgotten even the basics, and it has taken Duolingo a couple of years to get me to the point of trying to read/translate texts which interest me.  I started with Candide (a little too challenging), and have stepped back to The Little Prince (just my level).  Reading/translating the text slowly has given me a new appreciation of an old book – but more on that in another blog.

I get distracted easily (you might have noticed), and when the aviator is describing the Earth to the little prince, he says that there are about 2 billion grande personnes (adults) on the planet.  That got me looking up population statistics.  Now, The Little Prince was written in 1943, and there were no good demographic numbers during WWII, but the UN started keeping records after the war, and in 1951, the year I was born, the world population was estimated at 2.5 billion (presumably including children).  In 2024, the same organization estimated the population at 8.1 billion – an increase of 224% in my lifetime.  Compare this with the world population estimates for the nineteenth century, when over 100 years the population only increased by 60%.

The increase in the USA has not been quite that dramatic.  In 1951, there were about 150 million people in the United States; in 2024 the population was hitting 342 million – an increase of 128%.  There seem to be more people everywhere, though the increases are not evenly distributed.  Florida, for example, grew by almost 700% in my lifetime.  Massachusetts, where I currently reside, has only grown about 52% over the same duration.  In our rich country, populations have migrated to warmer climates, shorelines, desirable suburbs.  We all know this.  When I was growing up, my family had a summer place on a large island in Rhode Island.  It was almost a shack – no insulation, no telephone, plywood flooring.  The island was dotted with summer people like us and local fishermen (who lived in stouter dwellings).  Most of the island was shrubs (bayberry and blueberry) and small freshwater ponds.  Now there is not a vacant lot, shacks have been replaced by McMansions, and the freshwater ponds and their diverse habitats have been overrun by invasive species fed by the runoff from lawn treatments.  It is crowded, and it is so very different than it was.  You all know places like this.  It breaks my heart.

Almost nowhere is exempt.  Roads are crowded, tourist destinations are often unbearably swarming, and resources of all kinds are challenged.  Old people feel this particularly, as they can remember when it was otherwise.  Childhood must be very different when there are no wild places to explore.  Along with the increase in population of course, we have also seen an increase in the resources required to fuel a rising standard of living.  And poor Mother Earth is moaning under the weight of so many people. (Disclosure here – my own family is contributing to this problem; we have three children and eight grandchildren.  We are more than replacing ourselves.)

And yet, we have a cohort of people moving into Washington who think that a decrease in the rate of population growth is a problem.  One of them recently tweeted, “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”  This sidesteps the probability that population increases are a major reason for global warming, and also the facts of science, which contradict the hypothesis of “population collapse.”  But these are people who never let science get in the way of fearmongering.

The fact that life expectancy has increased by about 11 years since I was born has contributed not only to the population increases, but also to major changes to age distributions, which create problems in themselves.  Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that burdening our society, our planet, with an ever-increasing population would have beneficial results.  And if we really want more people in this country, why don’t we let in more immigrants?

Left alone, Nature takes care of overpopulation.  On that island in RI – severed from the mainland except for one small bridge – the rabbit population sometimes grew tremendously fast.  Rabbits everywhere.  Then the foxes would arrive, and the next year we would have no rabbits.  Soon the foxes – without prey – would presumably trot over the bridge and go elsewhere.  Within a year or two, the rabbits would return, and the cycle would continue.  It is not at all clear that Nature will take care of the human overpopulation problem, however.  Or that she will not be thwarted if she tries.

To many of the old, myself included, the world seems too full of people and yet devoid of any real human beings to interact with.  Try calling your doctor’s office.  Real trees have been replaced by phone trees; real people have been replaced by AI.  Housing is scarce and therefore expensive; driving has become onerous – don’t attempt to navigate the highways on either coast of Florida in the winter.  I am not a scientist, but it does not seem to me that we should be worried about increasing our population; I think we should be worrying about the quality of life (not lifestyle) of the people we already have.

Most of my statistics either came from the US census or the UN.  A very good site that compiles these statistics and is considered to be accurate is Worldometer.com.  I apologize for any inaccuracies and will gladly accept any corrections!