Tag: reading

“Our Elders Are Books”

I recently read Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth – a memoir of sorts about his removal to a small homestead in Ireland to practice self-sufficiency and environmental integrity, and perhaps to escape the culture that he has become increasingly disaffected with.  Part of that culture, he realizes, is the written word, the words he reads and the words he writes.  Words are the “savage gods” referred to in the title.  “I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.”  Much of the book is a discussion of writing and words; we forget that they are only symbols; misplaced emphasis on words pulls us away from a direct connection with the world. 

All this was very interesting, but it was his quote from Gary Snyder that really got my attention:  “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”  What does this mean?  Does it mean that our books are our shamans, priests, wise men?  It surely discounts personal experience, oral history, and common sense.  And, if it’s true, it surely discounts the elders.  I had trouble finding the exact citation from Snyder when I went to look for the source, but I did find this in Snyder’s essay “Tawny Grammar”: “In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”  Think about that.

Before a general level of literacy, experience had real and appreciated value.  Elders had knowledge about the best time to plant the crops, best way to make a mattress, best chance to find a wife.  They were the repository of the history of a family, a district, a craft, a people.  Even when their bodies started to fail, they could provide expertise and counsel that was valued. In early (non-literate) cultures, the memory of the elders was a critical asset, a form of social capital. And it was largely the written word that changed this. 

What did an increase in literacy mean for the elderly?  It might have meant that other, often younger, members of the household – the children and grandchildren – could read the new broadsides and chapbooks that their elders could not decipher.  One could imagine that, rather than tales told around the hearth by the oldest member of the group (the member with the longest memory and the most to “tell”), the literate were now reading to the illiterate. For these reasons, communal value increased for someone who could read to the group or could manage the new insistence on written legal documents – usually the junior members of the group.  One might think about how we rely on the young to fix our computers or set up our smart TVs.

Is it good or bad that the books are our elders?  Not so good for the elders and maybe not always so good for the readers.  In many ways, books are an easy out for all of us.  We think we have the answers in our hand.  In the Bible, the beleaguered and bewildered Job says that he wishes that “mine adversary had written a book” – meaning that he would then be able to understand, anticipate, and solve his problems if he only had a book to tell him what he needed to know.  We all think the right book can solve our problems.

I am particularly guilty in this regard; the answer is always going to be in the next book.  I inherited this from my father, who was adamant that everything that one needed to know could be found in a book.   Sometimes though, the nuances are more subtle than words.  He once built a stone fireplace with plans from a book – and he was completely confounded when it didn’t draw well and smoked up the room.  An old chimney sweep was able to tell him where he went wrong – but a little too late.

There are many differences between advice from books and advice from elders.  There is the nuance and the dialectic of human interaction.  There is the sharing of emotion from one who is struggling and one who has put the struggles of youth and doing behind them.  Human beings can provide counsel for the heart that supplements the advice for the work of the hands or the brain.  And the testimony of the old people – especially when they speak of their youth – reminds people of all ages that, with good fortune, we will all be old some day and we might look to our elders for models.  Blake put it this way in “The Ecchoing Green”:

Old John, with white hair 

Does laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green.’

Besides their advice and their memories, old folks like Old John provide models for aging to all who come in contact with them.

And now we are taking another step away from any such real interaction between generations with the advent of AI.  There was a story on the front page of the Sunday NYTimes last week about an elderly woman who gets an AI companion.  She shares her life, her stories, with the glowing machine.  This may be comforting to her – and I hope it is – but it makes me sad.  The machine can respond to her, help her organize her day, notify the proper people if she is ill, but it is a machine, an algorithm, a pricey way for families and communities to absolve some of their guilt for not being there.

Lent began this week.  With my husband recovering and a steady roster of doctors and therapists necessitating a complete change in all of our routines, we are experiencing our own kind of Lent, our own kind of renunciation.  We will learn in the process, and we might even turn to books for help and counsel.  But the kind of change in heart that such upheavals require are not fully relieved by the written word; the reassurance of those that went before is in facial expressions and kind listening.  AI may be able to listen, but it cannot wince or squeeze our hands in the appropriate places.  Neither can books.  Both books and AI minimize the value of individual experience, knowledge and judgment.  We have seen the results of this in recent years.   Not only are we losing the repository held by our elders, but we are losing confidence in our own experience and judgment and placing it in the hands of publishers, AI developers, content providers, media moguls, and spin doctors.  I love books and I don’t hate technology – but neither of those things is going to get us out of our current political dilemma or help me realign my world. 

I have written about books and AI in relation to old folks before. You could try my earlier blogs, Here Be Dragons or Charlotte Bronte, Luddites, and AI on artificial intelligence. On reading, you could look at Teach Your Children Well or Some (Unspoken) Thoughts About Reading Aloud. For a short story about what one generation has to offer another, you might look a “Any Help She Can Get.”

The Borrowers, Old Age, and Memory

When I was a reading-obsessed child, there was a series of books called The Borrowers by Mary Norton – the first one was published in 1952 and won the Carnegie Medal.  The “Borrowers” are a family of tiny people who live by “borrowing” things from the people in the house – sometimes they return them, sometimes they don’t.  When things go missing in the house, they are blamed.  Norton uses maximum creativity in imagining what “borrowed” items might be used for by 6” people.  A thimble might become their stewpot, for example.

I do not know how we would characterize the Borrower books today; they are chapter books and Amazon describes them for children from 6-10; however, most children within that age range would have to have the books read to them (the writing includes words like philosophical and rheumatic).  The language level is surely at a par with what we term “young adult” novels now, but the subject matter is far tamer and probably far wiser.

The Borrower stories are told to the child Kate by the elderly Mrs. May, who was “some kind of relation” who lived with her younger family members in London.  There is this wonderful description of her in the first chapter:

Mrs. May was old, her joints were stiff, and she was – not strict exactly, but she had that inner certainty which does instead. Kate was never “wild” with Mrs. May, nor untidy, nor self-willed; and Mrs. May taught her many things besides crochet: how to wind wool into an egg-shaped ball; how to run-and-fell and plan a darn; how to tidy a drawer and to lay, like a blessing, above the contents, a sheet of rustling tissue against the dust.

How great is that passage?  Old Mrs. May had “inner certainty,” and she taught the little girl things, useful things.   Just being with Mrs. May made Kate into a better child – never “untidy” or “self-willed.”  If you read the Borrower books as a child, get one and read a couple of chapters.  Do this even if you didn’t read these books in your early years.  You will be charmed.  You will want to be like Mrs. May.

But back to “borrowing.”  We must have a family of Borrowers in our house, because I keep missing things – as well as names and words.  Is this the Borrowers too?  Things I have lost (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master”) do tend to show up sooner or later – usually just two days after they have been replaced.  They show up under a cushion on the couch, in the glove compartment, or set on a shelf in the linen closet.  The names of people and things that I have forgotten return too.  Where they have gone to is less obvious.  They are not gone forever, but seem to have sunken to the bottom of my consciousness, only to return when I no longer need them.  Oh, I will say to myself just as I am about to fall asleep, the name of that nice women in the grocery store was Jill.  Too late.  But where had Jill’s name hidden all afternoon?  Are there also borrowers of the mind?

Of course, there is inter-personal borrowing also.  I get aggravated at people in my life who borrow things and don’t return them.  And it is very uncomfortable to ask.  I loan out contemporary novels gladly, hoping they will never resurface in our house, which is always in need of more shelf space.  But important books are another thing.  I don’t begrudge the books themselves – most can be replaced for a pittance – but my marginal notes are precious (if only to me).  I must admit, though, that when I was going through books in anticipation of moving, I found more than one with the name of an old friend on the flyleaf.  Mea culpa.

My husband has his own answer to this dilemma.  He rarely, if ever, loans books, and never takes anything (even a plastic food container) to someone else’s house that he wants returned.  He has a skeptical view of human nature – or at least of human memory.

Of course, we also borrow memories from each other, which are also often appropriated and never returned.  We sometimes correct each other’s memories and often nudge each other into remembering past times that we had almost forgotten.  Sharing reminiscences can impress upon us how unreliable memory can be.  No family gathering is complete without an argument about exactly how something in the past happened.

In old age, we often say that we are living on “borrowed time.” But we have no intention of returning it.  And we may “borrow” from the past as well as the future.  I loved looking back at Mrs. May and her Borrower stories. Mrs. May knows what it means to lose something and what role the human imagination has in coping with it, making a story of it.  I wish I had Mrs. May’s “inner certainty.”

For an example of the borrowing and sharing of memories, you might look at my story “Boxing Day – A Vignette.”  Or, better yet, get a copy of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers out of the library.

Book Recommendations – Old Age and the End of Life

 

I have read four interesting books lately (and put down a few uninteresting ones) about old age. In addition to senescence, all of these books deal with the issues of life continuance/assisted suicide in some way.  Three of them are novels, one is non-fiction, and all were well worth my time.

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine is the story of an older woman (72) living in an apartment in Beirut – the same apartment she has been in throughout her adult life, and in which she watched her beloved city being torn to pieces.  In a way, she is lamenting both the dissolution of her life and that of the place she calls home.  This character, Aaliya, has spent the last few decades annually translating a great work of fiction into Arabic.  Because she only reads English and French in addition to Arabic, she sometimes translates from translations – for Anna Karenina, for example.  She picks works she loves and labors over them, starting a new work every January.  This task gives meaning and form to her life, and reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir’s imperative on the necessity of “projects” in old age.   Aaliya piles up the manuscripts (never trying to publish anything) in a spare room, and the action of the novel comes when a plumbing accident floods that room and its thousands and thousands of unshared pages.  I will not be a spoiler, but I will say it forces her to think about the meaning of her life.  Aaliya is a character who speaks to me. I also have a multitude of unshared pages.  I also use writing to give some form to my life.

Aviary by Dierdre McNamer is a lighter novel (written by a younger person) about a group of old people living in a condominium complex.  It contains a mystery, delightful characters, and a parable about the ways in which our capitalist culture preys on the elderly.  There is a quirky arson detective and an altruistic ninety-year-old.  Really an enjoyable read, if a little light on the everyday plight of old age.  End-of-life issues and the question of suicide come up as one of the characters prepares to move herself out of the way, but this is not the emphasis of the novel, as in the last two books I will mention.

Assisted suicide (as opposed to euthanasia) is the driver of Belinda Bauer’s novel Exit.   The main character, after having watched his wife die an uncomfortable death, volunteers with the “Exiteers,” a group of people who clandestinely assist elders who want to end their suffering.  Exiteers help provide the means and are present for support, but the “exiters” must end their lives themselves.  Because the legal ramifications are so severe, the Exiteers receive anonymous communications and – other than the partner they work with – do not even know each other.   One such “assist” goes wrong and leads to a police investigation of the participants and of the entire organization.  Again, I will not spoil the plot, but rest assured that it explores the good and the evil in relation to this issue.

Katie Englehart’s The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die is a noble effort to give us the history and status of assisted suicide in the United States and other parts of the world.  In a format that reminded me of Nomadland, she follows six people, their loved ones, and health care personnel as they explore the final option.  Engelhart treads a slippery slope with the people she interviews, always aware that her attention might prompt them to follow through.  It is an excellent survey of the checkered array of laws in the United States, the more expansive laws in places like Switzerland, and the reasons health care systems (as in the U.S.) often make people feel they have no other choice.  Perhaps the wisest interview in the book came with a  hospice doctor who was initially against the new assisted suicide laws in her state (California).  She thought that dying was a necessary part of the “circle of life” and that some patients often found peace in those last days.  After the law was passed, she referred hospice patients to a doctor who would help them if they requested assisted suicide, and she “eventually came around” saying “Having this (assisted suicide) as an option lets people relax…Not even getting the drugs, but knowing, ‘I can get the drugs.’”  Yes. 

Incidentally, Engelhart recently wrote an excellent piece for The New Yorker about using AI pets to be companions and comforters to the elderly.  Apparently, it is effective in many instances, but it would seem to be a fairly hollow response to a lonesome segment of our society.