Tag: sonnet 73

Ways to Parse Our Lives

As I am writing this, it is the Autumnal Equinox, that moment when day and night are the same length, a pause in the steady progression to shorter and shorter days and the long night of the Winter Solstice.  One metaphor that poets and philosophers have used for our life journey is that of the seasons – Spring for youth, Summer for adulthood, Fall for aging, and Winter for the end of life.  Poets like these metaphors.  I think of Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves”:

In youth I sought the golden flower

Hidden in wood or wold,

But I am come to autumn,

When all the leaves are gold.

 And then there is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (one of my favorites):

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

If fall is the beginning of old age, what does the equinox represent?  An equanimous acceptance of aging headed for the final solstice of death?  I just learned that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – a time for reflection – was celebrated yesterday and always falls around the time of the Autumnal Equinox.

And that all got me pondering how we make sense of the stages and division of our lives.  I have talked about this before in relation to writing a life review (“Feast on Your Life”).  Such a pause can be a useful tool with which to try to make sense of our past (or to realize it makes no sense).  What were the moments in your life that marked a new path?  A birthday, a graduation, a birth, a death?  Or was it something more mundane – when you started meditating, learned to play bridge, or went blonde?

How do we divide up our lives to make sense of them?  By decades, seven-year spans, seasons, locations, occupations? Or are such divisions just arbitrary?

Augustine defined seven stages (famously reiterated by Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It), which corresponded to the known planets, each life stage taking some of its characteristics from the planet under which it was situated.  Old age was influenced by the distant Saturn, which was responsible for its being “cold and dry.”  In literature and legend, there are examples of three, four, five, six and seven divisions of life.  (Note: AI says that there are eight stages because it includes gestation as a stage – apparently, AI is a believer in personhood at conception.)

As I look back at my life from the age of 75, I can make all sorts of divisions.  Moving always felt like a “new” stage, as did graduations, marriages, divorces, birth of children, major illnesses and surgeries, retirement – but these are circumstantial.  Is there some kind of deeper division?  Are the real makers far more private, more interior?

Are all such divisions artificial?  Did they make more sense when we had more rituals to note and understand the transitions?  Transitions are hard.  Even if they are eagerly anticipated.

I recently read about the Fibonacci sequence in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before, a formula that makes a graceful spiral and is found over and over again in nature.  The ratio of two consecutive numbers in the sequence gets closer and closer to something called “The Golden Ratio” or about 1.618.  It turns out that many flowers have petals that correspond to such a number and it is a frequent descriptor of tree branching, water flow, and many more natural processes.   Could we apply it to the stages of our lives?  The sequence within the framework of any life would be 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 – since the next number would be far above current longevity records, we will have to assume that the last stage begins at 89!  In some ways this works for me – at 1, I learned to walk, to talk at 2, to read at 5, to swim at 8 – you see the possibilities.  And I would also note that while the average lifespan in the US is in the high seventies, the median is in the low eighties, and the mode (the age at which the most people die) is close to that last Fibonacci number of 89.

But almost any sequence (7 years, 3 ages, 4 seasons) is worth using if it gets us thinking about what went on in our lives, what changed, what stayed the same.  And in relation to my serenity project – when were we most calm, most content?  And why?  Was it circumstances that mattered or attitude?  Such reflections are, I am told, where wisdom comes from.

Change both gives and requires wisdom; the world is changing at a frightening rate these days.  It is important that our reactions be conscious, and looking at the past intersections of life might help.

Bare Ruin’d Choirs – Seasons and Similes of Old Age

I have been intending to write a blog about the notion of “singularity,” but my readings on the subject seem to go on and on, so I thought I would just look around me and write about the season and the seasons of life.

This is my first autumn back in New England after almost a decade.  We moved from western North Carolina two months ago (just in time, I guess).  Autumn was longer but less colorful North Carolina; there were the brilliant yellows but not the mellow golds and reds.  Fall has always been my favorite season, and I am looking forward to the colors, the smells, and the urgency of buttoning up the house (nesting) before winter arrives.

If autumn is my favorite season, October has always been my favorite month.  For years (until the printing wore off), I used a coffee cup inscribed with Thoreau’s quote about October. Here it is, to remind us to imbibe some of the magic Henry found in October:

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

Back to our earliest records, poets used the seasons of the year as similes for the seasons of life.  We still do it all the time, talking about a “December bride” or someone being “in the autumn of his years.”  These are apt similes, much like that of the Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  We grow and blossom, reap the karma of our earlier life, and close in ourselves with the narrowing of the light at the end of the year.  One significant difference, of course, is that our lives are linear, while nature recycles upon itself. (Or, as Dante contends, the life span is a parabola! See further discussion of that possibility here.) Perhaps the problem is how we look at it; if we could accept that we are part of nature perhaps we would see it differently.

Cicero, in his “On Old Age,” uses many images of old age that relate senescence to the cycles of nature.  Thus we have age as the “tranquil evening” of the life’s day, as the “autumn” or “winter” of the life’s year, as the ripening, maturing, even withering fruit of the tree of life:

There had to be a time of withering, of readiness to fall, like the ripeness that comes to the fruits of the trees and of the earth.  But a wise man will face this prospect with resignation, for resistance against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.

Clearly, the giants of Silicon Vally do not agree that “resistance against nature” is pointless, but more on them in my next blog.

Shakespeare starts his masterful Sonnet 73 about old age with these lines:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Latter day poets use the images of the seasons all the time to connote the ages of man; when Philip Larkin wrote his comic masterpiece about growing older, he titled it “The Winter Palace,” and ended with the image of a last December snowstorm:

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

For more examples, revisit Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves,” or Rilke’s “Autumn.” To find more correlations between the seasons and the stages of life, just look at my (incomplete) list of poems about old age.  And please send me any of your favorite poems to add to the list. Or write one.

But, back to me and to the month of October.  I used to think I was in the October of life, but that is foolish at this point.  If I were a maple tree, my leaves would have long since been raked up and hauled away.  I am more “bare ruin’d choirs” than the rich golds and yellows of this lustrous October.  I am surely in November, and probably most of the way to Thanksgiving.  The “later twilight” of life.  Robert Frost said that sorrow was his “November Guest,” but yet appreciated the season:

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow…

Yet, I can still enjoy the present October while looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of past Octobers, Septembers, Mays.  And forward to the dark and quiet evenings of December.

Old Marriages/Grow Old Along with Me

I have written about long marriages, old marriages, before (see my blog on romance in old age, “Old Folks and True Love“), but I recently ran across this quote worth sharing from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.  They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.  For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Is love more solid the closer it comes to death?  Shakespeare addresses age in Sonnet 73, beginning with a trope comparing age with the coming of autumn and winter:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The bard finishes with a couplet addressed to his lover:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare is assumed to be writing about a relationship between a young person and an old one; I would say that his sentiments are even more true when both participants are old.

And it is not just each other that we old folks love; the marriage itself becomes a valued object.  The marriage contains history (good and bad), a moral code (carefully crafted over the years), and a full set of rituals and traditions.  It even has a liturgy.  My husband, for example, ends every meal by sighing and saying it was “the best meal he ever ate,” (even when he was the cook).  I can be relied on for the morning weather report promptly upon sitting down for breakfast.  And so it goes – you long-married folks doubtless perform your own liturgies on a regular basis.

When we were wed over three decades ago, dear friends gave us a sun dial which has traveled with my husband and me to four different states.  “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be” is inscribed on the top of it.  It is a line from Browning.  We thought we were already “old” when we got married in our forties, and here we are in our seventies.  For us, Browning’s prophecy proved true – the latter years have only gotten better.  Part of it is that the family/stepfamily responsibilities have diminished, but mostly it is that we started with some trust, and worked hard to remain trustworthy to each other in every way.

John Lennon loved the quote from Robert Browning.  In the last year of his life, he used it as a basis for a song.  At the same time Yoko Ono wrote a companion piece based on Elizabeth Browning’s “How Do I Love You, Let Me Count the Ways.”  Before either song could be released, John was gone. John and Yoko were not allowed the chance to see how and if their love matured.  John thought about it in his song, however:

Grow old along with me

Two branches of one tree

Face the setting Sun

When the day is done.

Divorce was common in our generation; there are few of my childhood friends who are still with their first spouse.  And baby boomers are still getting divorced at a high rate. While divorce rates have declined ever so slightly over the past two decades, one cohort has been bucking the trend: baby boomers. “Research shows that boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—are divorcing more than any other generation.”  This is from a generation whose parents – no matter how much they bickered and sulked – rarely got divorced.  In some ways, I envy those of my cohort who were able to stay with their “original spouses.”  But by the time I made the choice for the long haul the second time, I apparently knew what I was doing.  May it be so for you.

I have written many short stories about old marriages.  You might look at “The More Loving One” or “Slip Slidin’ Away” for a couple of examples.