Tag: T.S. Eliot

In Praise of Ordinary Times

My husband and I just got back from a week away from home and are slowly getting back to… normal.  As far as I am concerned, ordinary time is a precious commodity.  While the definitions of ordinary or normal sound pretty boring – “usual, typical, expected” –  I think normal life is undervalued, and I would prefer to define it in terms like “comfortable, relaxed, and reassuring.”  We have our rituals (Thursday is shopping and laundry, Tuesday and Saturday are hike days, Saturday is movie night), but the quiet anticipation of known events nurtures me far more than waiting in crowded airports or sleeping in strange beds.

I know that I am in the minority on this.  Advice columns tell us older folks to keep trying new things, exploring unfamiliar places, stretching our wings.  We have friends who spend half their lives on cruise ships, and others who spend as much time visiting one relative or another.  I would remind everyone that if you peeled back the travel industry’s propaganda, you could find documented risks to the elderly from air travel (blood clots, etc.), cruise ships (petri dishes of germs) and relocations of any kind.   How much more likely are we to fall trying to find a strange bathroom in the middle of the night?

There is a wonderful line in the movie, Mrs. Miniver.  Suffering the deprivations, apprehensions, and demands of life in wartime Britain, Mrs. Miniver (played flawlessly by Greer Garson) thinks back to what normal life was like, and promises herself to cherish it when and if it returns.  The movie was based on a series of newspaper columns by Jan Struther, and in one of them, the writer reflects on her feelings about returning home after a holiday:

Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays, but she always felt – and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over.  Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she would find herself unable to get back.

It is true that many old folks have a tendency toward the static, toward ritual, toward constancy.  Our culture works against this and has somewhat tainted what should be one of the major joys of old age.  By now, my readers know that one of my favorite novels is Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  Lady Slane, elderly and retired far from children, grandchildren, and obligations, finds life’s “last, supreme luxury” to be the time to sit and reflect, to live a life of one’s own making, to enjoy one’s own quiet habits.

Some Christian churches have periods of what are called “Ordinary Time.”  Generally, they are times that are not special because they are neither just before Christmas and Easter (Advent, Lent) nor just after (Epiphany, Eastertide).  Holy Week is coming up soon, with many churches having a dozen or more services; I’m sure the rectors sometimes long for ordinary time.

Ordinary Time brings me to T.S. Eliot and his poem “Ash Wednesday.”  Eliot seems to rebuff those exhortations that we “stretch” ourselves as we grow older.  Eliot spurns such advice, quoting Shakespeare in the process:

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

I sometimes mourn lost stamina, but I never mourn lost ambition or the impetus of “striving.”  I resist replacing forced imperatives of youth (those of employment and raising children) with self-imposed ones of old age (doing “what is expected of me” or “what is good for me”).  I want to define my own normality.  I want to stay at home and reflect like Lady Slane.  I am accused (often and even by loved ones) of being boring.  However, this agèd eagle is not bored.  And I am not afraid of ordinary times.  I am just happy to be at home among my books and chairs and pots and pans.  And my quiet thoughts.

For the value of ritual, you might try my story about Walden Pond, “Again and Again and Again.”  And, please be assured, if cruises and world tours make you happy, keep at it.  Just don’t expect me to envy you.

Dayspring Mishandled – “Remember Not the Sins of My Youth”

“Dayspring Mishandled” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and is also a phrase in a pseudo-Chaucer poem (“Gertrude’s Prayer”) that Kipling wrote to go with that tale.  The first stanza of that poem is as follows:

That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

Dayspring is an old word for dawn, for the early part of the day, and Kipling’s point is that things we did, mistakes we made, in our early life cannot be corrected and may have consequences for the rest of our life.  This is both a fairly negative attitude and perhaps also a fairly true one.  How unfair it seems that decisions that we made when we were nineteen about marriage or education or conduct should have repercussions for the rest of our lives!  “Remember not the sins of my youth,” cries the 25th Psalm.  The Psalmist is talking to God, but he might as well have been talking to himself.  Who wouldn’t want to forget the transgressions of their youth?  Who can?

There are two kinds of “dayspring mishandled” that bother us, I think, as we look back from our old age.  First, we acknowledge missed chances, like not taking full advantage of our educational opportunities.  Regrets like these are ours alone, and we can usually remediate, atone, or come to peace in some way within ourselves.  Second, there is the guilt of doing things (or not doing them) that affect other people as well as ourselves.  This is a harder kind of remorse – even if we felt that we had no choice (if we wanted to survive) when we did whatever caused the pain.  Nevertheless, parents, children, spouses, friends – suffered.  I have always taken some solace from the words of Mary Oliver:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Of course, Mary Oliver had no children.  Your children live longer than you do, and they never forget.

Literature has often addressed this idea of coming to terms with “dayspring mishandled;” one thinks of Oedipus the King or Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Of special interest in this regard are works written by older authors, who are looking back at a long past. I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, his last major work, written when he was seventy and about six years before his death.  It is all about the mistakes of youth – and how they can destroy the rest of life if left to fester.  Lord Claverton (the elder statesman) laments:

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,

I know this from experience.  When you reach your goal,

 Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,

 You will find your past failure waiting there to greet you.

And yet, Eliot gives us a relatively happy ending.  Old Lord Calverton ends up in a rest home full of people who know the secrets he has tried to keep hidden for so many years.  The secrets come out, the children forgive, and the old man dies in peace: “I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone;/In becoming no one, I begin to live. /It is worth dying, to find out what life is.”  I recommend The Elder Statesman; I think Eliot learned much between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and his last play.

We would like to forget our instances of dayspring mishandled, but we cannot.  Not only are the consequences very real, but as the wonderful Haruki Murakami says, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.” Ah, yes.  Not easy.  But is it at least worth hanging the dirty laundry on the line with the hope that, after all these years, sun and time will bleach out the stains?

Like all of us, I have my share of regrets, of daysprings mishandled.  Besides acceptance (easily said, nearly impossible to live), the thing that helps me is to remember that dayspring is something that happens every morning.  Each day we get a new chance and an older and wiser self with which to face the challenges and the gifts.

I am not going be specific about my regrets here. But I have often written fiction about people who are trying to realize the “ideal” of the poet James Fenton:

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

Since it is Lent, you might look at my story, “Shrove Tuesday.”

The Gift of Latter Rains – What Old Age Might Give Us

I have written about the rewards of old age from time to time.  It is sometimes hard to remember that – beyond Medicare – there are gifts for which we should be grateful.  T. S. Eliot lists the gifts of old age, but some of the “gifts” seem more like punishments (“the painful recollection of all we have done”).  Saint Benedict says that old age is a truce from God, in that it gives us a chance to “amend our misdeeds.”  These might be dubious gifts. 

But the Bible talks – in both the Old and New Testaments, about the “latter rains.”  There is this from Deuteronomy: “That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.”  And from the Epistle of James: “Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.”  The latter rain – in a dry country, rain is a gift; Jeremiah says that the happy soul is like a “watered garden.”   And the latter rain is particularly precious.  Apparently, in Israel, the early or first rains are called the Yoreh.  They soften the land and make it malleable for the plow.  The middle months, the months of summer, are dry, but the late rains, which are called the Malkosh, actually allow the crops to finally ripen for harvest.

What are the latter rains of life? What are the gifts of old age?  Paradoxically, many of them come from giving up on things.  How the relinquishment of ambition frees us!  Fantasies often fall away!  Bertrand Russell, in his wonderful essay “How to Grow Old,” asserts that the greatest gift is the ability to let “the walls of the ego recede.”  He warns, however, against two dangers that inhibit this gift: 1) “undue absorption in the past,” and 2) “Clinging to youth in the hope of sucking vigor from its virility.”  The latter involves his feeling that, while children and grandchildren may be gifts, they should not be emotional crutches.  Here is a quote to ponder:

When your children are grown up they want to live their own lives, and if you continue to be as interested in them as you were when they were young, you are likely to become a burden, unless they are unusually callous.  I do not mean that one should be without interest in them, but one’s interest should be contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic….

Many of us have children who wish we were slightly more contemplative and vastly more philanthropic, I would guess.

There are other gifts.  In old age, we find that much of what we worry about never comes to pass – or, if it does, it is not half as bad as we expected.  (Try making a list of the things you worried about when you were thirty-five!) If we have any sense, this teaches us to worry less.  Sometimes we find in old age, that seeds we planted long ago and had long since given up on, finally come to bud and flower.  Again, if we have any sense, this teaches us to wait, to bide our time.

Bide our time.  Maybe the greatest gift of old age is time.  The latter rain brings time to reflect.  Time to pursue things we did not have space for in our busy lives.  As time until the end shortens, time in the here and now expands.  We have time to water our gardens.

Back to Russell and the gift of descendants, this week’s story, “Boxing Day,” is a meditation of a group of adult children who are for the first time marking a holiday without parental supervision or obligation.  Enjoy. 

The Drama of Old Age – Eliot’s The Elder Statesman

 

I have written about last poems, last novels, and now a last play.  There are many wonderful last plays, many of them directly relating to old age.  T.S. Eliot wrote The Elder Statesman in 1958 when he was about 70; I first read it when I was in my 50s, then again at 63, and now as I am about to turn 70 myself.  It is both a heartening and scary play.  On the plus side, Eliot uses the word love more in this play than in all his other drama combined; on the scary side, imagine arriving at the nursing home only to find it populated by all the people you have wronged in life, all the people who know your darkest secrets.

Eliot stated that he partially based his play on another play by an even older playwright.  Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus when he was about 90.  Cicero tells a story about how Sophocles’ sons were not happy at how their elderly father was handling the family fortune.  They took him to court for incompetence and Sophocles defended himself by reading from Colonus.  So much for the sons.  But Elder Statesman is not a rewrite of Sophocles; it feels deeply personal.  One cannot help remembering that Eliot and his brother-in-law had locked his first wife away in an insane asylum; she had died there ten years before this play was written.  And here we have a play about the problems of the past, how to deal with regret for things that cannot be changed.  Any old person knows about this.

Much of Eliot’s late writing is religious (or spiritual) in nature, but there is no religion in Elder Statesman.  The protagonist, Lord Claverton, has just retired due to a failing heart and is facing the first period in his life with an empty appointment book.  He has a loving daughter and a renegade son.  And time to think.  But he does not have to dredge up his old sins; they come knocking on the door.  The youthful joyride where he ran over someone, the inappropriate love match that he let his father buy off, the younger friend whom he betrayed.  For most of us, these kinds of past sin just reside at the bottom of our consciousness; Eliot has them come to call.  The question to be answered is what to do about our past sins, our inner critic:

What is this self inside us, this silent observer,

Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us

And urge us on to futile activity,

And in the end, judge us more severely

For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us.

One of the things we sometimes do with our own faults is to project them on our children.  Lord Claverton does this with his son  Michael – always fearful that Michael has gotten into trouble with some woman or hurt someone while driving his sports car.  In the end, however, he realizes that the only lesson both he and his son have to learn is not to try to escape their responsibilities, the consequences of their own actions:

Come, I’ll start to learn again,

Michael and I shall go to school together.

We’ll sit side by side, at little desks

And suffer the same humiliations

At the hands of the same master.  But have I still time?

There is time for Michael.  Is it too late for me, Monica [his daughter]?

Is it too late?  The call, the question, the entreaty, the petition of the old – can I undo, can I atone, can I make restitution, can I learn the lesson?  This is a play and so the old man does learn a lesson and that lesson involves love – a very human kind of love.  Confession, yes, but not necessarily to a priest:

If a man has one person, just one in his life,

To whom he is willing to confess everything –

And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal,

Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,

But also situations which are simply ridiculous,

When he has played the fool (and who has not?) –

Then he loves that person and love will save him.

We all hope to be fortunate enough to have that person, to find that person.  For Claverton, it is his daughter.  But one has to be willing to confess.  In Colonus, Oedipus dies claiming he was not fully responsible for what happened to him and his family.  There surely is a sense in which our fates are ordained by circumstances – but almost never completely.  Oedipus says that old age teaches him acceptance:  “My experience and my length of days teach me to be content.”  I hope your old age has brought you acceptance and contentment.  If not, read The Elder Statesman and think about who you might not want to encounter in the rest home of your final years. 

Also, for a story about dealing with the sins of the past, try my story “Shrove Tuesday;” for more on T.S. Eliot, you might look at my blog from a year ago, “Eliot’s Gifts of Old Age.”

Do the Elderly Have More Bandwidth?

I recently read Alan Jacobs’ book, Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind.  Who does not want a tranquil mind?  I recommend it (both the book and the tranquility). But I was particularly taken with Jacobs’ metaphor of bandwidth as a measure of the perspective of our lives.  Specifically, he wonders if young people – cocooned in their internet playlists and current fads – have not much narrowed their bandwidths.  Sounds paradoxical doesn’t it –  shouldn’t more bandwidth mean more information, knowledge, perspective? 

One might look at it this way.  When we boomers were young (oh, so long ago), we were universally exposed to what our parents and grandparents listened to, watched, talked about.  There was only one television in our house (in the family room), one radio (in the kitchen), and one phone (in the center of everything to prevent any kind of privacy).  And the children were not in charge.  So, we watched and listened to things our parents chose.  And when there was nothing else to watch or listen to, we read a book or eavesdropped on the adults.  Thus, I knew the tunes and lyrics of all the popular songs from the forties, watched any number of old TV shows and movies, and used the kind of language they approved of while talking on the phone.  When I was at my grandparents’ house, I watched Lawrence Welk and listened to my grandfather play old hymns on his upright piano.  Forced to attend church and Sunday School, I picked up the 17th century language of the King James Bible and got to know the organ music of Bach.  Desperate for something to read in the days before Kindle, I picked up whatever old stuff was in the house.  All of those things became my points of reference. I don’t think I was any different in this regard from other members of my generation – and probably all previous generations.   So, as Jacobs posits, our bandwidth stretched well into the past.  He says this wider bandwidth gave us a greater personal density – a term Jacobs said he got from Thomas Pynchon. 

For the most part, younger people today have their own computers, smart phones, televisions.  Statistics tell me families seldom sit down to meals together and seldom even gather around the same television show.  They can insert their ear pods and not have to listen to old music, old television, old people.  Their world is narrower.  Not that I wouldn’t have loved to have their options when I was fifteen.  And yet.

Jacobs’ argument makes sense to me.  Churches (at least main-line churches) and classical music concerts (when we could still have concerts) have become oceans of white hair.  Young people are, presumably, home listening to self-selected podcasts or reading the latest graphic novel.  Not only does that mean that they know less about the past, but it may have some effect on their attention span.  When you cannot change the channel or find another book, you have little choice but to stick to it.  Unless you are exposed to Bach and the beauty of King James English at an early age, will you easily appreciate it as you grow older?  And there is something else about the past that the present and future don’t have – it’s over; we can see how things turned out.  We can (maybe) learn lessons, or at least intuit when we are repeating prior mistakes.

It is not just the young I worry about in this regard.  I don’t listen to commercial radio because the music sounds like noise to me.  And I now have a choice.  I can listen to whatever I want on my MP3 player or computer and will never develop an appreciation for Lady Gaga and grunge rock.  I can get almost any book I want from our wonderful library system; as a result, I read books I like and have never opened a graphic novel.  So, my bandwidth extends far into the past, but not far into the future.  And the internet wants to help me with this by suggesting books based on my past reading, movies like the one I just watched, people like me that I might like to be “friends” with.

By the way, this problem is not entirely new.  T. S. Eliot identified it in 1928 (“Second Thoughts on Humanism“) in relation to the fact that there were enough books marketed in his day that “there never was a time, I believe, when those who read at all, read so many more books by living authors than by dead authors; there never was a time so completely parochial, so shut off from the past.”  If old Tom were still alive, he might be pining for those days.

I have no solution to this, but I am not sorry that I had the exposure I got when I was young.  Left to myself, I would have read Nancy Drew books and watched cartoons – perhaps branching out as I got older and bored of the same fare, but how would I have known what was out there?  And, of course, the extreme divisions in this country are surely a symptom of this.  If you aren’t forced to hear all perspectives, how broad is your bandwidth?  I wonder.