Tag: Teasdale

Was She Someone?

In the beginning of Penelope Lively’s wonderful novel Moon Tiger, Claudia, an “old ill woman” in a hospital bed, tells a nurse that she’s “writing a history of the world.”  The nurse is dubious, but asks the doctor later, “Was she someone?”  The doctor looks at her record, which includes illnesses in various parts of the world and notations about her books, and says, “Yes, the records do suggest she was someone, probably.”  She was someone… probably.

Claudia could be any of us.  We are  no longer identified by our work (although some of try to hang onto our titles and accomplishments); many of us are no longer identified by place (almost all of the seniors we have met in North Carolina came from somewhere else).  Our families might identify us as Nana or Grandma – but we are no longer the heart of anyone’s family.  Our appearance has changed, the culture around us has changed, and some of us have children who seem to have metamorphized into someone different than the offspring we raised.

In Buddha’s teaching, there are three principal “signs of being:” Change, suffering and non-self.  Buddhism posits no self (anatta) in the sense of a permanent identity; this follows, of course, from the first “sign of being”: change.   How can we hang onto a permanent identity in the face of relentless change?  If you are old, this is a query you have put to yourself many times.

Western thinkers have been much taken up with the subject of personal identity.  In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke tried to connect what he called “personhood” with consciousness and memory:

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

 Linking consciousness and memory to identity is problematic in relation to old age, when changes in the physical self and mental forgetfulness may both challenge any assurance of continuous identity.  In addition, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain our sense of identity when it is not acknowledged by those around us.  But I am an esteemed professor with an academic title, thinks the old man whose physical therapist has just called him “Georgie.”

Not only our bodies, but the physical world around us has changed also.  Things we thought were solid, have proved disposable.  My mother, in her eighties, was heartbroken when the child of some former neighbors e-mailed her to tell her that the house that her husband and father had built by hand just after I was born had been demolished to make room for a McMansion.  I cursed the person who shared that information with her, nevertheless it was the truth.  Houses change, cars change, neighborhoods change, culture changes, even the landscape is changing.  There is nothing to cling to.  Attachment to anything, even personal identity, is the source of dukkha, suffering.

In his old age, Jonathan Swift, who had thought much about identity and age, would sit and rock and say, “I am what I am, I am what I am.”  Perhaps what Swift was trying to remember in that mantra was that he was a popular author, the Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, one of the leading minds of his age.  But when he passed a mirror, Swift exclaimed, “O poor old man.”

But, back to Moon Tiger.  The last words of Lively’s novel tell us that Claudia has died and focus on what remains:

And within the room a change has taken place.  It is empty.  Void.  It has the stillness of a place in which there are only inanimate objects: metal, wood, glass, plastic.  No life.  Something creaks; the involuntary sounds of expansion and contraction.  Beyond the window a car starts up, an aeroplane passes overhead.  The world moves on.  And beside the bed the radio gives the time signal and a voice starts to read the six o’clock news.

We live with “objects” and leave them behind; yet, as I have noted, even objects change.  I have been thinking about houses these days – perhaps the most intimate of objects which we live with as we “inhabit” them.  This led me to reread (rereading being one of the great joys of old age) the interregnum in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Ray Bradbury’s poignant and scary story, “There Will Come the Soft Rains.” The title of the latter comes from a wonderful poem by Sara Teasdale in which are the memorable lines:

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

All this inspired my short story, “The Beach House,” in which the house does seem to wonder about the people, people who become attached to a house – an object, which in itself is healthily detached.

“This Will All Make Sense When I Am Older”

I ran across a cute Disney video from Frozen II,  wherein a young snowman (snowboy?) named Olaf sings a delightful song about how life is scary, but comforts himself that “this will all make sense when I am older.”  Of course, that got me thinking (now that I am older) about whether that was true.  I invite you to answer the same question for yourself.

Separated by time and hormones from experiences of our younger years, there is a certain detachment in old age that allows us to calmly consider why certain things happened, why we did the things we are now embarrassed to remember.  And there is sometimes a bittersweet melancholy to such thought.  As Kierkegaard told us, “life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward.”

Many people have tried to make sense of their lives, to give it a linear and rational narrative.  One of the things we learn in old age is that human beings are not always (or often) rational animals, lessons are sometimes earned but not learned, and we accumulate at least as much guilt as we do wisdom.  In these days, wisdom is needed, guilt seems to be confused with embarrassment, and the old often seem willing to let the young set the moral agenda – on civil rights, women’s rights, gay marriage, humane acceptance of all kinds.

This reminds me of the story of the woman about to be stoned for adultery.  There are a couple of mysterious things about this episode, which occurs only in the Gospel of John.   The Pharisees bring  a woman caught in adultery to Jesus; Mosaic law calls for her to be stoned to death and the crowd is ready. Jesus responds by crouching down and writing in the sand.  Over the centuries there has been much speculation about what he wrote.  Perhaps he was writing the sins of the onlookers, because finally he rises and tells the crowd that “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Personally, I wonder if he was just writing to get his thoughts straight – something I do all the time.  So the writing in the sand is one mystery, but not the one that interests me the most.

Soon after Jesus’ challenge (let him who is without sin throw the first stone), the crowd starts to drop their stones and disperse.  And here is the most interesting part to me in this familiar passage: John clearly states that “they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last.” The old people left first. Why? 

Did the old leave first because they were wiser? Had they learned that youthful indiscretions are not the end of the world?  Or did the old leave first because they had accumulated so much sin of their own that they knew clearly and immediately that they were not eligible to cast the first stone?  Is this an example of the value of experience?

I have elsewhere mused on the value of reflection in old age, and of writing one’s own story.  Maybe there will not be a clear narrative when we go to string the episodes of our life together, but there will surely be lessons there which we were taught, but never had time to really learn.  In the episode of the woman taken in adultery, the issue was forced.  For most of us there is not such a crisis.  But there is still a need, and time to learn the lessons that have accumulated in the parts of our minds we don’t visit very often. “This will all make sense as I get older,” says young Olaf.  Perhaps, with distance and time and attention, anything is possible. However, we might also remember the lesson that Sara Teasdale shared in one of her last poems: “The heart asks more than life can give, /When that is learned, then all is learned.”  

Many of my stories involve lessons learned late. For such tales, you might try “The Iscariot,” “A Balm in Gilead,” or “Eye of the Needle.”