Tag: Thoreau

“Here Be Dragons!” – AI and Old Folks

I have been trying (and failing) to stop thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  It is everywhere.  And it occurred to me that the replacement of our brain by silicon networks has ramifications that old people know something about.

But let’s start with an earlier usurpation by technology – that of replacing people power (physical work and transportation) with machines.  I am always amazed when reading Emerson or Thoreau to find that they thought nothing of a twenty-mile round trip walk to see a friend.  These guys were in great shape!  As was almost everyone in those days (except the filthy rich and they were fat).  Now we are all out of shape and spend hours doing Pilates or walking on the treadmill trying to regain some of the fitness that Thoreau had as a matter of the life he lived.  This only gets worse in old age, as we continue to try to persuade our bodies not to freeze up or flab up.  I, of course, am grateful for technology that allows us to replace or medicate arthritic joints and such, but we must also realize that as we delegated many physical activities to machines (machines that polluted the planet), we also handed over a natural way to stay fit. We have even convinced ourselves that going up and down stairs is bad for us, so we should live on one level or (better yet for the economy) invest in a stair lift.  While there is a time of life when stairs are not possible, study after study has shown that climbing stairs is good for old people.  I read once that when Paris put elevators in some senior residence buildings, the life expectancy actually declined!

Now we are accelerating a parallel process that had already been underway – that of replacing our minds.  If we don’t think our minds will decay from reduced use, we are deluding ourselves.  Anyone who has retired from a mentally challenging job knows that “use it or lose it” is true.  Old folks try to compensate by doing word and number puzzles – any group of elders often drifts to that day’s Wordle or the Jumble in the morning paper.  We take French classes, join book groups, tackle the myriads of math problems that show up on Facebook.  We are trying to maintain what is now not adequately used.

And, incidentally, there is AI designed just for old folks, including a monitor with the cute name of ElliQ which will help you take your pills, do your exercises, plan your meals – as well as giving you someone to talk to at any time!  If your younger relatives give you ElliQ for Christmas, you can be assured that they don’t want you looking to them for help!  And if we do not have to exercise our minds at all, what does that mean?  For the old and for the young?

Spinoza equated intelligence with virtue; Aristotle said that it was our ability to reason that makes us human.  Could farming out our intelligence rob us of both our virtue and our humanity?  I fear it might.  There is also something authoritarian about AI – it has the one true answer, the ability to tell us what we ought to do.  And if you think it doesn’t have its own biases, remember two things: it was created for profit, and it has no ethics. Already AI is biased toward capitalism and away from “wokeness.”  As its usefulness seduces us, we will be easy prey for collateral damage.

Earlier times were more skeptical about technology.  They warned us.  In the 19th century, as technology spread in the form of trains, gas light, and electrical power, there were many thoughtful discussions about whether it was good or bad.  Two major utopias of that period were set in worlds where the decision had been made to discard most technology.  One thinks of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).  These are “post-technology” narratives, where humans have taken life back into their own hands.  Here is Samuel Butler:

True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery whenever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of machines – they serve that they may rule.  (from Erewhon)

To avoid this despotism of technology, Erewhon destroyed all the machines created in the past three hundred years.

Similarly, William Morris created a world that has severely limited the invention and use of technology.   Both utopias were in stark contrast to Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1890), which more or less predicted that science and technology would solve all our problems by the year 2000 – albeit it had also replaced capitalism with socialism, so it wasn’t a profit-based technical utopia.  Hard to imagine.

But, again, as I said at the start, old folks know what happens to our mental and bodily functions if we don’t use them enough.  We also have a long view of the kind of change that technology engenders; we have watched the dumbing down of culture, the plague of obesity, the destruction of our attention span.  Elders are cautious folk, and we are worried.  In the Middle Ages and earlier, when cartographers had gotten to the end of their knowledge of geography, they labeled the unknown areas with warnings:  Hic Sunt Leones (Here Be Lions) or Hic Sunt Dragones (Here Be Dragons).  All warnings about AI and related technology seems to have disappeared – it is now blessed by the President, the media, higher education, and the venture capitalists.  But I, for one, will be looking for lions and dragons.

How Do You “Mask Despair”? How Do You Handle a “November of the Soul”?

As my regular readers know, I have been mulling over Moby-Dick after a recent re-reading.  (Re-reading is highly recommended; see my blog here.)  In the very beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tells us that when he is starting to despair, when he feels the “November of the soul,” he goes to sea.  Ishmael thinks that this is a universal solution, and the reason that all over “Manhattoes” (Manhattan) people in despair migrate to the shore, to the docks, and gaze upon the ocean: “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”  The ocean does help me when I am in the doldrums.   Perhaps it is the immensity and power of the ocean in relation to the paltriness of one human life.  I recently had a welcome dose of the sea, but it is not readily available to us all and is only a temporary antidote.

Thoreau reminds us that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” so we know we are not alone.  There are others, many others, in the clutches of despair.  Old age may or may not be more liable to this condition, but it definitely provides less distraction from our own minds.  In our younger days, when we had jobs, children, obligations and a hectic schedule all around, there was still despair, but perhaps little time to consider it.  Now, it descends during quiet late afternoons and the wee hours of the morning.  And, lately, every time we turn on the news.

The ocean helps, but so does nature in all its forms.  Wendell Berry finds relief (not alleviation) from despair in wild things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

Berry finds “grace,” but only “for a time.”

There are other ways, additional ways, that we handle despair.  Niall Williams’ latest novel, Time of the Child, is about an older doctor who has lost his wife and also lost his faith.  Yet Doctor Troy attends mass, in an effort to ward off despair and order his life with the comfort of a schedule, a routine:

The doctor attended Mass, but without devotion.  After his wife Regina was taken by a cancer he hadn’t seen coming, he had lost the relic of faith he once had.  To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more or less than how to get through another day.

Oh, the things that we do to “mask despair”!  Is this perhaps the reason that we old people cling to habits, our houses, our ways of life? Rituals, habits, and repetitions paper over despair.  In a world and a body that are failing us, they are something that is ours – built up over a lifetime.

In an earlier book, This is Happiness, Williams talks about how an old woman has braced herself against despair:

As a shield against despair, she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived.

Again, we know pessimistic people like this, we know times when we are like this ourselves (practically every day in the political realm, I am finding).  Not a pleasant way to live though, but, for some, expecting the worst is often a partial armor against despair.   

 So, what do we do with this despair in relation to our fellow elders: should we share it to make others know that they are not alone?  I remember, as a young woman, the first time I read Virgina Woolf’s admission that life “is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength.”  Someone was finally admitting to me what I thought was obvious, but I had never heard anyone articulate.   Mary Oliver says, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”  Yes.  The alternative is to buck up and, in our bravado, give others the hope that despair can be overcome.   Later in Walden, Thoreau exhorts us: “We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.”  I think I’m with the ladies on this one.

And there is another reason that we should share.  Our fears and worries, spoken out loud, are seldom as scary as when whispered silently through our minds.  When we expose our fears to the light, they do not disappear, but they often seem to shrink – or, at least, stop growing.  Also, remedies can be shared, as noted above.  Go to the sea, go to the woods, find comfort in ritual or habit.  And discovering that others have survived despair is the best encouragement we can find.

For anyone who came to this page by googling “despair,” and is in its clutches, please remember that you can talk to someone by texting or calling 988 for the suicide hotline.  Despair is a fact of life for all of us at times, but if there is no relief, please get some help.  You are not alone.

When I was young, I often used fantasy to counter despair.  I find it doesn’t work so well in old age.  I wrote a story in order to think about that: “Amnesia at the Airport.”  Try it.  Better yet, write your own story.  And share it.

Build Your Own World, Create Your Own Day, Construct Your Own Life

When I was young, I thought I would have figured things out by the time I was old.  (Old then being about 50.)  Yet I seem to be fighting many of the same battles with myself that I have been fighting for seven decades.  I know I don’t need another book to tell me how to fulfill my purpose, stop procrastinating, live according to my values and priorities.  I have read a slew of those books and know what it is that I am supposed to do.  That is not the problem.  Actually doing what I know is the best thing is the problem.

Moving closer to my teenage grandchildren and hearing them interact with their parents has been somewhat enlightening in this regard.  The conversation goes like this.  Parent: “Do you think eating all that candy (or staying up late playing video games or spending your allowance on silly things) is a good choice?”  Child: “I know, I know – but I really wanted…” You get the picture.  Many days this same conversation is going on in my head, but both characters are… me.  I know what the good choices are, but as Saint Paul laments in Romans 7:19, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.  Or as Ado Annie says in Oklahoma, “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

I have won the battle in some cases.  I keep a serious journal and have an exercise routine of sorts.  I take my vitamins and see my dentists and doctors as required.  I make my bed and remember birthdays and get a blog posted a couple of times a month, yet my life is overshadowed by the things I want to do and do not do.

Friends have told me just to climb out from under the guilt.  Retired people don’t really need to do anything, do they?  And yet this is not an answer for me.  I want to end every waking day by being satisfied by what I have accomplished, but I also am looking more closely (than I would like) at the end of my life.  The big deadline looms.

Three pieces of advice have helped me lately, and I am glad to pass them along.  Two are quotes from the Transcendentalists, first from Emerson in “Nature:” “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”  Birds single-mindedly build their nests; we should do the same.  In old age, our nests are for nurturing ourselves and not our babies, they are for cradling us to the end.  No better reason for building your own world.

If Emerson seems to call for too much, Thoreau parses it into to smaller chunks for us to consider.  In Walden, he tries to whittle his life down to the marrow; he trims his expectations to the day in front of him.  “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  Make this day a good one – and our days will add up to a life, a world.   Thoreau’s gentle exhortation has gotten me through some rough patches.

Lastly, I have been reading a wonderful novel, This is Happiness, by Niall Williams.  The book was recommended in a recent NYTimes piece by Ann Patchett and is narrated by a very old man who is recalling the coming of electricity to his Irish village.  Read it to find out if the residents are happier before or after technology catches up with them!  In any case, the seventy-eight-year-old man reflects on this very subject:

Not that you ever quite know what that is [the better version of ourselves], still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you.  I write this now. Having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard.  With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour.

And what are the fruits of this fruitless endeavour?  Perhaps that we affected the quality of our days with Thoreau and built our own (yet imperfect) world with Emerson.  I am happy to make an old lady’s accommodation with these truths.

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.

Puttering Around

When I was a child, my father “puttered” in his free time.  This had nothing to do with golf; it had a lot to do with a form of relaxation we don’t see much of anymore.  The extinction of puttering has a lot to do with some fundamental changes in our lifetimes.  Let me explain.

To putter is defined thus: to busy or occupy oneself in a leisurely, casual, or ineffective manner: e.g. to putter in the garden.  Leisurely, casual, and especially ineffective.  In his puttering, my father considered many projects and chores; few of them materialized. Puttering was not meant to be productive; it was meant to be an antidote to hard work and productivity.

My father had special clothes for puttering.  He wore, for years and years, the army fatigues he had brought home from his stint in the military sometime between WWII and Korea.  Those clothes lasted forever and were eventually stained by every kind of oil and paint known to our household.  Long after the shirts fell apart, the pants remained.  Dad called them his “putter pants.”  Now, there are “putter pants” on the market, designed with an elastic waist for old guys.  It would have been anathema to my father to buy something special to putter in.  When the last of the “military” putter pants bit the dust (probably disappeared by my mother), he started buying putter pants at tag sales – castoff military wear if he could get it.

Dad puttered on weekends and most of the summer.  (He was a college professor.)  He made no lists, but just wandered from one thing to another.  It was therapeutic rather than effective.  He would do it alone or with a child.  His grandchildren enjoyed puttering with him until they reached puberty, then they had “better” things to “do.”  So, Dad went back to puttering alone.  Such puttering is a lost art.

Dad sometimes did more than putter – in his younger days, he built two houses and repaired our cars and boats.  But when there was not something special and demanding on his plate – he puttered.  You could tell he enjoyed it because he sang or hummed the whole time.  Frank Sinatra and Patti Page hits when I was young; later it was Roger Whittaker.

I thought of this recently when I came across an article about Jeff Bezos and his habit of rising early and “puttering” until 10AM.  Good for him.  But the gist of the article was that Mr. Bezos was sure that his puttering made him more effective and more creative.  The author of the article tried it, and, sure enough, it helped him get things done.  I guess everything has to serve the Goddess of Productivity.  But that is not what puttering is supposed to be all about.  It is not supposed to be scheduled or weighted for effectiveness or participated in wearing specially designed pants.  Thoreau (one of the great putterers) would certainly assure us that there are not supposed to be new clothes for it.

Men of my father’s generation puttered.  What do they do now?  Is surfing the net or watching nonstop sports or playing video games the new form of puttering?  Do women putter?  I do it on occasion, but not with the joie de vivre and lack of purpose with which my father did it.  Even in retirement, I find myself pondering whether there is something specific I should be doing, somewhere I should be, some news I should catch up with.   Even if I am willing, even eager, to be decadent, there are many alluring alternatives calling to me – funny videos, silly text exchanges, countless errands.  I hope we have not lost the art of puttering – for it is an art.  And art is done for art’s sake.  It is not supposed to be a productive activity in any way – Jeff Bezos notwithstanding.

Perhaps this piece of writing is an example of puttering.  You might also look at an example of my puttering at fiction.  Talking about Thoreau and the advent of autumn reminded me of “Again and Again and Again.”

An Old Lady Returns from the Highlands

My husband and I just returned from Scotland – one of our favorite places in the world. But, on the long trip home, we admitted to each other that this might have been our last overseas trip. Scotland was gorgeous – we even lucked out and got an unheard-of two weeks of great weather, but was it worth it?

Air travel has become worse (if that is even possible), and we have become less resilient. Besides jet lag and the need to lift suitcases into overhead compartments, we have about a 50% infection rate – meaning at least half the time one or the other of us (or both) comes home with some kind of infection, presumably picked up on the plane. Sure enough, one of us is sick.

And it is not just our aging constitutions. Cognition is also not as sharp as it might once have been – in any case, driving on the left has not gotten any easier. Neither has deciphering maps or monetary conversion rates.

There is great pressure on the old to travel. In our rather aged community of many retirees, people travel far and often. There is much chatter about the best places to go and the best means to get there. Neighbors are often preparing to go somewhere or picking up the pieces when they come home to the unmown lawn.

Facebook accounts of our peers abound with selfies in exotic places, as the oldsters run through their bucket lists and their bank accounts. If one complains about the difficulties of travel, the solution is group tours, on which one can see foreign places while embedded with other Americans. No thanks. It is hard enough to get the flavor of a new place without seeing it through the lens of your peers and compatriots. One of the advantages of traveling on our own in Scotland was that we could avoid the places where the tour buses spilled out their tired clients. Plus (and most importantly), I am unsocial enough to find the possibility of being cooped up with a lot of strangers on a tour bus… terrifying. And, of course, we were in Heathrow earlier this week when pandemonium erupted as the biggest tour company in Great Britain went bankrupt and left hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded from Singapore to New Zealand.

And then there is this: while it is exciting to wait for an upcoming trip, can’t we all admit that after ten days or so we are simply pining for that flight home and wishing we had Dorothy’s ruby slippers? Don’t tell me it is otherwise. I know.

Of course, I may change my mind about travel. “Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.” True enough, Henry. Talk to me in another six months, when I have recovered from jet lag and bills from the last trip have been paid off, and I may have another opinion.

Even now I will admit that there are two true values of travel. First, travel makes you appreciate your own bed, friends who know you, food you recognize, and surroundings that are both boring and comforting. What Bertrand Russell called a “fruitful monotony.” Monotony that leaves time and energy for reflection.

Second, absence and return allows us to see the familiar in a different light. Like Thoreau, I am measuring the possibilities of seeing home with the eyes of a traveler. “It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village.” Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled widely giving lectures and garnering acclaim. He toured in Europe at least three times, seeing the sites and meeting the intellectual figures of his era. His friend Henry never left North America, and seldom ventured out of Concord – but what he saw every time he left his house was always new and always taught him something. Pick up his journals and open them anywhere.

The story for this post is “Again and Again and Again.” Some people dream of foreign places, but they are forced to swim in their own backyards. In HDT’s case, this was Walden Pond. “I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” Thoreau reminds us that characters were engraved on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: “‘Renew thyself completely each date; do it again, and again, and again.’” But it is, maybe, possible to do this without leaving home. At least that’s what Henry tells me and what I want to believe at the moment.

Answers?

My generation spent our young adult years being fascinated by all the new technology cascading to the market. We knew television from our youth, but soon it was color television, then there were VCR’s and cable TV, video games, there were computers in the office and then computers at home – and then the internet and cell phones arrived! Scanners, digital pix, e-mail, social media, texting, news on demand, ipads, smart phones, search engines – all of this was a long way from the US Postal Service and the Encyclopedia Britannica. We were fascinated, seduced, enamored, and then we were… suspicious, and sometimes overwhelmed.

I remember the first time I was exposed to a spread sheet program (Lotus 123) and realized those ledgers and blue and red pencils could go out the window. But the initial joy was followed by the realization that the answers we got from the spread sheets were only as good as the data and formulas that we put into them. The word processors produced gorgeous copy – error-free with justified margins, but the content was if anything diminished by the speed with which it could be produced. We learned the acronym GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. We found that we could reach anyone in the world from our cell phone or computer, but that there weren’t that many people we wanted to talk to. (Remember Thoreau? “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate!”) Google answered our questions, but we weren’t at all sure what questions to ask. Maybe Picasso spoke for all of us when he stated that “Computers are useless. They only give you the answers.”

Of course, computers and rational people can answer what are called convergent problems – ones with definitive answers that are the same across time and individuals. How do you build a bicycle? How far is it to the sun? But what are the important questions? For you? For me: “What should I do? How should I live? And (as I got older): Why haven’t I figured this out before now?” Ah, but maybe the problem is a blind belief in rationality itself and that we (or our computers) can “figure it out.” The best literature is written about the big questions of life. I just finished Richard Powers wonderful Prisoner’s Dilemma (and see here for a description of the philosophical problem for which the novel is titled) and the question that Powers asks is “what, if anything, can one private citizen do to make the shared scenario less horrible?” This is a great question for our time. A good exercise in reading is to attempt to ascertain what questions the author is asking and what – if any – alternative answers are presented to these interrogations.

Questions and answers. For all the rationality of Socrates, he is surely better at questions than answers. And wisdom literature of the religious variety is not much for definitive answers. In the Bhagavad Gita, we open with Arjuna asking Krishna why he must engage in battle. Krishna tells Arjuna that it makes no difference, in the end friend and foe are the same, and that Krishna himself is both the sacrifice and the sacrificer. Try to figure that out rationally. Arjuna learns a level of acceptance – “You have dispelled my doubts and delusions and I understand through your grace,” says Arjuna finally. “My faith is firm now, and I will do your will.”

Job asks God three questions: “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?” “How can a man be just before God?” and “If a man die, shall he live again?” As far as I can see, God never answers any of these questions. After trying to argue rationally with his friends and with God, poor Job comes to the same conclusion: “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” God also takes Job’s “friends” to task for thinking they had “figured things out” and for giving Job false information. These friends end up needing to make big sacrifices and have Job intercede for them to stay on the right side of the Big Guy. The Book of Job and the Bhagavad-Gita are stories of acceptance, not stories of answers.

Computers have both absolute rationality and answers; it might appear that both are, in many ways, useless. Like Job’s friends. Computers give us answers, but answers – especially easy answers – are something of which we should be very suspicious.

But the questions, the questions are important. How do we interrogate our own lives to avoid GIGO? What are your questions? Think about it. And when you decide on your questions, run them through Google for a laugh.

This week’s story, “Don’t Eat the Pink Ones,” has more mysteries than answers, but it is appropriate for the end of the blueberry season.

Aging Deliberately

I have always been challenged by Thoreau’s ambition to live life intentionally, with purpose and awareness: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” To live life deliberately. It seems like such an obvious and worthwhile goal.

I first read Walden in college. By then, it was too late to live my childhood deliberately – and is that even possible? For most of us, choices as to how we lived were severely limited until we were emancipated from our families. Our diets, our activities, our free time were all greatly prescribed. And the nuclear family meant that we often were not even aware that other choices existed. Do you remember how shocked you were when you ate a meal or spent the night at a friend’s house and realized that people did things differently? At six years old, I visited a house where the children were allowed to operate the television by themselves! Who knew?

During adolescence and young adulthood, hormones and the drive for emancipation drove me, drove most of us. And then, quickly enough, I was driven by my career and children. And too busy to think about much else. How else does one get through those years but by ploughing ahead with blinders on? When I visit my children now and watch them cope with young children and jobs and all the juggling of such a life, I still couldn’t tell you how it’s done – except that, under the circumstances, one has to suspend doubt that one can do it.

It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I really had time to pause and think about the shape of my life. There wasn’t much that I could do about the past (except make sure I was telling myself a truthful story – but more on that another time), but the future stood out as a time of … my own. Soon I would not have to work anymore, would not have to live in a given place or a prescribed way, would not have direct responsibility for anyone except my partner and myself. But didn’t Janice Joplin warn us: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”? Freedom itself can lead to futility, despair.

Jeannette Winterson says that the “question, ‘How shall I live?’ is fierce.” It is perhaps the only question. For so much of our lives things seem out of our control, and in our latter years we are, of course, subject to the decay and disease of our bodies. And yet. Surely facing deterioration and death is among the things we can do deliberately, unless we are robbed of this ability by dementia (which is just one of the things that is heartbreaking about that condition).

Here is Montaigne in his essay “Experience”:

We are great fools. “He has passed his life in idleness,” say we: “I have done nothing today.” What? Have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. “Had I been put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I could do.” “Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? You have performed the greatest work of all.” … Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken empires and cities.

So as we retire, we might ask ourselves Montaigne’s implied question, “Have you known how to take repose?” and realize its importance. In his repose, Montaigne looked inward and wrote his essays.

Of course, not all courses are open to us. How we (or the vagaries of life) have prepared our bodies and minds for this last part of life is consequential. Lord Bolingbroke who was forced into retirement in 1735 at age 57, wrote a treatise on study and retirement.  He reminds us such study “would have been agreeable and easy if he had accustomed himself to it early, will be unpleasant and impracticable late: such men lose their intellectual powers for want of exerting them, and, having trifled away youth, are reduced to the necessity of trifling away age. It fares with the mind just as it does with the body.” Cicero expresses similar concerns about dayspring mishandled in his essay on old age. But within the limits of our bodies and minds and preparation, choices still must be made. Old age is different from youth; to ignore the opportunities and challenges it presents will lead us to senescence mishandled.

Carl Jung always insisted that the stages of life had different purposes. “We cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” You can read Jung’s “Stages of Life” for his advice on how to spend your old age, but, hey, we’ve lived a long time. Maybe we can figure it out for ourselves. And then do it. Deliberately.

This week’s story, “Essentials,” is not about old age, but it is about the challenge we face at every stage of life – how to make life meaningful. How to live – within the parameters with which we are faced – with intensity and deliberation and good intent.

Second Growth

For anyone interested in the process of aging, one could do worse than perusing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals. Emerson lived to be almost seventy-nine, and kept a journal between the ages of seventeen and seventy-two. Not only do we read about his transit through time, but he relates the development and aging of his friends – and Emerson’s friends were wonderful people indeed.

I have conscientiously kept a journal for the past fifteen years; in the writing, it has been therapeutic; in its existence (particularly with the aid of the word processor’s search feature), it has been an aid to memory; in its chronology, it has helped me understand my own journey through time. I wish, though, that I had such documentation of earlier crises in my life, as I rely on my memory – both historical and emotional – to try to make some sense out of things retrospectively, which I believe is part of the mission of old age. And one’s own memory can be a sly fox. Of course, there remains the problem of what to do with the written details of one’s life and thought when the end of life (or mind) comes, but for now it is a priceless resource (to me). More on this in another post (as well as hints as to how to journal consistently), but back to Emerson.

In a journal entry that Emerson made in February 1862 (he was fifty-seven), he gives us his thoughts on a second growth in old age, as well as a comment from his friend Thoreau (what wouldn’t you give to go on a long walk with those two?):

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes came out late in life with a strong sustained growth for two or three years, like the old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, and at last begin to grow great. The Lowells come forward slowly, and Henry Thoreau remarks that men may have two growths like pear trees.

And this got me thinking about… dandelions. For one thing, it is that time of year in North Carolina. For another, dandelions have two “growths,” two “blossomings.” One day on a walk, I began wondering about dandelions (having seen a wonderful crop of them). How do they metamorphose from a yellow bloom to a white one with no “transitional” blossoms? As I got down on my haunches and investigated more closely, it seemed that the golden bloom closed up again and then reopened as the white feathery blossom – I found this diagram of the dandelion life cycle:

dandelion

 

So, the blossom is twice born – once to youth, beauty, color, and sexual purpose (attracting those bees), and the second time to lightness, airiness, ultimate dispersal, and perhaps rebirth. In-between, there is a period of rest, a closing down, a respite. It might behoove us to think of our whitening heads as such a second flowering.

For those of you interested in Emerson’s journals (which are voluminous), I recommend the abbreviated Heart of Emerson’s Journals, edited by Bliss Perry. For those of you interested in Emerson’s life, I recommend Mr. Emerson’s Wife, by my friend Amy Belding Brown.

For a story this week, you might go back to “Again and Again and Again” for a tale of Walden Pond, or you can read the prospectus for a novel (I actually did write the novel several years later), included here as “A New Fable of Old Age.” This started as a thought experiment in which the old are forced into a second growth. I apologize for my tardiness in posting this time; we have been visiting our elderly mothers. Perhaps more about that too at a later date.

 

Renoir, de Beauvoir, and the Artist of Kouroo

In 2012, there was a film made about the old age of Renoir. The film was lovely, but painful to watch, as Renoir coped with rheumatoid arthritis as he kept on painting, having to have assistants wrap his fingers around the brush to get him started. Possible for Renoir, perhaps, because he had the fame and fortune to get much support and respect, even though he was greatly debilitated. No nursing home for him. But still inspiring and lovely – pursing his project to the end.

In her La Vieillesse (interestingly, a French feminine noun meaning “old age,” but translated in the English version to The Coming of Age), de Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work. In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.” Yes. But. She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.” Therefore, we shouldn’t think too much but just continue in established “paths.” De Beauvoir does not think much of retirement.

De Beauvoir tells us the retired, “even if he keeps his health and clarity of mind…is nevertheless the victim of that terrible curse, boredom.” How afraid we are of being bored! What did Pascal say? “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” And what did Kafka say? “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” When on earth do we get a chance to sit alone and listen if not in old age, in retirement? Is it such a terrible curse? And what about people (like athletes) whose passions are dependent on a functioning body? My folks were devoted to tennis and desolate when they could not play.

There is more to it. De Beauvoir says that in old age we are overwhelmed by the past, as there is so much of it. She talks about the “hard apprenticeship” of childhood and the fact that “the unpleasant memories of this time that were repressed in adulthood [by ceaseless activity] revive in old age. The barriers that stood up well enough so long as the individual was active and subject to social pressure give way to the lonely idleness of old age.” Isn’t this a good thing (not the loneliness, perhaps, but the time to reflect)? Do we want to die with these barriers in place?   (This is a very good question, and my readers may have very different answers.)

This is one of those divergent problems (see Schumacher’s Guide for the Perplexed for a good definition of divergent and convergent problems) – for which there are only contingent answers. Surely we should pursue projects that engage us, challenge us. And this makes me think of Thoreau and his Artist of Kouroo. I don’t know if HDT heard this fable somewhere or made it up, but in Walden, he gives us an artist “who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.” The artist works and works, through endless eons of time, until he had a pure and faultless creation and “he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion.” In true creative engagement, time falls away. “His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth.” Perennial youth. But, when one puts the brush or the pen or the carving knife down, doesn’t one still have to deal with the aging body? May we always have projects ahead of us, but may we also be prepared to just sit – when we want to and when we have no choice.

This week’s story (“Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind”) is a part of my Metamorphoses series and concerns an old woman who has found a modest project, an object of engagement, in her old age.