Tag: Virginia Woolf

Old People as Their Own Best Teachers?

In my random reading this morning I ran across this quote from Yeats: “When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.”  The sentiment reminds me of James’ Beast in the Jungle – we spend life in preparation for some event, some epiphany, some revelation.

Bibliophiles like me have read a lot of books by the time they get old.  They might not remember all of them, but they have spent vast swaths of their lives living in a state of immersion in the reading experience.  As Ecclesiastes says, “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”  And now, like the preacher at the end of Ecclesiastes, I am old and am only too aware of the “weariness of the flesh.”   It seems to me that there should be a time to stop reading and to try to make sense of what we have read, what we have learned.  Montaigne wonders when the old man will stop learning and be wise in what he has learned, and it seems to me that his own essays were an attempt to do just that.

But it is hard to give up.  The internet assures me that this one new book will explain things to me once and for all.  Or that the latest novel will change the way I think of the world, or I must read a newly translated book that was never-before available in English.  And it is not just the push-marketing of Amazon and the like; when I look something up on Wiki or do a Google search, I am presented with lists of books that will elucidate the very subject which I am interested in – and I can have an electronic version of said book within seconds. And then there are the prize-winning books, the best seller lists, the books I keep seeing people walking around with.  Surely, of the “making many books there is no end.”

But even without our buying books, myriads of books are available to us.  Libraries have a far vaster array of offerings than they used to have, as they pool their resources and make what we used to call inter-library loans so easy.  Anything we want is available one way or another – anything we want except the answers that will enable us to stop looking.

One of my early blogs (“Possessing That Which Was Mine”) was about a vow I made to read nothing new – to go back and reread what I had read for a second time and to take time to process what I had learned.  That did not last long.  After a few months, someone recommended something that “I absolutely had to read,” and I was off.

In addition, I have cabinets full of daily journals that go back 21 years, and sporadic journal entries and autobiographical fragments going back to my childhood.  I have manuscripts of novels and short stories that I have been meaning to edit for years, but never do.  I clearly like writing more than I like revision. just as I like reading a new book better than really taking time to absorb an old one.  I am getting to an age at which I either need to use this material or recycle it.  Do I really want my children to read my journals? (Not that they would have any interest.)

There are various ways to handle such material.  I have a friend who, cleaning out his own artwork, offered to send all his friends a piece.  I happily accepted.  Other friends have reduced their written work to one flash drive that they can slip in their pocket and jettison before death if they don’t want their heirs pouring through the story of their lives.

But I am not ready to jettison my precious words without review.  So, I have decided to do a moderated version of Swedish death cleaning with the recorded experiences and ideas in my life.  First of all, I am going to try to stick to re-reading rather than reading.  For light reading (which for me means mostly mysteries), having long forgotten the “who-done-it” for novels I read over thirty years ago, I have the joys of Ngaio Marsh, Amandra Cross, and Agatha Christie to look forward to again.  For more serious reading, I will start with the novels that have meant the most to me over the years, probably first going back to Herman Hesse, Jorge Borges, and George Eliot.  For non-fiction, I am currently rereading David Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, and will soon move on to Thoreau and Montaigne.

And as for my manuscripts, about ten years ago I drafted a novel (The Order of the Stock Farm Jesus – excerpt here) about an old woman who encounters a young girl who, for reasons of her own, wants to collaborate on writing a list of rules for life.  What are the rules you live by?  What is the difference between what you do and what you think you should do?  Writing this novel was a good exercise then, but ten years later it seems an even better one.  In conjunction with that project, I will start reading my own voluminous journals (young to old) to see what the lessons of my life were.  What can I teach myself?  Have I learned anything?  Can I put what I have learned into words?  More importantly, have I internalized these learnings and started to act accordingly? (Can you teach an old dog new tricks?)

Virginia Woolf kept journals, and – although she never got very old – said that she wrote precisely so that her older self could read her younger self: “Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920, will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost…”  Marion Milner (A Life of One’s Own) started keeping journals in a desperate attempt to find out what it was in life that made her really happy.  Thoreau went to Walden and kept a journal to “front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”  I’ll let you know how my project goes, and – if you have attempted anything similar – please tell me about it!

I have written before on keeping journals in old age, “Journaling in Old Age.”  It’s not too late!  I didn’t start doing it seriously until I was 53, but I am so glad I did.  The benefits accrue not just in having a record, but in the very process of sorting out your thoughts every day, at transferring your experiences into words.  Try it.

If you have been journaling, you might look at an old blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for ideas about how to mine your own words for life lessons.  You might also look at my fanciful short story, “Nothing New.”

Thoughts on the New Year and Turning 70

There is much hope in the land for the New Year; 2020 will not be fondly remembered by most people. I do not have to detail the collective tragedy of this lost year.  On the positive and personal side, we were blessed with two healthy new grandsons this year, but have only seen them once. And, just as the vaccine is in our sights, Covid has surged.  It has even entered my immediate neighborhood for the first time.

I have written in another year about the images of the “old” year (Father Time) and the “Baby” New Year.  This is a holiday which will not let us forget time is passing.  As I get older, New Year’s Eves come faster and faster, and I go to bed earlier and earlier.  No bells at midnight for me.  And I am cognizant today that 2021 is the year in which I will turn 70.  Seventy seems old to me.  I am sure I will get used to my new decade (although my husband who is two years ahead of me says he hasn’t).  But the numerical marker is a bellwether, a harbinger of things to come.

The Bible tells us that seventy years is all we can expect of life.  Psalm 90 is quite explicit on this point:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Or in a more modern translation:

Seventy years is all we have—eighty years, if we are strong; yet all they bring us is trouble and sorrow; life is soon over, and we are gone.

One can argue that in Biblical times 70 was much older than it is now.  Maybe.  But I know there are many things about old age that have not changed, that cannot be easily “cured,”  including the simple truth of the wear and tear our bodies and minds have undergone for seven decades.

As anyone who has been reading these blogs will know, there has been much debate in recent years on what our attitude toward old age should be.  One of my favorite authors (both as the academic Carolyn Heilbrun and the mystery writer Amanda Cross) wrote The Last Gift of Time – Life Beyond 60.  It is a lovely book about getting older and delineates many of the joys of old age.  Yet, Dr. Heilbrun also vows in the book to commit suicide at age 70,  as “there is no joy in life past that point, only to experience the miserable endgame.”  She actually waited until she turned 77; I wish she had waited longer.

A few years back (2014), Ezekiel Emanuel (noted oncologist and bioethicist who was recently appointed to Biden’s Covid team and whose brothers are Rahm and Ari) wrote a much-discussed article in The Atlantic entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”  The title is misleading; Emanuel does not necessarily hope to die in his mid-seventies.  But he has decided that by age 75 he will give up all measures to make him live into a very long but perhaps debilitated old age.  He is clearly against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, but:

I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75.  Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible.  This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.

I recommend the article – particularly those parts about where our health care dollars are going and how statistics show that longevity improvements often just “increase the years spent in disability.”  By the way, Dr. Emanuel says in this essay that he will no longer take flu vaccines after age 75; I wonder how he feels about this in the current situation.  I do not want to make his argument simplistic though; it is a powerful statement of reality in the face of the very unreal chase after immortality.  As I approach my eighth decade, all these things are on my mind.

This is my last post in a remarkable year.  It is also the time for printing up my journal for the month of December and completing the three-ring binder labeled 2020.   This is the 17th year I have undertaken this process of recording my life in an organized way; these piles of words remember more than I do.    Virginia Woolf said, once, that she wrote her diary for her 50-year-old self to read (she was in her thirties when she said this).  Why does a 70-year-old keep a diary? (I bet you know the answer to this – if not read my blog on the subject here.)   And when is it time to stop writing and just to review and reflect?

December 31st  is also time to put away my books of morning readings – this year it was readings from C.S. Lewis and the third volume of a set of daily poems that I cycle through on a triennial basis. It is a time to start clearing away Christmas decorations and throwing out old calendars. 

And, as we clear away the old, are we getting ready for that final clearing away?  Does the end of a year make us consider that – perhaps – the new year might be our last?  Out with the old, in with the new?  Old man time being replaced by baby new year?  The old year being shuffled into drawers, shut into binders,  or collected in folders for our tax returns?  I have made no resolutions for the New Year.  I am not as pessimistic as Carolyn Heilbrun or Ezekiel Emanuel, but I did watch my mother’s life disintegrate into a malicious form of dementia in the end.  There should be some middle ground to this business of fading out, of becoming someone we don’t recognize mentally or physically.  I have no answers, but am open to alternatives.  And, in truth, I look forward to this new year.  Especially, to this new year.

 

Narratives of Old Age

Are real people fictions? We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever fiction we have chosen to believe in. It is necessary to have a story, an alibi that gets us through the day, but what happens when the story becomes a scripture? When we can no longer recognise anything outside our own reality? – from Jeannette Winterson’s Art Objects

Jeannette Winterson correctly points out that it is necessary to “have a story, an alibi that gets us through the day.” We all have narratives that we tell ourselves, for which we provide mental commentary as we move through our days. But what happens when our stories veer from reality? What happens when they become “scripture” for our consciousness, leaving no room for change or adaptation? And what happens when we get old?

What kind of story do we tell ourselves about getting old – if we tell ourselves that story at all? We tell ourselves stories about other people getting old, but we think we are all somehow… exceptions. My mother thinks she is the only person who is not “old” in her memory care facility. “This place is full of old people” she sneers with disdain as she shuffles past her peers down the long corridors. People put off going into retirement villages, elderly housing, assisted living, because those people are so old. And we say it with the same sneer that my demented mother uses. No young people ever complain about going away to college because the people are so young. (Although would you want to move into a dorm again with a gaggle of eighteen-year-olds?)

It is of great note that people of a certain age always claim to feel like they are younger than they are. A favorite conversation topic is divulging with our peers what age we feel like inside – 20? 15? 35? Surely not our real age – not 67 or 75 or 82. We think there is something wrong with our skin, our bones, our hearing because it is not what it used to be and because it does not match our mental image of ourselves. Sometimes I wonder if there is an acceptable story about getting old.

Jeannette Winterson says that we understand each other through “an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others.” In our culture, the stories of old age we absorb from others are mostly stories of denial or hostility. “You’re only as old as you feel.” “Do not go gentle into that good night.” But here we sit with our old bodies and our minds that sometimes can’t remember the name of that woman across the street.

Virginia Woolf (who never got very old herself) demands an acknowledgment of the “great wars which the body wages with the mind.”  Woolf concedes that such honesty will not be easy: “To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.” Woolf also acknowledges that age itself changes our perception of the entire world: “If you are young, the future lies upon the present, like a piece of glass, making it tremble and quiver. If you are old, the past lies upon the present, like a thick glass, making it waver, distorting it.” Is age itself distorting our ability to tell ourselves a real story, a meaningful story?

What would a true and helpful story of old age be? Would a more reasonable narrative of the body’s weaknesses save us from the wasted energy of railing against every demonstration of those very debilities? (I am currently hobbling around in an orthopedic boot protecting a broken foot. It is temporary, but trying my patience and my story about being fit and active – but more on this next time.) If we could get past disdain, would we find some value in old age – a refuge, perhaps, from the competitions and expectations of our youth? Again, I ask all of us (old or young), what is our narrative of old age? And where did it come from? Other people? From our younger selves? Are we brave enough to tell a new story?

And while we are at it, we might also examine the story of the past. Old age is a time (and often has time) for reflection. Does our past match the story we were living at the time? There are still lessons to be learned.

This week’s story is “Playing by Ear,” about the stories we absorb through our auditory functions. Think about it.