Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (50 page)

As I write this book, I interpret Miller’s story in ways I could not do more than four decades ago, when I was young and fit. I see its awful cogency. I see the outright mugging—robbery of one’s most precious assets: oneself, one’s mind, thoughts, words, all that one has spent a lifetime acquiring—that time sometimes metes out to those who live long. The sheer economy of this undoing makes me marvel. “Finders keepers, losers weepers.” We are doomed to be losers and weepers, but what we lose is not some shiny coin or jewel but rather ourselves, the self we have worked artisanally to craft over the years; but now, in old age, like a fabric that one pulls apart, returning it to separate, disparate threads, annihilating its pattern, one ravels out. “If you could just ravel out in time,” Faulkner’s Darl Bundren muses in
As I Lay Dying
, a book Faulkner wrote when he was all of thirty-two years old, and I wonder how on earth he could have known, back then, in his jaunty salad days, that raveling out in time is our common fate.

Already in the sixteenth century Michel de Montaigne recognized the temptation to believe that one matures and improves over time when he commented on the revisions of his work, acknowledging that the later versions might not be one whit superior to the earlier ones, “I do not trust my thoughts more because they are second or third or first. Often we correct ourselves as stupidly as we correct others.… After a long stretch of time, I have become older, but certainly not an inch wiser. Me now and me then are two, but which is better I could not say at all. It would be great to be old if we always progressed toward improvement. It is like a drunken movement, tottering, vertiginous, shapeless, like reeds moved fortuitously by the wind.” Mind you, this is the same philosopher who wrote so richly about the nature of “experience,” yet his signature note is expressed, I think, in the closing line, where he characterizes his trajectory through time as halting, lurching, precarious, patternless, governed by inhuman natural forces.

I am also reminded of Sartre’s malicious put-down of experience in one of the strongest passages of
Nausea
, where the venerable figure of Dr. Rogé—the hero of “experience,” an older man able to convert life into label with great fluency and authority—comes in for major undoing. Sartre suggests that our entire repertoire of cognitive tags is a form not only of bad faith but of helplessness in the face of oncoming life, amorphous life that refuses to be corralled into the specious forms we enclose it in, in our hopeless bid to choke ever-unruly experience into something we might call knowledge. In Sartre’s view, this corruption starts around the age of forty, at which time one “christens” everything in the name of “experience,” approximating a slot machine: “put a coin in the left hand slot and you get tales wrapped in silver paper, put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious bits of advice that stick to your teeth like caramels.”

Growing old is when this hardening of the cerebral arteries takes place, not because of plaque in our passages but because we are no longer in the fray, and all we can do is dispense pithier and pithier word product of the “believe me, I’ve been there” stripe. Education itself gets a bad name on this head: the efforts of the old to con the young, to substitute a regime of labels and legerdemain—mind’s bogus frames—for the viscous and unchartable flow of reality from which we, the aging, have been banished. What, Sartre asks, is Dr. Rogé’s actual
truth
? The answer is: he is soon to die. In this scheme, tagging events and data with ever more frenzy is a pathological sign that we are nearing our end—not a happy vista for the old.

As an old professor, I feel outright queasy more and more often as I discuss literature with my young students, not merely because the age gap between us is truly immense but because I cannot get clear of the suspicion that I am peddling my goods, rehearsing my spiel, taking the life-and-death issues of my texts and warping them into pedagogy and rehearsed views. Even Kierkegaard indicted professors along these lines, claiming they routinely transformed fierce old fables into serviceable pap, removing all the “fear and trembling” from them, defanging them for academic use (and reuse). Perhaps the most vicious rendition of the gaga palming off their snake oil is to be found in William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
, where venerable old folks, one of them (resembling me, I fear) sweetly described as “some old white-haired fuck” by our author, seem to be a permanent threat, always there ready to “unlock” their “Word Hoard” and spill it onto innocent bystanders in their bid for power. I see myself, white-haired, permanently on the far side of life’s élan and open-ended vibrancy, holding forth year after year to my youthful captive audience, spraying them with words. What kind of generational trap is this? Wisdom as spittle, as sclerosis?

In closing on this harsh topic, let me shift gears a bit and discuss a remarkable sequence from the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities
, which I read aloud to my students every year (never getting a rise out of them) and which moves me ever more deeply and disturbingly as I age. The story is one of the manifold portraits of imagined cities that Calvino’s protagonist, Marco Polo, describes to his royal host, Kublai Khan—the city of Adelma. Each face he saw reminded him of a dead person: a sailor holding a rope resembled a soldier comrade who is dead; a fishmonger’s face was that of an old, long-dead fisherman of his youth; a fever victim on the ground had the same yellow eyes and growth of beard as his father a few hours before his death. Polo no longer dares to look anyone in the face:

Filled with exotic color and charm—sailor, fish market, vegetable vendor, girl on a balcony—this airy account of overdetermined perception has a feeling of fate, of out-of-sync clocks that misregulate human life, so that you are still alive but your brain, unwilling to budge, locked into a kind of reverse gear, can no longer move forward, can only choose images and tags out of the past to affix to what is coming your way. Two clocks: one for body, one for mind. This formulation may sound overly mechanical, but it captures the disjunction that time brings the living, the odd mix of paralysis and motion, of frozen and fluid. Note that Calvino never even whispers the words “old age,” yet he has offered us a neurological portrait of how we process life in an evolving fashion that one fine day stops. Calvino has sweetly told this as a fable about Adelma, about the place you finally come to when your mental operations lose their connection to experience and start spitting out their own stored in-house data. But one can also see this little saga as a parable about the frozen attitudes, assumptions, and values that characterize the old, that advertise their rigidity, their condition of being stuck in time, of being living dead—a parable about experience as dysfunctional, about old age as literally out of sync.

I look around me at a world that is far more exotic and mysterious (to me) than Calvino’s Adelma—a regime of iPods and hedge funds and credit default swaps and blogospheres and rap music and melting ice caps and genocide and terrorism and much, much else—and I feel myself to be almost prehistoric, almost fossilized, unable to put a label on what I see, painfully aware that my stock of captions has no purchase on much coming my way. (I could use some help from Dr. Rogé.) Maybe Calvino had it right: if you live long enough, your brain starts to resemble an overloaded bookshelf where no new text can be put, but that series of old and older books is your (abiding, tyrannical) source of information and (mis)recognition. Perhaps we never leave the company of our dead father, our dead grandmother, now functioning as ghosts who arguably stamp the present with more authority than they ever possessed (for us) while living. Such transactions sometimes go by the name of “inheritance” or “tradition,” but for the most part they happen invisibly and unknowingly. Is it possible that our so-called wisdom might be nothing but projections of the dead, performed by the old and dying?

Freud used the term “uncanny” (
unheimlich
) to characterize a split-level type of perception whereby we intuit that our present situation is somehow prescripted, somehow an overlay of past experience, even made up of past residues. Calvino’s Adelma carries this arrested form of vision even further, unpacking its unavowed complicity with death: not the dead who now seem to populate our perceptions but our own death as thinking individual, no longer able to respond to life in the quick. Freud was drawn to the psychic layers in play when we encounter the uncanny, when we sense the bristling underside of seemingly tame, docile moments and perceptions, but I see this
décalage
or misfit as the very language of impending cognitive misprision, even bankruptcy, of what time does to our equipment, of our vain efforts to cope by substituting false currency for real, by throwing dead, past-owned words at fresh, living matter. Getting old makes you realize that your currency might be debased, that your tools—even your naming tools—might be necrotic.

Final harvest?

I have attempted, up to now, to face the worst, to do justice to the countdown that literary depictions of growing old sometimes proffer. Undone fathers, old folks hauled off the stage, old people unhappy in love, fouled harvest, discovering you’ve never lived, in short, undoing in so many phases. Hence, I hope I will not be accused of sentimentalism if I now insist as well on the resilience, pluck, grit, and sheer zest that are no less a part of our human equipment as we move from noon to night. Andrew Marvell’s witty seventeenth-century poem “To His Coy Mistress” closes with this well-known couplet: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” The poem is said to be about making love while you can, Horace’s carpe diem or “seize the day,” yet it seems wonderfully apt for our topic as well: to summon one’s all in the final chapter, to display even at the end a radiant kind of human doing that rivals the sun in energy. “Death be not proud” is John Donne’s well-known phrase; could there be a pride in old age?

Hemingway’s famous late story stands for many of us as a noble, if sometimes nearly mawkish, tribute to old Santiago’s courage and spirit in the face of awful odds. This fable of an old man matching his skill against the hugest fish of his life and finally bringing it in, only to lose it to sharks, would seem to be a parable about human endurance, about never quitting, about what Hemingway memorably called “grace under pressure.” Santiago models himself after none less than the great DiMaggio, a cult hero who comes across as the text’s male god, the pantheon figure who routinely achieves epic results despite his bone spur, his Achilles’ heel, his marker of mortality. Both he and DiMaggio, Santiago remembers, are sons of fishermen; both are tested, not unlike the way Kierkegaard’s Abraham was tested by God: to show their true mettle, their soul. It is a satisfying and fitting picture, I think, of the challenge of old age: to give your true, your final measure. How different this is from the entropic plot of accommodation, indeed extinction, we are so accustomed to! At the end of your course, you display everything you are made of. You triumph, old though you are, over the indignities of time. Remember the decrepit Oedipus at Colonus, rising to majesty at play’s end.

For we must never forget that Santiago is a man well past his prime. His great days would seem to be behind him. We learn this through his dreams: “He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach.” And that is how the story will close: the lone fisherman will make it back to port, dragging only the skeleton of his enormous, once beautiful marlin, and he will drag himself home to sleep and to dream of lions. Yet he himself wonders, in midbattle with the great fish, when he is aching for sleep, whether his life is a diminished thing: “Why are the lions the main thing that is left?” Are dreams all that remain?

What is left?
Is that not the resounding question that besets old age? Well, one was once young, and memories are still there; hence, it is pertinent that some of the story’s most riveting pages are devoted to the memory of Santiago’s epic arm-wrestling battle against the giant Negro, a battle he won, a battle that tested his very limits, it would seem. That was Santiago at his prime. But that is the past. He no longer possesses that fabulous strength. Old, he is now the owner of a hand that might cramp on him, that cannot be depended on when final efforts are due, when you either meet or fail the challenge. These handicaps—how right that word, “handicap,” seems in this story of bodies, especially hands themselves, that may or may not perform—are front and center in the old man’s battle with the great fish, and he knows quite well that raw force cannot be his strongest suit, that he must count on shrewdness, cunning, and the fruits of experience. As he tells the boy, “I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”