Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (57 page)

This long, rich, intricate, and gruesome passage challenges Shakespeare’s injunction to look on old age, because it says that such objective notation—measuring the damage, scouring the landscape—is possible only via distance and indifference. We are not constituted to be able to see our loved ones in this way, Proust asserts. Our love freezes them in time, pickles them (as it were), and hence blinds us to the unceasing work of time that goes about dismantling all human creatures who live long enough.

We see easily enough what this passage tells us about love, but what does it tell us about old age? I’d want to say that it helps to explain how surprised many of us are to find ourselves, one fine day, old; and then to realize that we’ve been old for some time now. The surprise comes, in part, from the conspiracy of silence that surrounds us: our friends and loved ones do not pass on the news that we are becoming gaga because they do not truly see it themselves, given their affection for us. Resisting the testimony of time seems almost hardwired in us: one retains an image of self from childhood, fancies that one is still on the front side of one’s trajectory, poised to enter the fray, to engage in life’s battles, that one still possesses youthful energies, still has bridges to cross and horizons to conquer. It seems fair to assume that this quixotic certainty deserves credit for much of what is great in life, the energies we marshal, above all our sense of promise and futurity. How dreary life would be, how permanently dispirited one would be, if you knew, early on, the exact number of days you had left to live.

But intimations of mortality cannot stay hidden, no matter how stubborn and “freezing” one’s love of others, or indeed of oneself, might be. Proust disposes of many registers as he deals with the shocking realization that human bodies never stop altering. He writes in the final volume of a reception where the narrator, now old, simply cannot link together the “feather-light fair girl” of his youth with the “massive white-haired lady” in front of him, and he realizes that life’s slow, imperceptible projects of dismantlement and reconstruction—carrried out on human bodies—utterly dwarf the work of architecture. Some have white hair, some have none, some limp, some have had strokes, some have palsy, all display the relentless tug of gravity that is inexorably bringing them into the earth. The Sphinx told us of a creature that moves from four legs to two legs to three legs, but it ain’t just the number of legs that alters over time. When I look at the photographs of myself on the suite of books I’ve written—in 1974, 1981, 1988, 1993, 2003, 2006—I get dizzy at the biological countdown staring at me in the smiling face of somebody I know very well but whose entropic trajectory has usually been mercifully hidden from me. I see the lines appear, the flesh sag, the bones protrude, and it makes me wonder if my sequentially smiling face is not a joke (on me): what am I smiling about? Live long enough, and you become something of a morphological carnival.

We know how such carnivals finish. Or we think we do. Arguably the most beautiful segment in all of Proust focuses on the grandmother’s “double death.” The old lady suffers the slights of time and illness: a stroke, bedridden, loss of hearing, then sight, then speech. At last she dies, and the child narrator is awakened by his parents to bid her farewell, but what he sees is a “beast” on the bed whom he does not recognize, who does not recognize him. Proust writes this as a version of Little Red Riding Hood: if this is not Grandmother, where is she? Rather than answer that question, the novel goes its merry way, the protagonist starts to get some lessons about sexual love, but then the boy returns to the coastal town of Balbec, where he had earlier vacationed with his (already sick) grandmother. Tired from his travels, bending down to remove his boots, the boy is violently struck by a living force that explodes into his life: it is Grandmother, Grandmother of long memory, possessed of all the little acts of goodness and kindness bestowed on him, including her tenderness right here in this coastal hotel a year earlier. What we see is that it is only now that the grandmother truly dies, for it is only now that he truly realizes what she was for him.

Was? No, still is, as the testimony of dream and memory makes clear, for he stays locked in his room, prey to a series of almost intolerably beautiful and painful visions and reminiscences and outright oneiric versions of dying/dead Grandmother, of seeking her in the hidden little room where, dead, she still lived but failing to find her, to tell her how much he loved her, to say farewell. It is a moment of loving grace, even if she is buried in the ground and he is alone in a room. Here, then, is a narrative drastically different from the spectacle of a beast on a bed. No, we cannot make the sun stand still—we cannot prevent the old from dying—but love constitutes our rival creation, our ability to create a space (
Gi plads!
) that still lives. Memory itself is the afterlife for which no religious creed is required.

Must we discover what people mean to us only after their death? Proust’s narrator is in a room remembering Grandmother’s sweet love, and he is tortured by the knowledge that nothing can now be done. But something can be done. We are capable of envisioning those we love with this long-angled perception and thereby seeing what they were, what they have ceased to be, even as we take in what they are and perhaps face the horror of a time when they will not be at all. To look at people with the eyes of memory is the ethical injunction, I believe, for growing old. Again I cite Proust: such a vision would endow our loved ones “with the beautiful and inimitable velvety patina of the years, just as in an old park a simple runnel of water comes with the passage of time to be enveloped in a sheath of emerald.”
The beautiful and inimitable velvety patina of the years:
such is the creative work of time.

Creative, not entropic. Time as the maker of beauty and value, not time as despoiler. Growing old is the indispensable requirement for such gathering, ripening perceptions. In this model, our loved ones acquire a kind of narrative and temporal density that we ourselves map and cherish. In this model, fidelity and marriage and family emerge, memory-fed, as the great creations of life, the fashioning of a vision that hallows what has been while meshing it with what is while knowing what is eventually to come.

Of course we must die, perhaps even become a “beast on a bed.” But before we reach our ultimate undoing, we are still sighted and sentient creatures, capable of remembering, charting, even imagining the work of time in those we know and love. A homage is due to this. For time does not simply dismantle us and our projects; it also coheres and completes them, brings them to visibility, confers on them their gathering plenary form. Time is at once the currency and the structure of love, for it frames and parses the life of the heart. This is the work of generosity, this is the true architecture of our lives. Perhaps old age is our final opportunity to reach toward such cohesion, in our loved ones as well as ourselves. Old age is when we might finally carry out our harvest.

These are the creations of love. They are the direct opposite of mortality’s decimations. And I have no illusions about what I am up against. Old age is also, I know only too well, a dyspeptic, corrosive time, a time for measuring losses, not gains, a time for acquiring an unwanted gift for seeing ruin everywhere. I know what the cumulative testimony of the books discussed here tells us about the “cost of living” and the diminishments meted out by age.
“Det var bättre förr,”
my Swedish relatives tell me, “It was better before,” and the “it” in question is capacious: the world we live in, as well as the people we are. Of course we must exit the world. And ourselves. Yet we remain impoverished, I think, when it comes to vision, for the spectacle of decline all too easily erases the memory of growth, and it is their tandem that gives the measure of who we are and how we have lived (as opposed to how we are dying).

One needs to learn to appreciate the accretive and fulfilling work of time: constancy, fidelity, friendship, respect, tenderness, love; these virtues are drenched with temporality, become richer and fuller as we go on living. I do not proclaim that we should be antiquarian about this or blindly venerate the sheer longevity of our human connections. But that patina of which Proust wrote speaks to the beauty and beneficent changes brought about by time, and only by time. There is no shortcut to enduring love. No one but you can have the dimensional perspective of loved ones that you have, just as you alone can gauge the layers and reaches of your own existence. I sometimes wonder if the appeal of the new, when it comes to our moral and imaginative life, doesn’t stem from a deep-seated fatigue with oneself, with the same old body and heart and mind that one came to this earth with and that one wearies of, wants to trade in for a new model, for new departures. Libido and desire batten on to the new. Surely, divorce and adventure and change are secret ways of starting over, of closing up shop on what was.

All of this is real, and I cannot deny it. But there is something benighted and reductive and almost vandalizing in such a stance. We are crimping our own lives by not grasping or valuing their plenitude. We diminish our kingdom. In our hunger for the new and different, we give something up, for we seem to have so little imagination for the old, for continuity and fidelity, for the gathering shape of time-drenched things and people, a shape that is for us to imagine and value—not just our own story, but our loved ones’ story: we
are
our brother’s keepers. Moreover, literature itself gifts us, again and again, with these dimensional portraits, helping us to widen our optic, expand our take, perceive the larger contours of individual existences. In this I am profoundly and literally conservative, because what is at stake is the discovery and conservation of one’s temporal estate: sometimes private, sometimes shared, never given, always created. Old men ought to be explorers. Growing old is not an oxymoron: we grow old, and the great challenge is to transform our hearts and perceptions so as to see time’s richness, our richness.

But more even than memory and reverence for the work of time, enduring love is the life force that resists Thanatos.

Love resists Thanatos? Easier said than done. Death comes to all, no matter what strategies and maneuverings and triumphs of heart and spirit are put in its way. In writing this book I have wanted never to lose sight of how things must end. That truth is, if you wish, my moral compass, and it parses even the most affirmative stories I’ve discussed, just as it must constitute something of a baseline in the mind-set of the old, no matter how much wisdom or courage or humor one has mustered for the journey. With this rather severe principle in place to keep me honest, I have chosen three utterly remarkable works of literature to conclude my discussion of growing old. Each shimmers, I believe, with a radiance I term
enduring love
, but there is nothing saccharine or blissful about them. Each bears witness to the worst that life can—and must—deliver. Each of these books is deeply cued to death: as rupture of self, as cessation of life, as nature’s elemental command. Enduring love is not a paradisiacal concept; we shall see that love emerges in these three books as an utterly primitive force, prior to the forms we assign it, anarchic in its power, yet fueling our last wants and deeds every bit as much as it does our youthful entry into things. Time-fed and death-fed, love endures and makes us endure, whether we term this memory or art or grace.

J. Bernlef, despite being a celebrated Dutch author, is not a household name in the United States. His one translated book,
Out of Mind
, deals with what is arguably the single most grisly and nightmarish threat of growing old: dementia, the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, the systematic erasure of who we are. Not a happy topic. Above all, a seemingly strange choice to illustrate “enduring love.” As we shall see, Bernlef is deeply drawn to the question of what remains when everything, including sanity and self, goes. Yet this short novel is astonishing in its richness and vibrancy, as if the dementia spectacle of overt dissolution and diminution were miraculously offset and even transcended by the rival spectacle of the heart’s emotional and temporal fullness, suggesting a dynamic of loss and gain, suggesting that we go out in horrible splendor, not tranquil submission. And it posits love as the stubborn, undying, anonymous, indeed reconfiguring force that stays to the end. Like all great art, this book humbles us, makes us realize how torpid and impoverished our habitual thinking often is when it comes to the essential experiences of living.

The novel’s protagonist, Maarten Klein, is a transplanted Dutchman now living, retired, with his Dutch wife, Vera, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The book records his rapid descent from functional old age to complete dementia. Bernlef understands the routine slings and arrows of getting old: “Year by year things happen to your body. Your feet lose their springiness. You go up and down the stairs once and you have to sit down to catch your breath. Your eyes start to water when you look at one spot for a long time. The shopping bag moves more and more often from one hand to the other and you meet fewer and fewer people’s eyes.” Yet these generic infirmities, unpleasant but manageable, are different in nature, Maarten senses, from what is now beginning to happen to him. He is increasingly unable to recognize, or make sense of, where he is, when he is, and what he sees. Where, when, what: these are the situational anchors of our sanity and composure, the indispensable markers that locate us in time and space, that give some shape to our existence, that frame our narrative, that undergird our identity. One takes these frames for granted, assumes they are stable and in place; it never occurs to most of us that they might be movable, might indeed be constructs that could metamorphose or evaporate.

At the beginning it all seems rather innocuous. Maarten thinks it’s morning when it’s evening; he wonders why the schoolchildren aren’t coming home on their buses because he thinks it’s a weekday when it’s Sunday—a liability, yes, but more an annoyance than a catastrophe. Life could still go on in its course; Vera could still steer him. Other mistakes are more embarrassing: Maarten asks about Jack or about the dog Kiss, not remembering that they are long dead and putting his interlocutors into real discomfort. Up to now, I’ve listed these “errors” or infirmities as deficits, but they are also openings, for the old curbs and brakes that invisibly shape for us what is sayable or doable or possible no longer function for Maarten. Things begin to move. The dead acquaintance, the dead dog: are they dead?