Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (20 page)

A few weeks later, I was having dinner with Mona Ackerman, a therapist friend who had been there that day. She had listened closely, and she’d saved her question for when we were at dinner. “You told us in your talk,” she said, “that you never wanted to be famous. I wondered about that.”

“I didn’t. I never wanted to be famous.”

“Really? Not at all?”

It was an innocent question that made my eyes lock on hers. How honest had I been with
myself?

“Well, I guess it’s possible…maybe I wanted it a little.”

“Why did you choose show business, I wonder?”

“Yes, well, that’s true….”

We looked at each other for a few seconds—and smiled. She had me. Of course I’d wanted it. It was a way to live forever. There was even a moment in my life when I’d worked out my strategy for eternal life. Sitting there with Mona, I flashed on it.

I was in my twenties, in a Howard Johnson’s near Times Square with a couple of other actors. We were passing time between auditions, and I mentioned that I was teaching myself to write and that I wanted to write really well because otherwise my work wouldn’t last very long. Writing lasted, I said, but stage work evaporated as it was being performed.

I smile now at the young man I was then. I assumed that whatever I wrote would be taken to heart by millions, and through my work I’d go on living. I didn’t know what the years in between have taught me: It
all
evaporates. When film was invented, they thought it would allow stage performances to last forever; but silver nitrate burned like flash paper, and celluloid turned to dust. One day colors burst on the screen, and the next day they faded. Brilliant hues turned to green and eventually to pink ghosts. Everything goes. Chaucer needs to be translated now. In time, so will Shakespeare. And just as books rot and go to worm, and Edison cylinders gave way to wax and wax to vinyl—everything we do, or make, or think of, will give way to something else.

Celebrity won’t let us live forever. It barely lets us live for now. So I think I’ll cross that off the list. But what’s left? Isn’t there
anything
that can give us that jolt we’re looking for—that feeling of satisfaction that lets us know how good it is that we’re here? Maybe there’s one. But it’s so ordinary, so foolishly simple, it’s easy to miss. I’ve walked right by it time after time.

Chapter 16

Bosco’s Belly

We were just finishing a comforting bottle of Brunello when my friend Arnold looked across the table and put down his glass. He’d been listening to my ruminations with compassion.
Where was I going with this?
I wondered.
Was I asking questions that had answers?

“You know what you should do? This will tell you how you really feel about all this. You should write one more talk. But a special one.”

“Like what?”

“If you were asked to give a commencement talk on your deathbed, what would you say?”

Arnold Steinhardt is a great violinist who is also a shockingly good writer. He can draw sense out of the simplest words the way he can draw music out of catgut and horsehair. So I paid attention. What
would
I tell the kids if I were writing a commencement talk on my deathbed? Would it bring me closer to the heart of it?

I doubt that on my actual deathbed I’ll use my time trying to crank out a few fresh platitudes, but I thought I’d see what I could come up with as if it were my last chance to make sense of it all.

So here goes. Today, for all you graduates who are moving out into the world, looking with hope toward the future, my message is this: “Go forth. And stay there.”

What do I mean by this? Do I mean you should get out of town? Go away and not come back? Well, in a way, yes. I’m saying, Go; set off on an adventure like Lewis and Clark’s—but don’t come back to where you started. Lewis and Clark almost died on their adventure, but they had a worse time when they came back. Instead, why not keep exploring, keep learning? Why fall back into old ways? Why ever give up trying to get where you’ve never been before? Someplace that, maybe, no one has
ever
been? Take what you need to survive in the wild, and go. When you get there, take what you find and make what you need to
keep
going. Go with someone you can lie out under the stars with and who can help you tell the mud from the quicksand as you cut a path through the unknown.

But whatever you do, and this may sound odd on commencement day: Don’t go looking for Meaning. I once took that trip myself, thinking it would be fun and easy. I would look back at all the things I’ve said on days like this—urging young people in one way or another toward a life of meaning—and the answer would be clear. But I’ve come to hate the word. It’s meaningless. My dear friends, are you looking for meaning? Don’t do it. I’ve driven myself crazy with it. I have the distinct suspicion now that there is no hidden meaning to life. Looking for one is just our problem-solving brain chasing its tail—its long, lizardly, snake-brain tail. Whenever I’ve wanted some meaning, I’ve had to make it myself. It wasn’t included in the box from the store.

Or, as it says on a plaque a friend gave me, “What if the hokey-pokey is really what it’s all about?”

Instead of driving yourself crazy, I’d go for something simple:

1.
Find someone to laugh with.

2.
Find something to laugh at (yourself is always good).

3.
Keep moving.

If I’ve ever had a sense of meaning, it’s been in simply experiencing my life: just noticing I was alive. That may be all there is. Marcus Aurelius said that all we have is the present moment. Twenty centuries ago, he understood what brain scientists have lately discovered: that
now
exists for just a brief moment in our brains—maybe five to seven seconds. Everything else is memory or thinking about the future, neither of which ever turns out to be what we think it is. But for me, that brief moment of
now
can be a fizzy quaff on a hot day.

Just noticing life
can be the whole bottle of beer. Nature is an intoxicating, tantalizing puzzle, a pyrotechnic display. I tell my grandchildren: “You’re
bored?
If you’re bored, you’re not paying attention.” I picked up this pithy saying from an article in a magazine, and I use it all the time on them, but they don’t seem to know what I mean by it. They look at me oddly. That’s okay. I wouldn’t have understood it at their age, either.

The soft belly of Bosco, my grandchildren’s dog; the dreamy look in his eye when you scratch his belly: This is the meaning of life. Both for me and for him.

When my brain gets frisky and I try to think beyond Bosco’s belly, it always boils down to the same two questions. One was what my young friend asked over coffee so long ago in a restaurant in Times Square. The restaurant is gone now, but the question lingers:
Why not end it? Is there a point to living?
And I think,
Of course there’s a point:
life
is the point.
That’s when the ancient Greek looks out at me from the pages of a book and asks:
But what is the
good
life?
The Greek, like the restaurant, is long gone, but the question hangs around.

And
that’s
when it really matters what value we place on things. I had a friend who lived the good life. At least it seemed so to him. He wrote books that were read by millions of people, he had houses around the world. And he also liked to spend most of his waking hours in a bottle of gin. So between gin and sleeping, he was unconscious about two-thirds of the time. If I were sentenced by a court to a life like that, I think I would appeal.

Whatever this thing is called—meaning, significance, satisfaction, fulfillment—I’ve looked for it in art and in love; in learning, friendship, faith, family, and in being helpful; even in pure motion—in just keeping busy. I haven’t found that any single one of them does the trick. If I stick with any of them too long, it loses its flavor on the bedpost and I have to switch over to one of the others. I find it for a time; I dig into a meal of it, and before I know it, I’m hungry again.

I do have an embarrassingly big appetite. In my thirties, I hit the jackpot in every way. I had everything: a loving wife, happy children, work I could be proud of, money, friends, even the chance to devote myself a little to the well-being of other people. I was truly happy. And one day I said to myself,
Is this all there is to life—happiness?

That’s more than an appetite. It’s piggish. But I was willing to work hard to taste as much as I could of all the things that are supposed to bring the deepest, most lasting satisfaction. And then it turned out that pursuing it doesn’t always do it. Sometimes sitting quietly and letting it come to you is what does it. But you never know which it is. Sometimes it’s both at once.

Squeezing the most out of life seems to involve some mysterious mix of floating without a care and at the same time working as hard as possible. It’s snoozing like a dog in a patch of sun on the living room floor while keeping twelve plates in the air in the kitchen. It’s motion and stillness, and both at once. It’s being Silent Sam and Scheherazade at the same time.

So it all ends up in some damn Zen paradox. I should have known.

In a way, though, I like all this uncertainty. It makes things more exciting. It ups the ante. Even when I
was
on my deathbed four years ago in a grimy little emergency room in Chile, I thought,
Okay, this may be the end of it; I’d better leave a note for the woman I love.
I didn’t pray or hope for an afterlife, or regret the life I’d lived. And I certainly didn’t waste time thinking about my so-called accomplishments. I just took care of business. I kind of like looking into the abyss.

But you’re graduating today. I don’t want to dump too much uncertainty on you right before you go out into a world that’s
filled
with randomness. You need confidence.

I’m going to drop the imaginary deathbed talk and switch to one I gave at Southampton College on Long Island in 2003. It’s a little bleak here and there, but mostly it’s hopeful.

We people in the commencement speech racket have a few standard ways of going about it. Sometimes we ignore the graduates completely and talk right over their heads to the newspapers or to shareholders—or even to other governments, while announcing foreign policy. If it’s okay with you, though, I’d like to talk today straight to the graduating class.

Forty-seven years ago, I was sitting out there where you are—well, not exactly where you are—it was on a large lawn in the Bronx. But I was sitting where you are in every other way while some guy, I forget who, was laying out a lot of platitudes for us. He was probably telling us about the word
commencement.
That’s a popular theme. This is graduation day, but it’s not the end of something; it’s the beginning of something…the beginning of the rest of your life. That’s a catchy way to start, calling attention to the fact that this event has had the wrong name for maybe six hundred years.

Well, actually, it’s the
right
name, because around the year 1314, commencement meant the initiation of someone into an order, and in a college, it meant taking a full degree. But we know nobody’s going to run out and look that up because that’s the kind of thing you did during your education—which we know is now
over.

He was also probably telling us, “You Are Our Future.” Another popular theme. Well, you’re not exactly
our
future. By the time you have any power, we may be outta here. And you’re not even
your
future, because the funny thing about the future is it never gets here.

But it sounds nice to say you’re our future. Sort of gives you some status on a big day—a little going-away present.

But this is forty-seven years later. The world is different now, a lot more complex and potentially more lethal. Little pleasantries are not going to do the job today.

There’s an old curse that goes like this: May you have the misfortune to live in interesting times. We have the miserable luck to live in
fascinating
times. As a species we know so much, and as a nation we’re so powerful, that it sometimes seems to me our future may be like a pencil balancing on its point. Any little thing could tip it, and depending on which way the pencil falls, we could either enter a golden age or see the birth of a darker dark age than we’ve ever seen before.

But it probably just
seems
that way. Probably we’ll muddle on—continuing to avoid both utopia and apocalypse. Which will be good, because all the utopias we’ve tried so far have been pipe dreams. And as for apocalypse, we have a knack for saying, “Not apocalypse now. Apocalypse
later,”
and getting away with it.

So I guess that’s the daunting task ahead of you: bravely muddling on.

And I’m here to tell you how to do it. I’m your man. Of all the people they could have picked to send you on your way with a final word of wisdom, they picked me. You are so lucky. I’m the perfect one to talk to you—because I learned practically
nothing
in college. Well, I learned a couple of things, and I’m sure you learned even more. But believe me, you have yet to learn the thing that counts; the thing that will get you through the dark hours of the night when the gray wolf of doubt, the prince of fear, comes and sits on your chest and, smiling, whispers to you, “Hello, friend. I’m going to eat you, but you won’t feel a thing because I eat from the inside out.”

Right about now, you’re thinking,
Is it too late to get the guy with the foreign policy speech?

Look, I’m exaggerating—but in spite of how easy it is to say, “Commencement means a beginning,” I’ve learned in these forty-seven years how bone-breakingly true it is that today
is
just the beginning. The rest of your life is going to be a continuing education, whether you sign up for it or not.

There
were
two vitally important things I learned in four years of college, and all the rest has been built on those two things. One was how to think more clearly, and the other was how to use language better. I remember with great satisfaction the class in logic where I began to understand that there were rules to thinking that, if followed, could help you sort out the illogicalities in someone’s thinking, especially your own. And even though I was already trying to learn how to be a writer, I remember the English class that truly invited me to dive headfirst into language. And that’s it: logic and language. But that’s all you need. The rest is experience.

No, there
was
one more thing I learned: that there were people who really cared if I learned. They invited me to exchange ignorance for curiosity. Now you’ll notice I said curiosity and not knowledge or truth. That’s because I think the opposite of ignorance is not just knowing something, it’s being
curious
about it. A lot of the things we know for sure are really just rough drafts of reality. In a story set in Eden, Mark Twain has Eve say about Adam that he knows a multitude of things—which are mostly wrong. We haven’t improved much since Adam.

I know this may all sound a little bleak, but what use would I be to you if I didn’t tell you the real stuff? I’m happy and successful in every way that counts to me. So why don’t I tell you how I got this way, and then
you
can be happy and successful, too. It’ll be a well-spent afternoon, worth getting dressed up for.

Okay, this is important. Number one: Get verrry lucky.

Be lucky enough to find a
person
you love and
work
you love. Be lucky enough to be able to do that work as long as you want.

Number two: Have a backup in case number one doesn’t work out. Be nimble.

You can’t control the kind of luck you’re going to get, but you can control what you do with it. I think making the most of what’s come my way has been my greatest skill. I recommend it.

There are a few essential rules I’ve learned that I think have enabled me to make the most of what’s come my way. For what they’re worth, here they are…this won’t take long, because I’ve only learned three things in my life.

Well, I’ve learned more than three things. I’ve learned some French and Italian, and I can say a few things in Chinese and Yiddish. I also know how to make rigatoni with artichokes—and these are all extremely useful skills. But they’re not one of the three essentials. They won’t save your life in an emergency—like suddenly growing old.