Travels with Epicurus (9 page)

But my schoolboy mind-set existed once upon a time, very long ago. As an old man, I am somehow able to entertain ideas that violate the logic of grammar. Of course, one reason for that may be that I am already going soft in the head. It has been known to happen. But on the other hand, in old age I do seem to be able to get occasional glimpses of ideas that appear to transcend logic. I
dare
to think illogical thoughts. So for the moment, at least, I'll cut Heidegger some slack.

ON ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS IN OLD AGE

The midafternoon sun has just found me where I have been hiding under the taverna awning. It blasts my eyes, and for several seconds I keep staring at it, allowing it to dazzle my brain.

When I was a little kid, my brother used to tease me about my practice of lying on my back on my bed, staring at the naked lightbulb that hung from the ceiling of our bedroom. All I could say in my defense is that I liked the way it made me feel. I believe this was my first taste of “getting high.”

Not long after college, my friend Tom and I experimented with psychedelic drugs. It was, after all, the sixties. But I like to think that we were more under the influence of one of our favorite philosophers, the nineteenth-century American pragmatist William James, than our infamous faculty member Timothy Leary. James was fascinated by altered states of consciousness and considered nitrous oxide (a.k.a. laughing gas) his drug of choice, no less than a door to the Hegelian absolute, the ultimate truth. In
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, James wrote, “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”

Tom and I were reaching for our ultimate
yes
. A good gander at the Hegelian absolute would have been nice too. Alas, it was not to be. At least, if either of us did glimpse anything meaningful way out there in yes land, we were unable to bring it back home.

But now, staring into the Aegean sun, I
do
feel a little brain tickle. The retsina doesn't hurt. “Why
are
there things that are rather than nothing?” Crazy question. What would total nothingness be like? What if the sum total of everything was zero? It boggles the mind to even consider the idea of universal nonexistence. It goes far beyond the idea of human mortality; it is asking what it would be like if there were nothing and no one to be perishable
in the first place
. And, maddeningly, why it turned out
not
to be that way.

Perhaps it is impossible to get one's head around immutable nothingness: the mind just keeps collapsing in on itself. I can only barely get the idea of subtracting everything from the universe. But an eternal nothingness to which nothing could possibly be added escapes me. Maybe the positivists were right, after all: the reason I cannot think about this stuff is because it is utter nonsense.

But what's this? For an instant, I feel something like relief or even gratitude that being
is
. I even experience tinges of something that feels a wee bit like awe—awe that miraculously being has somehow triumphed over nothing. And that, astonishingly, I have been a part of that triumph: I have had the privilege of participating in being and of being conscious of that fact.

And that is it—my yes! moment. It is over in a minute, and it was not even a full yes—more like a shiver of assent. I now realize why I wanted to be around people for today's philosophical skydive. Like the “minder” who kept a watchful eye on us when we took our LSD trips, to make sure we did not follow up on our “insight” that we could fly from a third-floor window, my fellow denizens of the Vlihos taverna are my ballast. For better or for worse, they keep me from flying so far yes-ward into the realm of mind-boggling philosophical abstractions that I will never come back. Maybe I have not been so daring after all.

Nonetheless, I feel remarkably gratified by my little mind excursion. I feel enriched, in part because I have trod where I dared not tread as a young man. The old man has mellowed to metaphysics.

Chapter Six

Iphigenia's Guest

ON STOICISM AND OLD OLD AGE

I
have hitched a ride on a train of donkeys carrying supplies to the monastery at the top of the mountain overlooking Hydra's harbor. Like Pavlos on the lead donkey, I sit sidesaddle on my mount, clinging with one hand to a wooden saddle-strut. I am probably too old for this, but it is delightful. Although I am only three feet higher than when I walk this stony path, this donkey-top view is utterly new: my eyes are now level with the first-floor windows of the houses we pass, and I shamelessly peer inside at dioramas of domesticity.

At frequent intervals, and without missing a step, the four donkeys ahead of mine drop grassy turds. A new law to placate sensitive tourists requires donkey men to stop, sweep up the lumps, and carry them to a suitable resting place, but Pavlos does not comply. He has horticulture on his mind. As a reward at the end of their workday, donkeys here are fed a tea made of poppy petals, and local folklore has it that in only one day's time a new poppy will germinate from every unloaded donkey stool. Indeed flowers are pushing out of virtually every crevice along our way. I like to think that Pavlos has an innate reverence for the circle of life.

Pavlos lets me off halfway up the mountain. From here, I walk a narrow path to a grand nineteenth-century ship captain's villa that now serves as the island's old people's home. My landlady, Iphigenia, works here. This morning I volunteered to pick up the mail in the port post office and, seeing that Iphigenia had received a long-awaited letter from her daughter in Australia, I decided to bring it to her so she wouldn't have to wait until the end of the day to read it. I've also been curious to see this place.

A man in his eighties or nineties is sitting on a bench next to the villa's courtyard gate. His chin rests on his folded hands, which, in turn, rest on the top of a wooden cane in front of him. I say, “Good afternoon,” in Greek, but he does not respond. I nod to him in the tilted-head Greek way, but he does not respond to this either.

The gate is open; I call Iphigenia's name, and a few moments later she meets me, flushed and surprised. When I hand over her daughter's letter, she is delighted, but she stuffs it into her apron pocket, saying that she wants to read it leisurely after she finishes preparing Spyros's coffee. With a nod of her head, she indicates that Spyros is the man on the bench.

“The others don't want coffee?” I ask.

Iphigenia smiles. “Spyros is the only elderly person who does not have family on the island,” she says. Apparently the legislators in Athens who established this palatial old folks' home did not take into account that no self-respecting Hydriot son or daughter would deny his aged parent a bed and care in his own home. Spyros is the villa's sole occupant.

As it turns out, Spyros requires a great deal of care. He is senile and incontinent and given to frequent fits of anger and despair. Iphigenia does her best, never leaving the villa until Spyros, fed and bathed, is asleep in his bed.

I cannot help wondering how much longer I have before I become like Spyros. Senility and incontinence are what we have to look forward to in
old
old age. It is abominable. As Shakespeare described it, among his “seven ages” of man, this

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

That stage of life is coming up next for us old folks, whether or not we choose to be conscious of it.

ON THE PRINCIPAL CAUSE OF DEPRESSION IN OLD OLD AGE

In Susan Jacoby's chilling investigation of today's increased longevity,
Never Say Die
, we learn what modern medical science, at great expense, has largely given to us: extended years of decrepitude. Whereas in days of yore a late-in-life heart attack or stroke would finish us off, we are now given stents and bypasses and cups full of meds, which essentially bring us back from death's door. At first look, this seems fine and dandy. Except the result of our expanded life span is that diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's assault us at an ever-increasing rate in these “bonus” years. Our bladders fail, our limbs tremble, and our energy dwindles to just above vegetation. Locked inside our decaying brains and bodies, we become isolated from everyone and everything we ever knew. Alive is the new dead.

A burgeoning specialty in gerontology is geriatric depression. Nursing homes now employ psychiatrists, psychologists, and ­social workers to deal with this rapidly growing problem. Professional periodicals like the
Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
publish innumerable articles on such topics as how to properly administer the Geriatric Depression Scale and which antidepressants have proved most effective with the “end-of-life population.” Psychiatrists, of course, regularly weigh in with their estimates of the principal causes of this depression.

Principal causes? I believe I could give these psychiatrists a helping hand on that question: it is because
old
old age stinks. It is horrible. The quality of life is usually zero. And if we still have any rational powers left at that point, we know that life is only going to get worse. This makes it difficult to see geriatric depression as a mental disorder. It seems more like an authentic and fitting response. These gerontological psychiatrists would have pumped Dylan Thomas's father full of Effexor if he had followed his son's exhortation to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

ON RAGE AND STOICISM

God knows, I can all too easily get into raging against the dying of the light. The entire prospect of gradually and inevitably falling apart, with death as the only possible relief, not only fills me with terror, it overwhelms me with anger. Not fair, any of it. This is the final payoff for having lived a long and fruitful life? Who made the rules? I hate it, all of it.

But what can come of my rage? Even if it feels authentic to cry foul in the face of this ultimate cosmic joke, is howling with fury the way I want to spend the period of my life before
old
old age gets me? The Stoics, both Greek and Roman, would certainly argue against taking the rage route.

Stoicism, founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium, not long before Epicurus took up residence there, developed over the course of more than three centuries, reaching into all regions of Greece and to Rome, where such philosophers as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius refined and elaborated upon its fundamental tenets. This philosophy's most abiding idea is that people should liberate themselves from their passions and surrender uncomplainingly to what is unavoidable, because dwelling on what is out of our control invites pain without any conceivable gain.

Zeno out-Zenned Epicurus in his prescription for a calm and comforting happiness; he advocated fully detaching ourselves from our desires rather than, as Epicurus proposed, calibrating and mapping out various routes to contentment. Epictetus, a first-century Greek, succinctly expressed the results of practicing Stoic philosophy: “Show me one who is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy. Show him me. By the gods I would fain see a Stoic.”

The Stoics, then, would advise us to cut loose at the very source of our rage against the horrors of
old
old age by becoming
indifferent
to
old
old age's claim on us. After all, it is out of our control anyhow. With no expectations or desires, we will experience no geriatric depression.

I do not think I am able to do that. Sometimes the practice of Stoicism feels more like denying pain than transcending it, and denial of any kind has rarely seemed to me like an authentic way to live. (There are also times when the practice of Stoicism seems like a mind game, one that comes perilously close to singing to oneself “Don't Worry, Be Happy.”) But one compelling idea that I do take away from Stoic philosophy is the business about letting go of matters over which I have no control. Focusing on the horrors of
old
old age before I get there would get me nowhere. For starters, it would be a waste of precious and very limited time.

ON ENDING LIFE BEFORE IT BECOMES WORTHLESS

Still, there is one question about upcoming
old
old age that ­cannot be postponed: when is it no longer meaningful to remain alive?

The Confucian philosopher Mencius put the situation simply and eloquently when he wrote, “Life is what I want;
yi
[often translated as ‘meaningfulness'] is also what I want. If I cannot have both, I would rather take
yi
than life. On the one hand, though life is what I want, there is something I want more than life. That is why I do not cling to life at all cost. . . . In other words, there are things a person wants more than life and there are also things he or she loathes more than death.”

The Roman stoic Seneca put it even more bluntly in one of his collected letters to the Roman governor of Sicily, Lucilius: “Life has carried some men with the greatest rapidity to the harbor, the harbor they were bound to reach even if they tarried on the way, while others it has fretted and harassed. To such a life, as you are aware, one should not always cling. For mere living is not a good, but living well is. Accordingly, the wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. . . . He always reflects concerning the quality, not the quantity, of his life. As soon as there are many events in his life that give him trouble and disturb his peace of mind, he sets himself free. . . . For no man can lose very much when but a driblet remains. It is not a question of dying earlier or later, but of dying well or ill. And dying well means escape from the danger of living ill.”

And as a preamble to his recommendation to end one's life before it becomes intolerable, Mr. Cheerfulness himself, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote in
Studies in Pessimism
, “Every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: ‘It is bad today, and it will be worse tomorrow; and so on till the worst of all.'”

Personally, I find Mencius and Seneca more sympathetic on the subject of ending life at the appropriate time.

There is no
yi
in Jacoby's account of
old
old age. Do we really want to cling to life at all costs? Do I?

ON THE PRACTICABILITY OF ENDING LIFE IN OLD OLD AGE

Although both Mencius and Seneca make profound, if distressing, sense about the point at which it is better to die than to continue living, they do not offer any advice on a critical practical question: how do we know exactly when that point has been reached? The timing is tricky. We need to pull the plug
before
we cross the line into full-fledged dementia; otherwise we will be beyond the point of rational decision making, yet before we cross that line, we may still have a sufficient number of “driblets” left to make life worth living.

This is less of a conundrum if we have graduated to life-support machinery and have signed a living will that empowers a deputy to pull the plug at this point; in effect, our doctor takes care of the timing problem the moment he decides we need to be attached to (and, hence, detached from) a ventilator. But this is a special case, as is the situation of being in intractable pain that no medicine or amount of time will relieve. It is not difficult for someone to decide to finally end that pain the only way possible rather than continue to endure it for the rest of his life. In my wife's country, Holland, unbearable, untreatable pain is sufficient reason to ask for and be granted physician-assisted suicide.

But what if we are still able to breathe sufficiently and are not in intractable pain, yet the quality of our lives has been reduced to zero? The probability is that at that point we will not have the wherewithal—the rationality or the strength—to put an end to “living ill.” And asking someone in advance to make that decision for us—even after presenting her with a detailed list of circumstances and conditions that define the point at which we want to be “set free”—often comes to naught. In the end, relatives and friends may understandably lack the will to make that decision. We are left with our own calculations and predictions.

—

I have a curmudgeonly old friend named Patrick who has dubbed this period of our lives “waiting for the diagnosis.” Which upcoming day or doctor's visit is going to deliver the news that our first major geriatric, and possibly fatal, disease has shown up? Needless to say, Patrick is not an adherent of Stoic philosophy.

Nonetheless, he is correct in his assertion that a fatal disease
will
show up eventually; only
when
remains incalculable. Well, not entirely incalculable. Researchers at the University of California have compiled a number of geriatric prognostic indices that allow us to plug in our stats—age, gender, body-mass index, personal medical history, etc.—and, voilà, out pops our life expectancy. It is, of course, just a ballpark figure, but still a statistically significant one. In terms of medical care, this provides a calculus for determining, for example, whether it makes sense to get another colonoscopy or mammogram; if, according to the indices, we will in all probability die of something else before colon or breast cancer can substantially damage us, the sensible course of action is to skip the test and save time, discomfort, and expense.

This life-expectancy index may also serve as a guide to the Mencius/Seneca puzzle: when to plan and execute our final exit. But for some reason I don't feel like doing the math on that one just yet.

ON ANTICIPATORY DEPRESSION IN OLD AGE

Watching Iphigenia spoon-feed coffee to Spyros in the courtyard of the old people's home, I again find myself thinking about my friend Patrick. He is not yet in
old
old age. His is not geriatric depression; it is
anticipatory
depression: he knows what is rapidly coming down the pike, and it makes him bitter and morose. He tells me that I am as unauthentic as any forever youngster, that my quest for an authentic old age is ultimately no different from the forever youngster's relentless busyness: we are both in denial of what is coming our way any day now.