Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (56 page)

In the following pages I want to argue that there is also a richness in growing old, a wealth that has nothing to do with material assets or nest eggs but rather a human gift conferred on us by time itself—time, the capricious and brutal thief that is so adept at robbing us and diminishing our estate, erasing our gains, dismantling our achievements. Could time be generous? What can it offer?

In Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway
, Peter Walsh philosophizes about just these matters: “the compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” One is gratified by this perception of late power, this grounded, anchored condition of at last being equal to experience, being even superior to it, able finally to examine it, make sense of it. On this head, age turns us into masters, turns our life into a laboratory, in which we hold experience in our hands—experience, the most mercurial, ungirdled, flowing thing of all—and squeeze it into truth, our own truth. A late clarity that orders the affairs of our life: that would be a vista worth attaining.

Taking hold of experience … in the light
. I want to talk about light, about vision: how we see the old, how the old see themselves and their world, and finally how growth might be located precisely here. Could we learn to look differently upon the world? Could literature help us toward a more generous optic about the density of human lives, especially the sheer temporal richness of those we have lived with and cared for during our time? The inner vision of old age is uniquely constituted to balance the momentary retinal evidence of our eyes with the rich invisible testimony of years gone by. Old people acquire a longitudinal perspective on the people and even the places they have known and loved, and their memories are filled to the brim with things that no longer exist, children once young but now grown up, spouses once in their prime but now old, parents and grandparents once present and dear but now dead: “vanished but not gone,” as Faulkner puts it in his haunting tale of mourning, “Pantaloon in Black.” No, the retina cannot manage this vision, but the heart can. And so can literature.

One of Shakespeare’s most haunting evocations of old age is to be found in Sonnet 73:

Perhaps the most striking feature of Shakespeare’s poem is the harsh, unavoidable klieg light beam that it insistently focuses on the spectacle of decline. What is it thou mayst behold, thou seest, thou seest, thou perceiv’st? My decrepitude. My wreckage. My descent into death. The poet avails himself of seasonal and elemental images to convey this common fate: the trees, once animated by birds, are now leafless and quivering; the sunset heralds the transformation of light into dark, into sleep, into death (the death we encounter nightly); one still possesses heat, but it is only a glow, a turning in on itself of the vital fire of youth now become ashes, a fire that is going out, en route to extinction, cold and dark. Paraphrasing Shakespeare always embarrasses, for his own images are at once sharp and mysterious, as in the indeterminacy of those leaves—yellow, none, or few—which may or may not still be on the bough, yielding a bristling picture of growing bareness, growing bereftness; likewise the conflation of sunset and sleep, common enough in Elizabethan poetic discourse, manages also to invoke a dead body being sealed up or a coffin being sealed shut; and the final sinuous account of fire and glow is simply untrackable, inasmuch as the living heat of the old person now appears to be a remnant of youth, a borrowed flame—as perhaps all our flame is, meted out to us at birth and slowly diminishing over time—yielding an image of old age as a form of suicide, a self-consumption, a supreme economy by which our organism plays out, returns to quiescence. This entire suite of metaphors dwarfs any notional account of aging by conceiving of it as a complex natural undoing pageant of sorts, a programmed end to vitality, heat, light, and life.

All this is what thou seest. And now the poem turns sublime: seeing this, one’s love for the wintry, death-gripped person becomes more strong, grows. At this juncture the unidirectional, death-driven organicism of the poem turns inside out, reverses course, bequeathing a view of human love as victorious over death, as indeed strengthened and nourished by its war with entropy, as feeding on death. As a commentary on old age—on the “lovability” of the old—it is a welcome piece of news, and it beautifully inverts everything in its path, turning loss into gain, diminishment into growth, death into life. Of course our death cannot be stopped by another’s love, but the poem nonetheless posits human affection for us as a clear countertug against the exit we are doomed to make. The economy is perfect: our own weakening is matched, degree by degree, by the intensifying feelings of our loved ones, as if they were cued to the same natural phenomenon. One is the face of the other.

But they move in different directions, and that is what is so beautiful. It is because life is transitory that it is so unspeakably valuable. It is because the signs of old age are nature’s script of an impending death that we cherish even more intensely those whom we know we must lose. Would that not be the lesson we must learn: to see all those we care for in temporal, even fatal terms? To realize that each life carries its death and is hence all the more urgent and precious? Who more than the old should take this vision to heart?

There is a fine moment in
Civilization and Its Discontents
where Freud evokes the temporal/spatial history of Rome: he points out that the city of his (modern) time is a layered place, that the many Catholic edifices are built over the ruins of the earlier known pagan temples, which themselves were erected over still earlier monuments, signaling still prior cultures. The eye can see none of this: two buildings cannot occupy the same site. Only the informed inner eye can take in this layered space, and even then one cannot visualize it. I want to enlist Freud’s Rome portrait as a paradigm of age itself, and I want to go on to say that old cities and monuments have always exerted a fascination on viewers and visitors for just those reasons: they are the living residue of times and peoples seemingly long dead. The great cultural centers of the world are storied places, virtually palimpsest-like in their overlay of signs and markers. We are drawn to these dense sites in some primitive fashion akin to hunger, as if they afforded entry into (and possession of) the halls of time. Of times. We decipher and pay homage to such structures, sensing that they are big with time, that they are the still-breathing stone language of the past. Is it too much to say that they extend our own reach when we enter their precincts?

Cathedrals, castles, cities: storied structures anchored in time, vast in space. Are these not appropriate figures for our lives? I began this book by suggesting that none of us possesses our figure in the carpet, the melody that will cohere our days and works; nothing in your safe deposit box manages to give the fuller measure of your estate. How can you bring it to visibility, bring it back to life? None of your assets, nothing the doctor prescribes or the priest recommends, will propel you again into those spaces or ferry you again into those waters, so as to miraculously bring those days and years back to life. No matter how “wired” and connected you are, no matter how great your electronic and digital reach may be, your grasp of your own long itinerary—and those of others—must needs be meager. How can we recapture our dimensions?

Charles Baudelaire, arguably the patron saint of modern poetry, wrote a number of astonishing urban portraits of life in Paris during the 1850s, and some of his most haunting pieces are built out of double vision, out of the sharp contrast between what the retina takes in and what the heart or brain remembers. “Le Cygne” (“The Swan”) offers a magnificent picture of Paris as palimpsest, as multilayered.
“Paris change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur d’un mortel,”
observes, elegiacally, the poet as he compares the altering cityscape with the turns of the human heart. What moves me in this poem is the countermove required by reading: we are asked to perceive the invisible temporal and moral depths that undergird the cityscape: the hidden origins and precursors of its buildings and its denizens, all the while knowing that none of this is “on view.” All of us contain ruins. There is an ethos here, an ethos for the old.

Ruins. Is that not what weary Oedipus at Colonus is, at least until the prophecy of redemption for Athens is actualized? Old Lear, old Goriot, old Isak Borg: are they not ruins? Consider the teeming modern cityscape, filled with decaying people and buildings, and ask yourself if you do not see entropy writ large. This is why another Baudelaire poem, “Little Old Ladies,” is so remarkable. The poet begins with a merciless, clinical look at the old women who trudge the streets of Paris, creatures at once
“décrépits et charmants,”
women shrunken and twisted and buffeted by the wind, compared to puppets, to bells, to small children (for they have in common tiny caskets), women now become debris, wreckage, outright grotesques. That is what time does. Yet in the fourth segment of the poem, something miraculous occurs: they are transfigured by the vision of the poet. Once upon a time they were giddy actresses and fabled beauties in their dazzling prime, now they are seen trudging through the polis; once their names were known by all, but now no one recognizes them. Drunks insult them, children mock them. They are frightened, wizened, shameful, hovering in the shadows. But the poet restores them in his mind’s eye, imagines their fiery youth, bonds with them with a kind of intimacy and empathy that borders on the obscene: he watches over them, he senses their secret pleasures, he lives their lost days, his heart is expanded by their vices, turned luminous by their virtues.
“Ruines. Ma famille.”
They are ruins; they are his family.

Baudelaire and Freud are cartographers of a special sort: they are alive to the temporal density of cities and humans. What they tell us, in their own way, is that humans are also historical monuments, replete with stories, memories, scar tissue, and the living pith of days and works. Baudelaire is almost vampirish in his approach to the little old women (one can imagine a policeman arresting him if the contents of his mind were visible; but then, many of us would be in jail if that were possible): he feels the pulsing blood and the pulsing past that yet lives in these derelicts that litter Parisian streets. And he battens onto this matter, this magma, sensing that it is his nourishment, his family. This is queasy if you wish, but it is also generous, indeed sublime. And it figures the landscape and territoriality of human time in sharp, pungent, affective terms. The sheer vibrancy of the old ladies’ distant past functions as a libidinal fuel for art; it finances his poem, it composes his family, it makes him larger than he was. In this we see a generosity proper to art, and it is something nourishing and elemental that we, the readers, can, cannibal-like, also partake of, by the simple act of reading and imagining. We too become fellow travelers. We resurrect monuments, cities, and people.

In Freud, it is a question of hallowing the historical density of places. In Baudelaire it is a matter of imagining the past vibrancy and beauty of those whom time assails. Age is a capacious entity, but what it contains is invisible to the eye. Remember again Aureliano’s cold, diagnostic, clinical view of his own mother, Úrsula. He sees it all: mother as monument, mother as dimensional; yet he feels nothing at all. Against that calcified image, place Shakespeare’s lover of Sonnet 73, equally acute and unflinching in its ocular testimony but fueled by tenderness and love. That you are to die makes me love you the more.

Proust, whom I take to be the master of “fourth-dimensional vision,” the longitudinal vision of life in time, had no illusions about how arduous such a vision is. Arduous not because we are hard-hearted and refuse to think of our loved ones’ mortality but precisely because love itself censors such thoughts, because the very nature of love must blind us to the reality of death. I mean “blind” quite literally. This is shown in the sequence where the young narrator speaks to his grandmother by long-distance telephone and is able to discern in her very voice that she is ailing, hearing “for the first time the sorrows that had cracked [her face] in the course of a lifetime,” realizing that he urgently needs to see her.
To see her:
that is what is at stake here. Can you “see” a loved one? It is not an idle question. He rushes back to Paris and hastens to her room, opening the door on her without any warning at all and getting an eyeful; because she does not know he is there, he is, in some significant sense, not there but merely a photographer taking a photograph of “places which one will never see again”: