Prime Time (4 page)

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart are the same state of being.…

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three dimensional space.

33 VARIATIONS

Right after my seventy-first birthday, I was working on this book when I was asked to star on Broadway in
33 Variations,
a new play by Moisés Kaufman. My character was a contemporary music scholar trying to understand why Beethoven spent three of his later years, when he was deaf and very ill, writing thirty-three variations on what was generally considered to be a mediocre waltz composed by Anton Diabelli, a well-known music publisher of the time. Imagine my surprise and pleasure when I discovered that my character’s final monologue touches upon this very theme: how the exigencies of late life that cause us to slow down also permit a different, deeper kind of seeing.

A scene in
33 Variations,
with my character leaning against Beethoven.
CRAIG SCHWARTZ

The character I play explains how at first she had assumed that Beethoven had written the thirty-three variations in order to show mid-eighteenth-century Vienna what a grand masterpiece he could make out of a mediocre waltz. What she learned, however, was very different: She realized that Beethoven knew that the waltz was a simple, popular waltz that people danced to in beer halls. In delving to its depths, Beethoven pierced and dissected it in his thirty-three variations, turning a fifty-second waltz into a brilliant fifty-minute composition. He was sick and deaf, but he was showing us how, when we allow ourselves (or are forced) to slow down and see, what may appear banal on the surface can flower into magnificence.

Ripening Consciousness

We’re not all Monet, Cézanne, or Beethoven, but we all have the potential to achieve the flowering of consciousness—to learn to really
see—
and this can occur later in life, even in the presence of terrible physical infirmities.

The day of my final performance in
33 Variations,
I read an article in
The New York Times
⁴
about Neil Selinger, a fifty-seven-year-old lawyer who, following retirement, had begun tutoring at the local high school. He volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and signed up for The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where he discovered his “writer’s voice.” Two years later, he was diagnosed with fatal amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease wastes your body, but your brain remains untouched by it. I know quite a bit about the disease because my character in
33 Variations
died of it every night. So, for me, the appearance of this article on that day felt like a little miracle.

In an unpublished essay, Mr. Selinger described what he felt happening to him. “As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger. As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice. As I diminished, I grew. As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself.”

Selinger’s writing teacher, Steve Lewis, says that his student has had to lose his lawyer’s voice and that “he’s got sort of a Zen countenance now. And it’s reflected in what he writes. He doesn’t duck anger and despair, he doesn’t duck anything, but it’s all there without self-pity. His writing is richer because his experience of the moment is richer.” Neil Selinger is the embodiment of mounting the Third Act staircase!

Slowing Down

Unlike during childhood, Act III is a quiet ripening. It takes time and experience and, yes, perhaps the inevitable slowing down.

You have to learn to sort out what’s fundamentally important to you from what’s irrelevant. A life review, which we’ll take up in the next chapter, can help you do this.

Letting Go of What’s No Longer Needed:

Flexibility and the Shift from Ego to Soul

My brother, Peter, once pointed out to me that on the Fonda family crest is the word
perseverate,
Latin for “persevere.” We have been proud, my brother and I, over the years, of our perseverance through some challenging times.

While I still appreciate the value of persistence, it occurs to me that in the Third Act, part of the shift from ego to soul requires flexibility more than perseverance—the flexibility, for instance, to take stock of who and what surround us and to see if maybe we should let some of it go.

Think about gardening. My daughter taught me that if I want to maximize the spring and summer blooms on the English lavender that fills my garden, I have to cut back the dead blooms of fall. Deadheading, it’s called (not the Jerry Garcia variety!). The Third Act is the time for deadheading. Like plants in the winter, we have less energy to spare trying to resurrect old, dead growth, trying to blow life into the escapades and behaviors of youth in order to prove we’re still young. I don’t want to become a hollow old fool, squandering my precious remaining life force on stuff that doesn’t serve this stage of life. It takes flexibility and a dose of courage to slough off the clutter, the gadgets, the obsessions, the pursuits, the whatever or whoever doesn’t resonate with who we are now or want to become. I understand now what it is that I really need to know and so am freer to discard the rest.

Sure, I forget things, but I also remember a whole lot of things with more vividness because I know
why
I want to remember them and what significance they have for my life. With age, as Stephen Levine says, we “lose memory but gain insight.”
⁵
My time now is dependent on no one but myself, so I, myself, must be sure that the various tasks I choose to occupy my time are the right ones. I have no time to waste as I once did, going down wrong paths. If I want to make ripples, I better be sure I am throwing my pebbles into the right pond.

Getting to Essences

Like the Impressionists, by rendering life down to its concentrated essences, we can begin to live more lightly and to put our energies into activities and people who enrich what may be the only thing that still retains the capacity for growth—our spirit.

SPIRIT

It has been explained to me that soul is the substance of who a person is, while spirit—or consciousness—is a way for a person to communicate with God … which, as I see it, means becoming whole. Spirit is the uncapturable essence that makes us unique among animals.

Every other single thing in the world operates on the principle of entropy; in fact, the second law of thermodynamics says that everything is in a continual state of decline and decay (think of Arnheim’s arch). The one thing that defies this universal law is the human spirit (Arnheim’s stairway). This alone continues to evolve upward. And, like energy—which it is—spirit can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed (the first law of thermodynamics!).

The philosopher, poet, and novelist George Santayana wrote, “Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age.… Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.”

We’re all born with spirit, but for some of us it is buried deep beneath the detritus of life—violence, abuse, neglect, disease, chronic depression. That’s when addictions can happen. We become “empty chalices,” in the words of the psychologist Marion Woodman, and so we try to fill ourselves with clutter, including addictions. Psychiatrists call this “self-medicating.” For example, alcoholics try to replace spirit with spirits … alcohol. There are many other ways in which people in whom spirit is damped down seek to fill themselves: compulsive shopping, gambling, violence, workaholism, sex, drugs, food, drama. One of the great ideas of Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step program is that we can’t be fully healed until we’ve opened ourselves to our spirit or “Higher Power.”

It took me a long time to get this. The whole “Higher Power” business used to feel so touchy-feely to me. Now that I have experienced it myself—overcoming a long-standing food addiction—I understand that it has more to do with love than it does with God (unless you understand these two as one). The humility needed to take the step of acceptance and love softens the hard, empty place at our center, permitting spirit to flood in and fill the emptiness.

A wise person—I don’t remember who—once said, “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” It takes work and intentionality to continue to grow, to ascend that staircase. In
Beowulf,
this is described as having “wintered into wisdom.” Wisdom is there in all of us; we just have to bring it out and fluff it up. But if we don’t address our addictions, our stagnation, or our old attitudes, or if our life goal is centered on continuing the past, remaining powerful or good-looking in the mechanistic sense, then age is a downward and very slippery slope. Eventually someone smarter and quicker supplants us at the top, the golf swing gets iffy, the old rituals become empty. While surgery can tighten the face, there’s still the giveaway neck and arms, the tendency toward postmenopausal thickening around the middle.

If, however, our goal is to awaken to a new stage, to awaken our consciousness, harvest our wisdom, burnish our perhaps languishing soul so as to go deeper into life’s meaning and manifest it with compassion, then age can be a positive process of continued development and growth, moving us toward our goals instead of causing us to leave our goals behind.

Plastic Surgery

I have not hidden the fact that I have succumbed to wanting to look good in the mechanistic sense. Yes, at seventy-two I had plastic surgery on my jawline and under my eyes.

From early girlhood, starting with my father, I was judged by how my face and body looked. This became what I thought determined whether I would be loved. I’ve tempered my anxiety around these surface issues, but I cannot deny that they still lurk. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if those things hadn’t mattered as much. Would I have accomplished less because of being less driven to prove myself? I certainly would have had a lot more time to do character-enhancing things instead of obsessive ballet, dieting, suntanning and then tanning beds, and eventually plastic surgery. Oh, well. I finally got tired of looking tired when I wasn’t, and I wanted to be able to continue working as an actor in a field where it’s hard to work if you’ve not had any “work” done. (Or so I thought till I worked with Geraldine Chaplin, who hasn’t had a speck of “work” done, who works constantly as an actor, and who is absolutely glorious! Ditto the magnificent Vanessa Redgrave!) I still have plenty of cherished lines, however, and I don’t think I look like someone else, but my face is less droopy, and that makes me feel better.

Droopy skin isn’t the only manifestation of my age. I choose shoes for comfort now, not style. As Ted Turner’s father once said, “What’s the good of money if your feet hurt!” My eyesight has diminished. When I began writing this book, I was using font size 14; now I use size 18 and still need glasses. And I rail at restaurants with menus whose print is so small and faint that I need a flashlight! Whatever it is I’m doing, I know now that I have to do it a little slower. I don’t leap gracefully out of cars; I don’t rush across streets; I use railings and am careful to watch where I step; I pay more attention to posture, partly for looks, but mostly so my back won’t hurt. None of these things is a big deal. I know others are less fortunate, including those who face major health problems. I’m not happy about any of my physical problems, but I do not want them to define me. Instead, like many people I have talked to who are in Act III and whose stories are in this book, I just get on with my life, trying to live it, make it useful, and enjoy it as fully as I can. The Positivity and Generativity that I write about in Parts Two and Four are very much at the center of my life.

More on the Longevity Revolution

Opting for mounting the staircase of life rather than staying on the descending arch becomes especially important given that, as already mentioned, longevity has become a new cultural phenomenon. Certainly, there have always been very old people—my mother’s father and mother lived into their nineties—but they bore little resemblance to grandparents of today. My grandparents did not seem to enjoy the potential vibrancy we can now expect. They did not come of age with an awareness of the importance of aerobic and weight-bearing exercises for keeping our metabolisms high, our weight in check, and our muscles and bones strong. No one knew, really, about the cost of smoking cigarettes, or about the healing effects of good cognitive therapy, twelve-step programs, or meditation. They didn’t have the benefits of joint replacements or organ transplants, or medicines that can eliminate or at least relieve many of the major age-related illnesses or conditions (including Viagra, Cialis, and testosterone therapy).