What a pleasure it is to run into one’s self in an unlikely
place.
Not long ago I was browsing in the
Northshire bookstore in
Manchester, Vermont,
filling time while my wife looked for a gift.
In the Psychology section of the second-hand book nook, a title jumped
out at me: “The Delights of Growing Old,”
with
a cover drawing of a rakish Parisian gentleman, nattily attired and puffing a
cigarette.
His name was Maurice
Goudeket;
I’d never heard of him, but
within a day he became something like an alter ego.
Like Goudeket, I am in my early 70s, a writer and journalist,
finally released from the need to seek gainful employment; comfortably retired,
healthy, and happily married. He was a
Parisian and I’m a New Yorker, but we live the same way:
“ ‘I have nothing to
do today.’ This is a remark that no
longer has any sort of meaning for me.
For if it should so chance that I am freed for a while from those
everyday duties that by their very monotony give a feeling of emptiness, then
so many activities open before me that my only difficulty is in choosing
between them. With these few free hours
of mine in view, thousands of writers have written thousands of books on every
conceivable subject, and hosts of artists in every age and country have brought
into being a great body of work that museums have gathered together for my
personal benefit..
I get up before anyone
else in my household, not because sleep has deserted me in my advancing years,
but because an intense eagerness to live draws me from my bed…
Every morning my
coffee has a fresh taste, and this comes as much from me as it does from the
pot. There is the paper too, which will
put me in touch with the entire world; and any paper, properly read, has an
almost incredible amount of astonishing, moving, ludicrous items in it…
Eventually I emerge
into the street, and of all wonders, the street is the most wonderful… Always there are
faces, a sea of faces, with everything they conceal and everything they give
away …
This indeed is what they call growing old, also known as a
person’s dotage. But as an Irish
landlady once confessed to me, “I like my dotage.” On a
really good morning, it is a continuum of wonder, free from anxiety or regret.
Getting there is not guaranteed, and many people never make
it. Some die too soon, and many are
broken by ill health, poverty or a lifetime of conflict. And
for those who do get there, it is not a painless process: to gain this new life, you have to lose the
old.
For Goudeket, the delights of growing old arrived only after
years of depression and struggle. He was
65 when he lost his first wife, the novelist Colette, and he thought his life
was over. Colette was 16 years older
than Goudeket and much more famous, but as he tells it, they worked and lived
together for 30 years in a state of mutual adoration.
After a period of numbness in deep mourning, he set out to
make the rest of his life a memorial to their partnership – editing her
posthumous publications, and dwelling in a landscape of memorabilia.
He stayed on in their Paris
apartment, looked after by the same servant, with not a stick of furniture
moved. Mentally, he tried to preserve
the thoughts and feelings of his 30 years with Colette -- envisioning the rest
of his life as “a long and soothing meditation on the past.” But somehow the past began to fade. A crack appeared in the wallpaper. Even the fixed memories began to appear in
different lights. Re-reading Colette’s
work, he found himself looking at different aspects – noticing the style more than
the contents. His feelings also did not go according to plan. Instead of soothing nostalgia, he found his
memories brought him joy and excitement.
Meanwhile his body began to rebel:
I was seized with
ungovernable fits of impatience, a kind of muscular revolt, which obliged me to
stay out until dawn: I thought all this
was caused by my unhappiness, but in fact it was nothing of the kind. Night after night I came home at four in the
morning and got up again at eight, as fresh and lively as though I had not
committed any excesses at all. I tried
to damp down the blaze that was filling me to the gentle glow that my chosen
life required, but I tried in vain. I
was having an attack of energy, as some people have an attack of listlessness.
Long story short: he
married again, to the young widow of a friend, and in his 70s was father to his
first-ever child, a boy.
My own road to dotage was not as glamorous, but also begins with
a loss, followed by dashed expectations, and attacks of energy.
Twenty years ago, reading the business section of the paper
every day, I noticed an ominous trend.
Somehow at or around the age of 58, great movers and shakers were being brusquely
removed from their prominent posts in the world. They always vowed to “pursue other
opportunities.” None was ever heard
from again. Sure enough, when I arrived
at 58 (also the age at which my own father died) I was dismissed from my
long-time post as a writer of the CBS Evening News, and sent off to pursue those
elusive opportunities.
Determined to be the exception, I scrambled to put together
a second act. I hauled out my skills as
a free-lance writer, a teacher, a musician, even an actor, dreaming of
re-inventing myself and confounding those who had devalued me, not that they would
notice or care. The results were
piddling. In my best year, I replaced
about one-fifth of the income from my former job, and less than that of my
self-esteem. I had no idea how much my
perception of myself had depended on my career, but there it was.
My wife went to work full-time. I stayed home to cook and clean, and confront
my own inadequacies as a father. The
flip detachment I had cultivated as a prosperous head of the household didn’t
work at all when I became the stay-at-home dad to three teenage daughters. I learned a long-overdue lesson – to help
someone through their trials, you have to be willing to do more than observe
and kibitz. You need to participate, and
feel some pain yourself. It took
years.
My prevailing mood was depression, complicated by unruly bursts
of energy that kept me awake half the night, jumping out of my skin. Like Goudeket, I took this as a sign of my
unhappiness, but in fact it was nothing of the kind. I was having an attack of energy, but I
didn’t know what to do with it. I
poured my energy into my various comeback schemes, all of which ended in
disappointment and renewed depression.
Still, I made a promise to myself: that at 70 it would be over. For various socially conditioned reasons I
felt it necessary to spend my allotment of threescore years and ten in striving after worldly glory. But after that, no one including myself would
criticize me for giving it up.
So sometime around my 70th birthday, I released
myself from ambition and the need to compete. I had no idea what the results would be. I spent the first few weeks in reflections
on my own decrepitude, the ghastly realization that with every passing week,
the possibility of turning back became more unlikely, more ridiculous.
And thus I allowed my dotage to begin. Amidst what I had come to think of as the
wreckage of my life, I began to experience what Maurice Goudeket called “la
douceur de vieillir”.. this continual surge of memories that comes
breaking in on my inner silence, this contained and sober joy, this
lighthearted music that bears me up, this wider window on the world, this
spreading kindly feeling and this gentleness….”
M. Goudeket’s account of his dotage, like the account of his
marriage, is obviously idealized. He
and I have our bad days along with our good, like everyone else. And I’m still a beginner at this, barely six
months into my seventies. But the state
he describes is real, and it is happening.
For me the delights of old age flow directly from the
renunciation of everything we sought before.
Having exhausted our (and the world’s) attempts to define, discover,
invent or re-invent ourselves, we at last have the freedom to let life show us
who we are and where we’re going.
Dotage is a time of radical discovery – but not because we
have become so wise that we can “know” ourselves. Such knowledge is impossible! We are too deep, complex and contradictory, too
subject to accidents and chance. What will happen to us tomorrow is as unknown
and unknowable as what will happen after we die. But in this flux of incertitude we are free
to discover whatever we want, about ourselves and the world -- pleasant and
unpleasant, shocking and soothing.
It’s not that we have nothing to do. Dotage comes with duties: to love, to forgive, to wonder, and prepare
for our death. We like to think of old
age as a settled time of reflection, but in fact our lives are more fragile and
volatile than ever, more subject to sudden change or sudden end. Even now I feel things happening to me this
week that I don’t understand, new patterns of sleeplessness and agitation. Is this male menopause? A fatal disease? Or
just another divine inspiration, a fit of madness that will push me to go
places and do things I never imagined? Only if it’s the last of these will I blog
about it.
Copyright 2012 by Tom Phillips
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