Every Third Thought Read online

  That was the day I should have died, but didn’t. Since then, a fortunate convalescent, I had lived from day to day as if nothing had changed. Call it carpe diem, or call it denial. In the back of my mind, I always knew there had to be a reckoning. Now, seated in another emergency vehicle, that moment had arrived. I had fallen off my perch.

  Such a fall is a kind of failure, and an intimation of that final and bigger crash. As the ambulance, moving at an almost reckless 30 mph, turned into St Mary’s, the paramedics renewed my passport to infirmity by asking if I could walk into A&E, or ‘would you prefer a wheelchair?’ Would I, hell! This Friday afternoon was becoming a civil war between two kinds of self, the proud vs. the vulnerable. From twenty years’ experience, I was reluctantly being reminded of something I had come to know so well: we live in our bodies.

  As I made my way down a long linoleum passage to check in with A&E, as if at a Holiday Inn, the dizziness and disorientation were wearing off. Exercise – in medical jargon, ‘ambulation’ – is rejuvenating. I was beginning to feel better. All I had to do was wait. As I sat in the waiting-room, it struck me for the first time that, with the coup de vieux of ageing, much of the adjustment we make has to do with accepting a walk-on part in a Samuel Beckett play, Endgame perhaps, or Waiting for Godot.

  Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

  Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

  [They do not move.]

  *

  Contemplate yourself in A&E, and you quickly encounter some alarming ‘What Ifs?’, scaly creatures with merciless, predatory expressions, hot from the hinterland of your worst nightmares. What if my fall had resulted in concussion, or worse, brain damage? What if it indicated a more sinister problem? What if I was no longer immune, as hitherto, to neuro-degenerative side-effects? What if I was not discharged? What if . . . ?

  In the universal predicament of waiting, one instinctive response is to open a book and find an escape in another narrative. Such distractions are always a nice route to an alternative, and perhaps luckier, kind of self. In a hospital waiting room even a copy of Hello! magazine or the National Geographic will at least pass the time. St Mary’s A&E, however, offered not so much as a pre-natal pamphlet or a National Health Service handout to read. After my fall, I had no book to hand; anyway, I had lost my reading glasses in the drama of getting off the pavement in Kensington Park Road. Perhaps I should engage my fellow patients in conversation? It was back to Beckett again:

  Estragon: In the meantime, let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.

  Vladimir: You’re right, we’re inexhaustible.

  As my equilibrium returned, I wondered how I might seem to the others waiting patiently next to me. As the victim of an assault? As a middle-class professional with an unexplained head-wound? A posh vagrant? We were a strange and ill-assorted bunch, rather less afflicted by the evidence of ‘accident’ or ‘emergency’ than you might imagine: an overweight Iranian businessman in a shiny suit, nervously engrossed with his BlackBerry; a pregnant woman and her mother, both in black; a small, ferrety, white-faced boy with his right hand wrapped in a dishcloth; and Brendan, a stage-Irish drunk, well known to the staff of St Mary’s, who was now singing quietly to himself as he carefully removed his shoes and socks to inspect his very smelly feet.

  Vladimir: That’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots, the faults of his feet.

  Ever since, as a teenager, I first stumbled on the unforgettable opening line of Murphy (‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’), Samuel Beckett has been a favourite writer. At this moment, in the aftermath of my fall, I knew that Beckett would become my guide to life in the foreseeable future, whatever that turned out to be. Words are still the best weapons with which to come to terms with ageing, and what Beckett calls ‘failing better’.

  It should be a peaceful kind of armistice. Why fight a losing battle? But words and culture – art, music, drama, and poetry – can make the difference. You need to know that this is my natural habitat. In the more than forty years since I left college, like the schoolmaster Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost, I have eaten paper and drunk ink; at first, as the editor-in-chief of the publishers Faber & Faber from 1980 to 1996, and then as literary editor of The Observer from 1996 to 2012. In a privileged and fortunate career, books and print have been a guide, a consolation, and a modus operandi. For me, experience has often been refracted through novels, poems, and plays. Literature has filled a void, providing a narrative, in the words of Samuel Johnson, ‘better to enjoy life, or better to endure it’.

  Turn a page, and you find a new distraction, or another version of reality. Is this not the search for a fuller kind of experience? Art, which helps us focus on our quality of life, might also inspire a richer understanding of our mortal existence. I did not know it, but the first seeds of this enquiry, Every Third Thought, had already begun to take root in my imagination.

  Here, at St Mary’s, in the short run, the waiting was over. After scarcely a couple of tedious hours, my number came up and soon I was being admitted to the treatment zone. Next, I was lying in a private cubicle, behind a flimsy blue curtain, being examined by a very practical, friendly young doctor whose refreshingly down-to-earth approach was to offer a choice between a) a full scan and a battery of diagnostic tests, or b) a bandage for my head injuries (no stitches needed), some painkillers, and a taxi home. ‘What you probably want,’ she said, with a winning smile, ‘is a nice hot shower.’

  There’s nothing so soothing as that old English cocktail of normality and no-fuss, also known as the sweet illusion of continuity. So of course I chose b), and went back to my regular life. By seven o’clock that evening, while the long summer day was still burning in the late-afternoon streets, I was back in my flat, and showering off the bitter aftertaste of A&E. But I didn’t go to Zanna’s wedding, and something had changed.

  As Petruchio puts it in The Taming of the Shrew, ‘Where is the life that late I led?’ On this day, I had passed a fateful frontier of experience, and was no longer as blithe or as nonchalant as once I’d been. This afternoon of 27 June 2014 had witnessed a decisive personal transition: in this new world, where the endgame must be played out, nothing would ever seem quite the same again. I had survived my fall, and was still 100 per cent myself. And yet . . .

  Together with the crossing of that immense psychological frontier – turning sixty – my own consciousness had experienced a subtle shift. Try as I might, I could not prevent another Shakespearean ear-worm (‘Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind . . .’) from burrowing into my imagination. Over the next two years, there would be more hospitals, more tests, more nurses, and, of course, a whole lot more waiting about. And all the while, my story continued to germinate.

  Vladimir: We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

  Actually, habit-the-deadener is a lifesaver. Since 2014, and during 2015/16, the year in which I have completed this book, there have been sudden deaths, irruptions of pain and loss, unanticipated afflictions, and the nagging intrusions of what I now think of as the ‘third thought’. My fall had dumped me, metaphorically, outside an almost tangible, and imminently dreadful, threshold. Through a door, at the end of a sinister corridor of shadowy extent and mysterious atmosphere, is that a glittering and majestic jet-black arch from which there can be no turning away.

  Perhaps, in the shower, I hoped to drown the apprehensions of old age. Yet, in some secret chamber of self-awareness, I was conscious that, like Prospero in The Tempest, I should now begin to acknowledge an inevitable rendezvous. Shakespeare’s magician is talking about retirement, and I have no plans to retire, just yet, but the mood that governs his return to his dukedom is one that any sixty-something can relate to:

  Go quick away: the story of my life

  And the particular accidents gone by . . .

  I’ll bring to your ship, and so to Naples . . .

  And then retire
me to my Milan, where

  Every third thought shall be my grave.

  3

  FOREVER YOUNG?

  ‘I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits.’

  John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Act IV, scene 2

  As I sit here now, putting these words onto a yellow legal pad, what I hear is the beat of my grandfather’s eighteenth-century grandfather clock behind me, marking the seconds, minutes, and hours in the early morning light. In younger days, I was less a lark than an owl: now I’m always up with the sun.

  There’s no getting away from the tick-tock of biological life. In the words of the Psalms, ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow.’ When I turned sixty in 2013, my first reaction was to fudge it. For about a year, I pretended I was fifty-nine or, if I could get away with it, fifty-seven. Secretly, I made a simple and sobering calculation on my iPhone of how long I’d got. Assuming about ten years left of my biblical span, just how many days, hours, and minutes remained? My score (give or take some leap years) looked something like this:

  3,650 days

  87,000 hours

  5.25 million minutes

  With that data in front of me, things seemed alarmingly finite. Look closer, if you want. Humanity has a clever way with the kind of introspection which might otherwise disable the will to live. It prefers to tell stories, at first through myth and religion, and lately through culture and psychoanalysis. Thus the bright, irrepressible dreams of youth morph into a more subtle communion with Time’s reckoning, a roster of regrets which, in certain lights, can look like a catalogue of failure.

  Most of these regrets are trivial (wishing I’d spent more time in the Australian outback; wondering about skiing the Alps, or trekking to the Forbidden City); some are sentimental expressions of wishful thinking (what if I’d stayed in Cambridge; what if I’d not at first married so young; what if I’d ever lived in New York; what if . . . ?). A few are more painful, sombre re-evaluations of personal shortcomings. In ‘How Long Have I Got Left?’, the New York Times article that inspired his memoir When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi writes:

  The path forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d just spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d have a plan (write that book). Give me 10 years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The pedestrian truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?

  Sitting alone with these words reinforces the isolation of the endgame, and its imperatives. So, back to reality. No time to waste. Towards the end of Twelfth Night, Feste reminds Malvolio that ‘the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’ As these retributions begin to multiply, the mind cannot help but interact with the body. Both are doomed, the one trapped in the other.

  There’s nothing straightforward in the relationship a thoughtful person has with their Self, and especially with its human frame, in which body-image is just the most visible manifestation of that inner dialogue. Ageing only makes the dialogue more complex. How to shed early-life fantasies or mid-life anxieties, and acquire late-life wisdom? The frailty is all. Today, on the Tube, sitting opposite a full-colour reproduction of David Hockney’s Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, I was confronted with yet another fleeting reminder of Time’s relentless passage, in the advertisements for his Tate retrospective. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Hockney was this elfin, irrepressible presence, an Ariel of contemporary art. Now, plus a hearing-aid, he has joined the other ageing, greying figures of my youth.

  With the onset of these later years, a process that starts at different times for different people, the fragile self finds that ‘less is more’, and learns to moderate its youthful egotism. Young people think they are immortal, and that the world revolves around them. Older people know they are mortal, that their future is not infinite, and also that they must take their place in the scheme of things. Among the important lessons about ageing is a new appreciation of simple pleasures: the joy of friendship and the satisfaction of small victories – an engagement fulfilled or a mundane task completed. Being alive in the world brings its own reward: the wind in your face on a blustery spring day, or the silver magic of summer moonlight.

  From the many motivations for such a mood of acceptance, the most fundamental is physical. With the passage of time, the human frame slows down. On my visit to St Mary’s Paddington, after my fall, I was forced to acknowledge this. Was I, for instance, the same person who had been wheeled, semi-conscious, into hospital in 1995?

  Well, yes and no. For twenty years, thanks to a lucky spin of the genetic lottery, my recovery had been good. To outward appearance, I was comparatively unchanged. I would always walk with a mild limp, but my left arm (paralysed in 1995) was now, in physio-speak, quite ‘useful’. Indeed, my physical strength, stimulated by whatever exercise I could manage, had probably increased.

  Unlike many stroke sufferers, I had been able to return to work, in the competitive arena of the British media. Here, occasionally, conversation will sometimes default to questions of appearance more readily than to issues of press freedom. Last week, meeting J, an ex-BBC friend, after some years’ hiatus, the dialogue went as follows:

  Me: You look well.

  J: Well, I still have hair, and so do you.

  Me: Hair is what counts.

  J: It’s good to have hair after sixty.

  Me: (complicit) Yours is white, too. That’s so distinguished.

  J: Hair is what really matters at our age. It makes all the difference.

  Etc.

  So much for the challenges of ‘fake news’ and the 24/7 media cycle.

  Inwardly, however, I had begun to detect the first hints of a rallentando, a slight but (to me) perceptible loss of acceleration. Where once I could almost manage a semi-regular, stressful fifteen minutes of awkward running in the park, now I was happier to go for a swim, and become fishily at ease in the water in a way that was impossible on dry land. My daily coping strategies, perfected over many years to compensate for the various small physical deficits attributable to stroke, were no longer as effective as before. Perhaps most telling of all, in my imagination, I was no longer competing in my private ‘Team test’.

  This is the fantasy in which, even as a middle-aged man of sedentary habits and demeanour, you can watch TV and happily picture yourself participating in a national team at the highest level. In my case, until quite recently, I could watch a game of Test cricket, and (I know this is ludicrous) fantasize about bowling some brilliant reverse swing at a top Australian opening batsman. Or racing through the outfield to make an acrobatic catch just inside the boundary. Further back, in my thirties, in the same ‘Team test’, I might have imagined haring down the wing on a football pitch to make that brilliant pass from which Gary Lineker or Eric Cantona would conjure up another match-winning goal. Lately, however, even in fantasy-land, I have to concede an encroaching slowness hampering my career as either a Test cricketer or a Premier League footballer. In truth, I was always a spectator. Now, reluctantly, I am also a couch potato.

  The strange and frustrating part of my condition is that I can easily imagine movement – running, say, or vigorous hiking – while being unable to execute even an approximation to a dash or a climb. Achingly, my body has wishes it cannot fulfil. In this state of frustration, a movie classic like Singin’ in the Rain becomes a kind of torture, offering an invitation to the spontaneous thrill of a dance that I can neither accept nor even contemplate. When I watch those scenes with Gene Kelly, immobility feels like a prison.

  These long-term inhibitions have trickled down into everyday life in ways I have come to accept. Compared to many stroke sufferers, I’m lucky. My walking disability is minor. I am still my old self, sort of. My progress is often slow and can be laborious, but I’m independent. Lately, I find that in cr
owds, at airports and train stations, I prefer to use a cane.

  The upshot is that even the smallest journey each day has to be planned in advance. If I drive to the shops for milk or bread, shall I also go to the bank? Can I park close enough to Barclays to be able to cross the road to Sainsbury’s afterwards? If I arrange to meet a friend in the West End can I drive to the rendezvous, or shall I find a ‘Disabled’ parking bay and take a bus or taxi for the last mile? What if it’s raining? How will I get back? How congested will the traffic be? On and on it goes: every day becomes an accumulation of a thousand internal transactions in which nothing can be taken for granted.

  *

  As the prisoner of my body, I have learned to subordinate rage to acquiescence. My strategy has become the negotiation of a discreet reconciliation – with myself. At the same time, there’s our old bio-chemical make-up which is, inexorably, against us. When we, with our Stone Age brains, start to think about our mortal selves in relation to our ceaseless consciousness, and ask questions about the interplay between our physical well-being and our psychic equilibrium, we talk about mind over matter, but what does that mean, in practice?

  For the last twenty years, I have invested my energy in the kind of optimism that sometimes masquerades as stoicism, pretending that I had come through a life-threatening passage of ill-health unscathed. Defying gravity, I have wanted to remain, in the words of the song, ‘Forever Young’.

  No one ever seriously challenged that fantasy. I found the wider world complicit with my dreams of eternal youth. Capitalism, by which we live and work, is all about aspiration, growth and vigour, ambition and success (even when the small print tells us that the price of shares can go down as well as up). Western medicine and medical practices reflect those values. The doctor’s contract with the patient is to diagnose, treat, and cure – and then to send you, the patient, back into the world of the well, restored, renewed, and ready for the fray.