Every Third Thought Page 3
Agreed: the fantasy of youth might be my weakness, but it’s also endemic to our society. The young, the backbone of armies throughout history, are also the foot-soldiers of capitalism, and they celebrate well-ness in thousands of intangible and influential ways that add up to a bigger picture of a world in which medicine must always make us better, where life expectancy is going up, and where – with a nip here, a tuck there, anon another rinse – the effects of ageing can be indefinitely postponed.
By chance, my own genetic make-up conspires to validate this fantasy. As if fulfilling some Faustian pact, my photograph over twenty-something years still betrays surprisingly little evidence of wear and tear (a source of irritation to friends and family who refer, darkly, to ‘the portrait in the attic’). Well, ‘Forever Young’ might be the song that Dorian Gray hums to himself, slipping carefree down the boulevard, but it remains a tune fraught with irony.
When you are young, you ask, ‘Who am I?’ With the passage of time, that question morphs into: ‘How, when, and where am I going?’ That’s an internal debate which can quickly tumble towards a sense of humiliation at the loss of ‘fitness’, provoking many questions.
One of the things about ageing that no one talks about openly, or at best in whispers, is shame, the mortification of being ‘unfit’. It’s so fundamental that we learn to disguise it. After my fall, I made light of it to friends, and went to some lengths to distract attention from my cuts and bruises. Shame in older people manifests itself as defiance, intolerance, even rage (‘against the dying of the light’) and finally, with luck, a kind of ludic irresponsibility which, in the lives of some old people, can show as an expression of joy.
Nora Ephron, who compressed more wisdom on the endgame in the twelve pages of ‘Considering the Alternative’ than many weightier volumes, refers to Alice B. Toklas’ famously blunt question to Gertrude Stein (‘What is the answer?’) as Stein was dying.
‘What is the question?’ was Stein’s gnomic reply. To which Ephron’s response is a witty riff on the possibilities:
Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? And what about chocolate? There’s a question for you, Gertrude Stein – what about chocolate?
Eventually, in the small hours, at the dead of night, a darker strand in this line of questioning begins to plumb anxieties about things left undone (relationships broken beyond repair; feelings exploited; family neglected; friendships taken for granted; trust betrayed) and things not achieved, hopes unfulfilled (the novel I once had in mind; those plans for a cutting-edge arts centre in Northern Ireland). In the booming and shadowy mansion of deep regret, this opens another door into a multi-mirrored chamber of despair.
Here my reflections become mocking, even merciless: you are mediocre, ordinary, and insignificant, a preposterous bag of air. The disabilities you go on about are a physical manifestation of your moral and intellectual weakness. What on earth are you playing at? Even to write those words is to project an air of undeserved consequence. Vanity is the deadliest of sins, especially in the arts. The creative life, in all media, flirts with and feeds on vanity. It’s the rocket fuel that propels the self into action, but also the firewall that inhibits self-examination, self-scrutiny, candour, etc. Kipling writes of his ‘six honest serving men’ (who had taught him ‘all he knew’):
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
The scrutiny of these ‘serving men’ is indispensable to a successful endgame. In the aftermath of my fall in 2014, ‘Forever Young’ insisted that there should be no scars, and that my body should not let me down. This was almost certainly deluded. Frankly, I’m not what I was, and it’s beginning to prey on my mind. My inventory of dissolution, north to south, goes something like this.
At least, looking on the bright side, my hair is only hinting at grey. In the right kind of light, it can look dark and, on a good day, even lustrous. Elsewhere, other exterior parts have become vulnerable to inexplicable moles and growths. So far, on closer examination, these have turned out to be benign. Venture into the interior, however, and there’s trouble brewing: my teeth need regular maintenance, and I’m getting long in the tooth – with receding gums that are prone to bleed. I cannot see this computer in front of me without reading glasses.
Further down, my chest will intermittently be seared with heartburn. There’s an inexorable sagging of the pectorals and a thickening of the waist. If I stop to think about it, I feel bad about my bum. From the stroke, my left arm and hand have intractable ‘deficits’ which means that I am typing these words with a super-dexterous right hand. Both knees are crocked, my left leg is semi-paralysed (more ‘deficits’ there), and both feet, from soles to ankles, have the tingling pins-and-needles sensation of peripheral neuropathy.
This kind of ageing only exacerbates our consciousness of who we are, provoking new ambitions for what we might achieve, because ageing also provides a constant reminder of term limits. As an optimist, I believe this does not have to be a source of regret. Every writer knows that there is nothing like a deadline to galvanize the creative economy. New ideas flourish in extremis. ‘Depend upon it, sir,’ declared Dr Johnson, ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’
In other words, it’s all about me, and you, and the vulnerable self.
4
I – ME – MINE
I me mine, I me mine
All through the night, I me mine
The Beatles (George Harrison)
After the 1960s, the unfettered, post-war self found popular expression in many unconscious ways: in song (‘I Me Mine’); in books (The Selfish Gene); and in society (the ‘Me Generation’). By the millennium, this noble self was being boosted by fantasies of medically engineered immortality (consider Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go). Today, in the global marketplace of free expression, there are more versions of the liberated self available than ever before. As Gawande writes, ‘the lines of power between the generations have been renegotiated.’ Lately, the older citizen has not so much lost status and control as begun increasingly to share it. Since the Sixties, the respect traditionally paid to the elders of society has been eroded, but it has not been replaced by ‘the veneration of youth’, says Gawande. ‘It’s been replaced by the veneration of the independent self.’
In 1946, once the baby-boom was under way, the veneration of the self acquired a canonical text: a popular guide to child-rearing and childhood, which appeared in post-war America and austerity Britain to influence our beginnings. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock shaped the new generation and became the seventh-best selling book of all time.
As those first post-war babies came to maturity, another genre emerged to guide the successful and liberated adult towards a greater fulfilment than anything ever enjoyed by their parents. Women especially no longer wanted to be relegated to the kitchen or the bedroom. They began to read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan; then later, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer; and possibly, later still, The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.
For both sexes, these books had popular antecedents in bestselling psychoanalytic theory. Erik Erikson, in Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968), was among the first to describe an ‘identity crisis’ among post-war American men. This, argued Erikson, was attributable to a lack of creative work. Lives of quiet desperation were no longer acceptable for the Spock generation, raised to inherit the earth.
The central feature of Spock’s advice was that he used the insights of Freudian psychology as a key to parenting. He taught, persuasively, that every child is a growing individual whose needs and desires had to be recognized and met. Several decades on, the voice that rocked the cradle all those years ago still shapes our co
nsciousness. We remain heavily invested in notions of ‘personal growth’, with manic self-fulfilment now becoming a fundamental goal for an ageing population. Nora Ephron has fun with this obsession:
We are a generation that has learned to believe we can do something about almost everything. We are active – hell, we are proactive. We are positive thinkers. We have the power. We will take any suggestion seriously. If a pill will help, we will take it. If being in the Zone will help, we will enter the Zone . . . we will scan ourselves to find whatever can be nipped in the bud. We are in control. Behind the wheel. On the cutting edge. We make lists. We seek out the options. We surf the net.
For successive generations, in the coming decades, the translation of ‘the independent self’ into a dynamic, confident, and purposeful individual will continue to be the will-o’-the-wisp of a happy retirement. The beneficiaries of Spock will continue to pursue personal fulfilment. But when modern medical practice becomes complicit with this quest, the conflict between the desire to remain active and independent, on the one hand, and the biological imperatives of ageing, on the other, is in danger of becoming another kind of burden for the old. Happiness can no longer be John Lennon’s ‘warm gun’, but a more sensible rapprochement between the instincts of early life ambition, and late-life reality.
For some old people, such speculations are just that: theories. We have to recognize that in every geriatric circle there will be a few with an inexhaustible appetite for life. I think of Margy, my mother’s neighbour, a redoubtable woman in her nineties who conducts her life like someone half her age. Margy says, ‘I know I am falling behind a bit. I cannot catch up with modern technology. I do not climb stepladders easily. I wish I could wear pretty shoes, but comfort trumps style, so I just put on my bright lipstick and head out the door.’
Optimism will always be inhibited by biology. My friend the developmental biologist Jim Smith likes to describe his ageing mother’s frank recognition of an awkward reality. Whenever she was wheeled off to hospital, Mrs Smith would croak, defiantly, on her exit, ‘DNR! DNR!’ (Do Not Resuscitate). In the Smith family, refreshingly, death was a subject for black comedy.
Baby-boomers are optimists who face an existential crisis. I know because I’m one of them. We have been overindulged with positive messages. For decades, we have had unqualified love and support. We never expected to face infirmity, or decline, or . . . But now, suddenly, there’s a list of afflictions with scary names that, after the age of about fifty, spring up like dragons’ teeth: oesophageal cancer, varieties of leukaemia, coronary heart disease, etc. Today, as this cohort passes into history, it is a renewed awareness of the complexity of this final lap that’s beginning to attract the attention of those who manage the third act of the human drama: accountants, geriatricians, and neurologists.
Ars vivendi, the art of living well, is a tradition that’s undergoing a profound change. In the past, the common experience of everyday life was a three-act drama – beginning, becoming, and finally, leaving – in which the first two acts were all-consuming. In this new century, it’s the third act that’s attracting the biggest audiences. Ars vivendi is now matched by a new consciousness of ars moriendi, the art of dying or, to put it another way, our conduct of the endgame.
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To embrace transience, and to recognize our insignificance, must offer the best chance for any reconciliation with Fate, and possibly some long-term happiness and fulfilment – the longing that troubles every generation.
For myself, all I can hope for is to have inspired Alice and Isobel – my beloved daughters, emissaries of the future – to laugh and cry at the same thing, and perhaps to have passed on something about sympathy, kindness, and hard work. In this mood, ageing is all about becoming reconciled to, and making friends with, nothingness, sub specie aeternitatis.
Beneath the eye of eternity, I am on the record, in various printings of My Year Off, as the celebrant of a marriage to Sarah Lyall, a union blessed with a happy childhood for our two children. Now, however, that story has a new twist: at the beginning of this, my third act, Sarah and I are living apart. She, no longer in the family home, is resident in New York City, and the girls come and go in my life as peripatetic Anglo-American teens.
The lost experiences of former loves cannot be taken away, any more than life itself can be unlived. There’s this existential truth: you and I might want our stories to be written differently, but it’s still our story, yours and mine, itself the sum of countless human transactions involving love and hate, fear and longing, pain and loss, anxiety, passion, risk and originality. Acknowledge this, perhaps, and you can begin to make peace with the worm of regret. For me, the bright hopes I expressed twenty years ago have matured into something I never expected. I live alone, making friends with solitude, writing these words in a blue dawn, and functioning outside the recognized circles of hearth and home, older and slower.
‘Slowness’ is a theme I first encountered during my convalescence in the autumn of 1995. It was something I celebrated, almost as an existential blessing, becoming friends with slowness, both as a concept and as a way of life. As mature adults we become accustomed to doing everything freely, and at will, often at speed, possibly multi-tasking. With ageing, we develop a more cautious, serial mentality (‘I’ll take this one step at a time’), and then we start to become dependent, needing help with more and more, taking charge of less and less. At first, it’s digital technology and small print, but finally, we’ll probably want assistance with even the simplest things, such as getting dressed and bathed.
The passage of time enforces a reminder of the things we may never do again. Less sport, certainly; fewer mountain hikes or cross-country walks, perhaps; and no more mad running. The romantic young man or woman in the flying scarf racing through an airport to the departure gate or the meeting-point becomes an almost exotic creature, driven by impulses we can recognize, but no longer feel in our bones. Perhaps with resignation, we learn to appreciate the things we can do, and the experiences that are still available to us. As Coriolanus says, ‘There is a world elsewhere’. Indeed there is, and it’s probably inside your head. It will be the sensitive and fragile brain that becomes the future vessel of hope and resilience.
These restrictions of personal freedom have sponsored some peculiar foibles. I have developed a minor obsession with the lottery of green traffic lights, and also the lucky number seven, my birth date. I recognize that these superstitions are linked to an apprehension of ‘Fate’. Perhaps this was incipiently part of my temperament but, in the aftermath of dramatic ill-health, I have become inclined, in the evaluation of possible future outcomes, to expect the worst. This, too, becomes another justification for taking things slowly. Slowness equals deliberation, and deliberation has come to equal the avoidance of risk. Yet, in younger days, I was excited by the thrill of risk. Does this mean I am no longer myself? Looking back over twenty years, it’s instructive to see how that ‘insult to the brain’ has shaped so much of my waking consciousness, conditioning it to slow down, to re-shape who I am.
Historically, the oldie turned to God in the search for fulfilment during his or her later years. Today, with the idea of God under assault from belligerent atheists and an indifferent majority of uncommitted agnostics, there’s still a hunger for a dialogue with something bigger and richer than individualistic materialism. This expresses itself, in the West, in a widespread appetite for culture. The crowds who attend concerts, exhibitions, plays, and arts festivals include all sorts and ages, but the majority are over fifty. For every Harley-Davidson propped outside the marquee, there will be a dozen wheelchairs within.
The horses of the night ride hard. Time is always catching up. For better or worse, we find ourselves slowing down in the diminuendo of senescence. It’s now that ‘every third thought’ becomes preoccupied with ‘the grave’. To a generation which has enjoyed unprecedented personal autonomy and fulfilment, these ‘third thoughts’ are strange and disturbing. The ques
tion is no longer ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What exciting new experience can I enjoy?’ but ‘How long have I got?’ and ‘What is my endgame?’
At some point in the ageing process, our thoughts become binary – nostalgic or fearful: either a stream-of-consciousness entertainment about that younger self, or a more urgent interrogation of likely future prospects. And why not? There are any number of gruesome routes to the grave, most of them obscure to us in the present. This becomes one of John Donne’s themes in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions:
We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises; and we hew, and we polish every stone, that goes to the building; and so our health is a long and regular work. But in a minute a Canon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a Sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorders, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.
Donne’s words could have been written yesterday. Another certainty is that our destination will never vary.
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Faced with the onset of decline, I have inevitably become tempted to monitor subjective physical qualities such as balance, continence, and mobility. After the age of fifty-five, no one I know is immune to the fascination of self-scrutiny in the shower, a quasi-medical procedure than can morph into something broodingly existential. It’s a sober prospect, to which my recent summer fall added several contingent elements of anxiety.
After that ‘emergent occasion’, once the bruises had faded and the cuts had healed, I was more or less myself again, though probably rather less than more. In this new and reflective mood, I was beginning to wonder about something I’d never explored before: a course of radical physiotherapy at the National Hospital. My internal dialogue went something like this: