May and June Journal

June 25th, 2008

Well, this includes some of April, too. I won’t go into the details but on April 15 I underwent unanticipated open heart surgery at Riverside Hospital in Columbus. The problem was discovered without either a heart attack or stroke, or even pain. My luck was with me in more ways than one — I had an appointment for help with my tax filing for 9 a.m. that day. Turns out, seniors had been given an extension until October…

I’m going to begin a cardiopulmonary program that meets three times a week for twelve weeks, beginning Friday, June 30….The aftermath finds me lazy, still.

April 2, 2008 Journal

April 2nd, 2008

Looks like I lost two whole months. As perhaps mentioned earlier, I finished my fantasy novel and began again on the third or fourth draft of “Why Did I Do It? What incest offenders learn in treatment,” based on my 12 years doing therapy with sex offenders in the prison system. Non-fiction may be easier to find an agent for than fiction — I hope so, because I’m not getting any younger (and other cliches.)

As luck would have it, John Kachuba gave me the book “Writing Fiction; A Guide to Narrative Craft” by Janet Burroway last Sunday night. It was his and Mary’s last night attending the Spiritual Growth Group since they have bought a HUD fixer upper in Cincinnatti, and they have given most of their books to the Athens Friends of the Library Book Sale. He has taught creative writing at OU and this is the text he and others use.

The two sample stories-for-criticism early in the book are “The Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams and “How Far She Went,” by Mary Hood. Reading them as a potential writer I was impressed beyond words, I guess, since I can’t seem to be able to put my experience into words. Very subtly done.

In the third, “Showing and Telling” chapter Hood explicates the importance of significant details, filtering, use of the active voice, prose rhythm and mechanics.

Significant detail: specific, definite, concrete particular details are the life of fiction. A detail is concrete if it appeals to one of the five senses

Filtering: Vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as “she noticed” and “she saw” be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.

Active Voice: Always use the active voice except when the actor is unknown or insignificant, or for stylistic effect. Watch out for “linking verbs” which are passive, as “She was beautiful.” Instead, let the reader experience.

Prose Rhythm: The rhythm of an action and emotion can be imitated by the rhythm of a sentence in a rich variety of ways. (”The stops and starts of prose flow.”)

Mechanics: You can depart from standardized mechanics whenever you produce an effect that adequately compensates for it. Usually, stick to the grammatical magic whose purpose is to be invisible.

I’ve just been using this space to help me focus on some good writing tips. I’m signing off now to read “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates “for Bob Dylan,” next in the book.

A Game of Chance

January 30th, 2008

It is a chill autumn day on Earth, but in Heaven it is same-o, same-o. Three of the God brothers are sitting around a table playing stud poker. They realized aeons ago that if they freed up a little complexity, chaos and emergence onto the table, it made for a rousing game of chance.

Yaweh has his elbows on the table, studying his hand. Poseidon stretches out in his chair contentedly. Zeus, on the other hand, holds his cards close to his chest and eyes Yaweh anxiously.

Their game is interrupted by young Jesus, who enters apologetically. “Forgive me, but Earth’s people are in need of a few miracles. They are casting doubt on the existence of the God family.”

Yaweh looks sternly over his glasses and glares. “What do they consider a miracle?”

Jesus and his father have had this conversation before. “They want something that they can’t explain, that flies in the face of everything they know.”

Yaweh speaks to his brothers. “Who would have suspected that something appearing from nothing, that slime molds bonding together to find food, the mysterious unfolding of the mathematical road map, the teeniest particles glopping together to make a body with an immune system, toddlers recalling past lives, the magic of reproduction and even the tunnel experience of the clinically dead would not suffice? Is it not self-evident? Pray tell, where do they think it all came from? What kind of piddling thing do they desire?”

Jesus replies, “something puzzling, like milk turning into orange juice.”

Zeus makes a rude sound.

Jesus continues, “I fear emergence has gotten away from us. Consciousness emerged with the more complex brain, and reasoning became something that humans could pool together. They believe themselves to be on the way to comquering the unknown, and have an answer for most mysteries.”

Poseidon is curious now. “What kind of answers do they give?”

Jesus glances at the cards and says, “That it’s the luck of the draw. That it’s an accident. Some say it’s impossible, so there’s no such thing as reality, it’s only a dream.,”

Zeus bellows and throws a bolt of lightning earthward. “Fools!”

Jesus protests, “Foolish, yes. But how can they be fools if you have made them in your image?”

Yaweh grumbles and raises the ante. “No more miracles for them. They’ll have to make do with what they have, and what unfolds from what they have. Milk into orange juice indeed!”

Whoah! Where Did 2007 Go? and 9/11 and Need Agent

January 30th, 2008

It’s the 30th so I have a chance to begin a new leaf on the first month of the year. Last night I attended a showing of a 9/11 video at the library — the one by the architect. After seeing it I now believe I believe that explosives were involved in the destruction. At this point in time I believe I believe that the government’s cover-up was because of their security failure and that “the bad foreign guys” got into the building(s) and set the complicated widespread explosives, to be detonated at a strategic time by the bad guys. (As it turns out about 3 months previously a new elevator system was installed — involving 4 elevators — with access to the crawl space between floors.) I have wondered and never seen an explanation for the government giving money to the victims (and having them sign a release). Maybe that’s why.

My novella turned into a novel, and is finished. It’s called “Sight Unseen: Are we our bodies?” and I haven’t been able to get an agent to look at it. It is pretty cross-sectioned, dealing fictionally with homosexuality, AIDS, astral projection, the Shadow, the Other Side, incest, feminism and body swapping. None of the genres — not even fantasy — seem to fit that content. Only one person has read it all, and she doesn’t like the heroine because of how irresponsible she is. (I didn’t tell her it’s me).

Epstein Reflection

June 4th, 2007

Kid Turns 70
And nobody cares.
by Joseph Epstein

Seventy. Odd thing to happen to a five-year-old boy who, only
the other day, sang “Any Bonds Today,” whose mother’s friends said he would
be a heartbreaker for sure (he wasn’t), who was popular but otherwise
undistinguished in high school, who went on to the University of Chicago but
long ago forgot the dates of the rule of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens and
the eight reasons for the Renaissance, who has married twice and written
several books, who somewhere along the way became the grandfather of three,
life is but a dream, sha-boom sha-boom, 70, me, go on, whaddya, kiddin’ me?

A funny age to turn, 70, and despite misgivings I have gone
ahead and done it, yet with more complex thoughts than any previous birthday
has brought. Birthdays have never been particularly grand events for me; my
own neither please nor alarm me. I note them chiefly with gratitude for
having got through another year. I have never been in any way part of the
cult of youth, delighted to be taken for younger than I am, or proud that I
can do lots of physical things that men my age are no longer supposed to be
able to do: 26 chin-ups with gila monsters biting both my ankles. I have
always thought I looked–and, as mothers used to instruct, always tried to
act–my age. But now, with 70 having arrived, I notice that for the first
time I am beginning to fudge, to hedge, to fib slightly, about my age. In
conversation, in public appearances, I described myself as “in my late 60s,”
hoping, I suppose, to be taken for 67. To admit to 70 is to put oneself into
a different category: to seem uncomfortably close to, not to put too fine a
point on it, Old Age.

At 70 middle age is definitely–and definitively–done. A
wonderful per iod, middle age, so nondescript and im precise, extending
perhaps from one’s late 30s to one’s late 60s, it allows a person to think
him- or herself simultaneously still youthful, though no longer a kid.
Forty-eight, 57, 61, those middle-aged numbers suggest miles to go before
one sleeps, miles filled with potential accomplishments, happy turnabouts in
one’s destiny, midlife crises (if one’s tastes run to such extravaganzas),
surprises of all kinds.

Many ski lifts at Vail and Aspen, I have been told, no longer
allow senior-citizen discounts at 60, now that so many people continue
skiing well into their 60s. With increased longevity, it’s now thought a
touch disappointing if a person dies before 85. Sixty, the style sections of
the newspapers inform us, is the new 40. Perhaps. But 70–70, to ring a
change on the punchline of the joke about the difference between a virgin
and a German Jew–70 remains 70. One can look young for 70, one can be fit
for 70, but in the end there one is, 70.

W.H. Auden, who pegged out at 66, said that while praying we
ought quickly to get over the begging part and get on to the gratitude part.
“Let all your thinks,” he wrote, “be thanks.” One can either look upon life
as a gift or as a burden, and I myself happen to be a gift man. I didn’t ask
to be born, true enough; but really, how disappointing not to have been. I
had the additional good luck of arriving in 1937, in what was soon to become
the most interesting country in the world and to have lived through a time
of largely unrelieved prosperity in which my particular generation danced
between the raindrops of wars: a child during World War II, too young for
Korea, too old for Vietnam, but old enough for the draft, which sent me for
22 months (useful as they now in retrospect seem) off to Missouri, Texas,
and Arkansas. My thinks really are chiefly thanks.

As for my decay, what the French call my décomposition géneralé,
it proceeds roughly on schedule, yet for the moment at a less than alarming
rate. I have had a heart bypass operation. Five or so years ago, I was found
to have auto-immune hepatitis, which caused me no pain, and which
side-effectless drugs have long since put in remission. I am paunchless,
have a respectable if not abundant amount of hair atop my head (most of it
now gray, some of it turning white), retain most of my teeth (with the aid
of expensive dentistry). I have so far steered clear of heart attack, dodged
the altogether too various menacing cancers whirling about, and missed the
wretched roll of the dice known as aneurysms. (Pause while I touch wood.) My
memory for unimportant things has begun to fade, with results that thus far
have been no more than mildly inconvenient. (I set aside 10 minutes or so a
day to find my glasses and fountain pen.)

I have not yet acquired one of those funny walks–variants of
the prostate shuffle, as I think of them–common to men in their late 60s
and 70s. I am, though, due for cataract surgery. I’m beginning to find it
difficult to hear women with high-pitched voices, especially in restaurants
and other noisy places. And I take a sufficient number of pills–anti-this
and supplement-that–to have made it necessary to acquire one of those
plastic by-the-day-of-the-week pill sorters.

Suddenly, I find myself worrying in a way I never used to do
about things out of the routine in my life: having to traverse major
freeways and tollways to get to a speaking or social engagement. I take
fewer chances, both as a driver and once intrepid jaywalker. I find myself
sometimes stumbling over small bumps in the sidewalk, and in recent years
have taken a couple of falls, where once I would do an entrechat and a
simple pirouette–a Nureyev of the pavement–and move along smartly. I walk
more slowly up and down stairs, gripping the railing going downstairs. I
have, in sum, become more cautious, begun to feel, physically, more fragile,
a bit vulnerable.

Sleep has become erratic. Someone not long ago asked me if I
watched Charlie Rose, to which I replied that I am usually getting up for
the first time when Charlie Rose goes on the air. I fall off to sleep
readily enough, but two or three hours later I usually wake, often to invent
impressively labyrinthine anxieties for myself to dwell upon for an hour or
two before falling back into aesthetically unsatisfying dreams until six or
so in the morning. Very little distinction in this, I have discovered by
talking to contemporaries, especially men, who all seem to sleep poorly. But
this little Iliad of woes is pretty much par for the course, if such a
cliché metaphor may be permitted from a nongolfer. That I have arrived at 70
without ever having golfed is one of the facts of my biography to date of
which I am most proud.

“Bodily decrepitude,” says Yeats, “is wisdom.” I seem to have
accrued more of the former than the latter. Of wisdom generally, I haven’t
all that much to declare. I find myself more impressed by the mysteries of
life and more certain that most of the interesting questions it poses have
no persuasive answers, or at least none likely to arrive before I depart the
planet. I haven’t even settled the question of whether I believe in God. I
try to act as if God exists–that is, the prospects of guilt and shame and
the moral endorphins that good conduct brings still motivate me to act as
decently as I’m able. I suffer, then, some of the fear of religion without
any of the enjoyment of the hope it brings. I don’t, meanwhile, have a clue
about why there is suffering in the world, whether there is an afterlife, or
how to explain acts of truly grand altruism or unprofitable evil. You live
and you learn, the proverb has it; but in my case, You live and you yearn
seems closer to it.

But then, I must report that at 70 even my yearnings are well
down. I have no interest in acquiring power of any kind and fame beyond such
as I now pathetically possess holds little interest for me. My writing has
won no big prizes, nor do I expect it ever to do so. (”Tell them,” the
normally gentle and genteel 90-year-old William Maxwell said to Alec
Wilkinson and another friend on the day before his death, “their f–ing
honors mean nothing to me.”) I am ready to settle for being known as a good
writer by thoughtful people.

I would like to have enough money so that I don’t have to worry,
or even think, about money, but it begins to look as if I shan’t achieve
this, either. Rousseau spoke of feeling himself “delivered from the anxiety
of hope, certain of gradually losing the anxiety of desire . . . ” I’ve not
yet lost all my desire, and suspect that to do so probably is a sign of
resigning from life. Although I’m not keen on the idea of oblivion, which
seems the most likely of the prospects that await, I like to think that I
have become a bit less fearful of death. One of the most efficient ways to
decrease this fear, I’ve found, is to welcome death, at least a little, and
this growing older can cause one to do–or at least it has me, sometimes.

Seventy poses the problem of how to live out one’s days. To
reach 70 and not recognize that one is no longer living (as if one ever
were) on an unlimited temporal budget is beyond allowable stupidity. The
first unanswerable question at 70 is how many days, roughly, are left in
what one does best to think of as one’s reprieve. Unless one is under the
sentence of a terminal cancer or another wasting disease, no one can know,
of course; but I like the notion of the French philosopher Alain that, no
matter what age one is, one should look forward to living for another
decade, but no more. My mother lived to 82 and my father to 91, so I’m
playing, I suppose, with decent genetic cards. Yet I do not count on them. A
year or so ago, my dentist told me that I would have to spend a few thousand
dollars to replace some dental work, and I told him that I would get back to
him on this once I had the results of a forthcoming physical. If I had been
found to have cancer, I thought, at least I could let the dentistry, even
the flossing, go. Turning 70 one has such thoughts.

At 70 one encounters the standard physical diminutions. I am
less than certain how old I actually look, but in a checkout line, I can now
say to a young woman, “You have beautiful eyes,” without her thinking I’m
hitting on her. If my dashing youthful looks are gone, my intellectual and
cultural stamina are also beginning to deplete. I have lost most of my
interest in travel, and feel, as did Philip Larkin, that I should very much
like to visit China, but only on the condition that I could return home that
night.

Another diminution I begin to notice is in the realm of tact. I
have less of it. I feel readier than ever before to express my perturbation,
impatience, boredom. Why, with less time remaining, hold back? “I wonder,” I
find myself wanting to say to a fairly large number of people, “if you
haven’t greatly overestimated your charm?” Perhaps, though, I do better to
hold off on this until I reach 80, as I hope to be able to do; it will give
me something to live for.

A younger friend in California writes to me that, in a
restaurant in Bel Air, Robin Williams, Emma Thompson, and Pete Townsend (of
The Who, he is courteous enough to explain) walked by his table. I write
back to tell him that I would have been much more impressed if Fred Astaire,
Ingrid Bergman, and Igor Stravinsky had done so. My longing to meet Robin
Williams, Emma Thompson, and Pete Townsend is roughly the same, I should
guess, as their longing to meet me.

I don’t much mind being mildly out of it, just as I don’t
finally mind growing older. George Santayana, perhaps the most detached man
the world has known outside of certain Trappist monasteries, claimed to
prefer old age to all others. “I heartily agree that old age is, or may be
as in my case, far happier than youth,” he wrote to his contemporary William
Lyon Phelps. “I was never more entertained or less troubled than I am now.”
Something to this, if one isn’t filled with regret for the years that have
gone before, and I am not, having had a very lucky run thus far in my life.
At 70 it is natural to begin to view the world from the sidelines, a glass
of wine in hand, watching younger people do the dances of ambition,
competition, lust, and the rest of it.

Schopenhauer holds that the chief element in old age is
disillusionment. According to this dourest of all philosophers, at 70 we
have, if we are at all sentient, realized “that there is very little behind
most of the things desired and most of the pleasures hoped for; and we have
gradually gained an insight into the great poverty and hollowness of our
whole existence. Only when we are seventy do we thoroughly understand the
first verse of Ecclesiastes.” And yet, even for those of us who like to
think ourselves close to illusionless, happiness keeps breaking through,
fresh illusions arrive to replace defunct ones, and the game goes on.

If the game is to be decently played, at 70 one must harken back
as little as possible to the (inevitably golden) days of one’s youth, no
matter how truly golden they may seem. The temptation to do so, and with
some regularity, sets in sometime in one’s 60s. As a first symptom, one
discovers the word “nowadays” turning up in lots of one’s sentences, always
with the assumption that nowadays are vastly inferior to thenadays, when one
was young and the world green and beautiful. Ah, thenadays–so close to
“them were the days”–when there was no crime, divorce was unheard of,
people knew how to spell, everyone had good handwriting, propriety and
decorum ruled, and so on and on into the long boring night of nostalgia.

Start talking about thenadays and one soon finds one’s
intellectual motor has shifted into full crank, with everything about
nowadays dreary, third-rate, and decline-and-fallish. A big mistake. The
reason old people think that the world is going to hell, Santayana says, is
they believe that, without them in it, which will soon enough be the case,
how good really can it be?

Seventy brings prominently to the fore the question of Big D,
and I don’t mean Dallas. From 70 on, one’s death can no longer be viewed as
a surprise; a disappointment, yes, but not a surprise. Three score and ten,
after all, is the number of years of life set out in the Bible; anything
beyond that is, or ought to be, considered gravy, which is likely to be high
in cholesterol, so be careful. Henry James, on his deathbed, in a delirium,
said of death, “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.” Wonder why?
Few things are less distinguished than death, that most democratic of events
and oldest of jokes that comes to each of us afresh.

At 70 one more clearly than ever before hears footsteps, as they
say wide-receivers in the NFL do who are about to be smashed by oncoming
pass-defenders while awaiting the arrival of a pass thrown to them in the
middle of the field. The footsteps first show up in the obituary pages,
which I consult with greater interest than any other section of the
newspaper. Not too many days pass when someone I know, or someone whom
someone else I know knows, does not show up there. Late last year the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the novelist William Styron conked out;
neither was a close friend, though as fellow members of an editorial board I
spent a fair amount of time with them. Then the tennis player Ham Richardson
appeared on the obit page. I was a ballboy for an exhibition he and Billy
Talbert put on with two members of the Mexican Davis Cup team at the Saddle
& Cycle Club in the 1950s in Chicago. I was surprised to learn that
Richardson was only three years older than I. I am fairly frequently
surprised to discover that the newly deceased are only a little older than
I.
Along with footsteps, I also hear clocks. Unlike baseball, life
is a game played with a clock. At 70, a relentlessly insistent ticking is
going off in the background. I have decided to read, and often reread, books
I’ve missed or those I’ve loved and want to reread one more time. I recently
reread War and Peace, my second reading of this greatest of all novels, and
I ended it in sadness, not only because I didn’t wish to part from Pierre,
Natasha, Nicolai, and the others left alive at the novel’s end, but because
I know it is unlikely I shall return for another rereading.

I’ve been reading Proust’s Jean Santeuil, his run-up for In
Search of Lost Time, which I’d like to have time to read for a third and
last time. I wonder if I shall be in the game long enough to reread Don
Quixote and Herodotus and Montaigne–reread them all deeply and well, as
they deserve to be read but, as always with masterworks, one suspects one
failed to do the first and even second time around.

Seventy ought to concentrate the mind, as Samuel Johnson said
about an appointment with the gallows on the morrow, but it doesn’t–at
least, it hasn’t concentrated my mind. My thoughts still wander about, a
good part of the time forgetting my age, lost in low-grade fantasies,
walking the streets daydreaming pointlessly. (Tolstoy, in Boyhood, writes:
“I am convinced that should I ever live to a ripe old age and my story keeps
pace with my age, I shall daydream just as boyishly and impractically as an
old man of 70 as I do now.”) Despite my full awareness that time is running
out, I quite cheerfully waste whole days as if I shall always have an
unending supply on hand. I used to say that the minutes, hours, days, weeks,
months seemed to pass at the same rate as ever, and it was only the decades
that flew by. But now the days and weeks seem to flash by, too. Where once I
would have been greatly disconcerted to learn that the publication of some
story or essay of mine has been put off for a month or two, I no longer am:
the month or two will now come around in what used to seem like a week or
two.

I hope this does not suggest that, as I grow older, I am
attaining anything like serenity. Although my ambition has lessened, my
passions have diminished, my interests narrowed, my patience is no greater
and my perspective has not noticeably widened. Only my general intellectual
assurance has increased. Pascal says that under an aristocracy “it is a
great advantage to have a man as far on his way at 18 or 20 years as another
could be at 50; these are 30 years gained without trouble.” To become the
intellectual equivalent of an aristocrat in a democracy requires writing 20
or so books–and I have just completed my 19th.

Still, time, as the old newsreels had it, marches on, and the
question at 70 is how, with the shot clock running, best to spend it. I am
fortunate in that I am under no great financial constraints, and am able to
work at what pleases me. I don’t have to write to live–only to feel alive.
Will my writing outlive me? I am reasonably certain that it won’t,
but–forgive me, Herr Schopenhauer–I keep alive the illusion that a small
band of odd but immensely attractive people not yet born will find something
of interest in my scribbles. The illusion, quite harmless I hope, gives
me–I won’t say the courage, for none is needed–but the energy to persist.

The fear of turning 70 for a writer is that he will fall too far
out of step with the society that he is supposed, in essays and stories, to
be chronicling. I recently wrote a book on friendship, but was I
disqualified, as one or two younger reviewers politely suggested, from
knowing how friendship really works among the young today? I continue to
read contemporary fiction, but not with the same eagerness with which I once
read the fiction written by my elders and people of my own generation. In
his sixties, Edmund Wilson, describing himself as “a back-number,” announced
his loss of interest in much of the writing of the day. A time comes when
one loses not merely interest but even curiosity about the next new thing.
How intensely, at 70, must I scrutinize the work of Jack Black, Sarah
Silverman, Dave Eggers, and Sacha Baron Cohen?

I have never attempted to calculate the collective age of my
readers. When I am out flogging a new book, or giving a talk, the audience
who come to hear me are generally quite as old as I, and some a bit older.
Perhaps the young do not spend much time attending such non-events. Perhaps
they feel I haven’t much to say to them. I do receive a fair amount of email
from younger readers–in their 20s and 30s–but many of these readers have
literary aspirations of their own, and write to me seeking advice.

But the feeling of being more and more out of it begins to sink
in. The news of the new movie stars, comedians, hotshot bloggers, usually
comes to me a little late. My pretensions as a writer of nonfiction have
been toward cultural criticism. Older men and women–Henry Kissinger,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Baker–can stay in the foreign policy game almost
unto death. But how long can a writer commenting on the culture be expected
really to know the culture? In fact, there can even be something a little
unseemly about writers beyond a certain age claiming to share the pleasures
of the young. I recall Pauline Kael, who was 18 years older than I, once
comparing a movie to “your favorite rock concert,” and I thought, oh, poor
baby, how embarrassing to see you whoring after youth. I much like the
Internet, adore email, and probably use Google seven or eight times a day.
But must I also check in on YouTube, have a posting on MySpace, and spend a
portion of my day text-messaging? At 70, the temptation is to relax, breathe
through the mouth, and become comfortably rear-guard.

By 70, too, one is likely to have lived through a fair amount of
cultural change, so that traces of disorientation tend to set in.
Chateaubriand (1768-1848), whose dates show that he lived through the ancien
régime, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Restoration, the Second
Republic, and died just before the Revolution of 1848, wrote: “Nowadays one
who lingers on in this world has witnessed not only the death of men, but
also the death of ideas: principles, customs, tastes, pleasures, pains,
feelings–nothing resembles what he used to know. He is of a different race
from the human species in whose midst he is ending his days.” In my youth
one could go into a drugstore and confidently ask for a package of Luckies
and nervously whisper one’s request for condoms. Now things are precisely
reversed.

I have, of course, lived through nothing so cataclysmic as
Chateaubriand. But I was born on the far side of the rock ‘n’ roll curtain:
some of that music (the less druggy Beatles songs) seems to me charming, but
none of it for me is charged with real meaning. More important, I was born
in a time when there still existed a national culture, so that the entire
country grew up singing the same songs, watching the same movies, and,
later, television shows. The crafty marketers had not yet divided the
country and its culture into Kid Culture, Black Culture, and scores of other
Ethnic Cultures. Something like the Ed Sullivan Show, which might have a
comedian, an animal act, a tenor from the Met, a young popular singer, a
foreign dance troupe, a magician–something, in short, for all the
family–is no longer possible today.

I also grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon
as possible, while today–the late 1960s is the watershed moment here–the
goal has become to stay as young as possible for as long as possible. The
consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer
only means that they feel they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to
marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at
least, into one’s 30s, perhaps one’s early 40s. At 70, I register with mild
but genuine amazement that the movie director Christopher Guest’s father
played keyboard for the Righteous Brothers or that the essayist Adam
Gopnik’s parents, then graduate students, took him in their arms to the
opening of the Guggenheim Museum. How can anyone possibly have parents
playing keyboards or going to graduate school! Impossible!

I, of course, hope for an artistically prosperous old age,
though the models here are less than numerous. Most composers were finished
by their 60s. Not many novelists have turned out powerful books past 70.
Matisse, who is a hero of culture, painted up to the end through great
illness, though his greatest work was done long before. There are the models
of Rembrandt and Yeats. Rembrandt, in his richly complex self-portraits,
recorded his own aging with great success, and Yeats–”That is no country
for old men”–made aging, if not Byzantium, his country: “An aged man is but
a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands
and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.”
Rembrandt died at 63, Yeats at 73. I see that I had better get a
move on.
Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is
author most recently of Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy’s Guide.

February’s Journal Entry

February 23rd, 2007

I’m not keeping up with this blog very well but at least I’d like to post one entry a month, and this month is drawing near the end.

I don’t know if it’s my imagination but it seems people are less willing to be straight with me than when I was younger. When someone is honest with me I feel validated. The behavior of younger people towards the elderly seems like a mixture of protectiveness and repugnance, a wanting to keep a safe distance. The truth is, I experience the same attitude towards other old people. I can remember not wanting to touch my mother, of feeling very impatient with her fraillties. I recall her saying “You’ll see how it is when you’re old,” and I felt like she was putting a curse on me. Now I come closer to understanding. I really regret not knowing how to tell her to turn so she could stand up in the bath tub. Instead, I grew impatient. Now I have figured it out, but it’s too late to help her.

I’m trying to remember if I still feel irritated by old people driving slowly. I like letting my car go at its own speed, with the idea that it will last longer. Maybe that’s my attiude toward myself, too.

I was reading “Start the Conversation” by Ganga Stone the other day and shed talks about “the Witness of the Waking State,” the “One we always were.” She’s discussing it in terms of a part of ourselves that survives death. I’m only recognizing it as really being a part of us, since I can recall at age 5 wondering if I would still be me when I was grown. I decided to re-connect with this topic consciously every birthday, and by and large I have continued to do just that, and I find that I am still “me” inside.

That is the part that can recognize itself in the mirror at 70, with memories of itself at all preceding ages. You can never step in the same river twice — all our cells are dying and being replaced so that nothing remains the same but our memory of former selves.

That’s enough for this month, I think. I’ve been looking for a poem called I think The Old Mexican Woman who regards herself in the looking glass…it’s around here somewhere.

The FCC Wants to Gag Us!

January 10th, 2007

Common Cause members have already sent tens of thousands of messages to the FCC - but in this final week before the deadline, we wanted to advertise on high-traffic websites to recruit new activists. Outrageously, MySpace told us that they “won’t allow that to be shown.” (The ad we submitted is below.)

Maybe MySpace doesn’t want the word getting out about proposed changes to the ownership rules because they themselves are owned by a media conglomerate. In 2005, MySpace was gobbled up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which also owns Fox.

Their refusal proves our point: Big Media has too much control over what the public hears, sees and watches — and we need to let the FCC know it.

While MySpace’s decision is disappointing, there is still time to tell the FCC ‘no more media consolidation’ . But we need to move fast, and we need your input.

1. Go to CommonBlog and vote for the sites where you think we should place our ad. Time is short; we need to get this together in the next 24 hours.

2. If you are a MySpace user, put our ad up on your own Myspace page, or on any other website or blog you are active with.

Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, I don’t qualify as a “high-traffic website,” but I thought I’d jump in with my small bit of democracy.

Fabular

January 4th, 2007

The receptionist at the vet’s asked what I wanted them to do for my cat.

“Save her.”

Leaving a very old cat at the vet’s for iv treatment can be a scary prospect. Dr. Frazier was gentle with me as she reviewed the test results. “Electrolytes are what she needs, and it’s possible she won’t be able to handle what she needs.

“You can call tomorrow and see how she’s doing.”

I knew Dr. Frazier would be off the next day, but called anyway. The male doctor wanted me to understand that chances were slim that my cat would ever go home. “I don’t know what Dr. Frazier told you about the test results, but when an old cat has had kidney disease for as long as this cat has, they usually don’t recover.” It was obvious he was willing to dash my hopes in order to prepare me for the worst. “She’s awfully weak.”

“But you can try for another day?” My voice was trembling.

“Yes, if she lasts that long.”

My God, why didn’t I suspect Fabular was dehydrated, not just getting old? I felt torn between visiting her to show I hadn’t forgotten her, versus fearing they would bother her by moving her to a more presentable viewing area. Would Fabular think I had forsaken her? What if she couldn’t pick up her head and didn’t recognize me? Would a memory of her with an iv drip supplant happier memories? And was I thinking more of me or of her?

I dreaded the next 24 hours.

I did not have to wait that long.

The Other Side

December 31st, 2006

From a distant relative who doesn’t know me very well:

Subject: How the “Left” Stole Christmas]
>>> > How the “Left” Stole Christmas ~ ~ ~
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > Twas the month before Christmas
>>> > > > When all through our land,
>>> > > > Not a Christian was praying
>>> > > > Nor taking a stand.
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > See the PC Police had taken away,
>>> > > > The reason for Christmas - no one could say.
>>> > > > The children were told by their schools not to sing,
>>> > > > About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things.
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > It might hurt people’s feelings, the teachers would say
>>> > > > December 25th is just a “Holiday”
>>> > > > Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit
>>> > > > Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it!
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > CDs from Madonna, an X BOX, an I-pod
>>> > > > Something was changing, something quite odd!
>>> > > > Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa
>>> > > > In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda.
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > As Targets were hanging their trees upside down
>>> > > > At Lowe’s the word Christmas - was no where to be found.
>>> > > > At K-Mart and Staples and Penny’s and Sears
>>> > > > You won’t hear the word Christmas; it won’t touch your ears.
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > Inclusive, sensitive, Di-ver-si-ty
>>> > > > Are words that were used to intimidate me.
>>> > > > Now Daschle, Now Darden, Now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen
>>> > > > On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton!
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > At the top of the Senate, there arose such a clatter
>>> > > > To eliminate Jesus, in all public matter.
>>> > > > And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith
>>> > > > Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace
>>> > > >
>>> > > > The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded
>>> > > > The reason for the season, stopped before it started.
>>> > > > So as you celebrate “Winter Break” under your “Holiday Tree”
>>> > > > Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me. ~ ~ ~
>>> > > >
>>> > > > Choose your words carefully, choose what you say
>>> > > > Shout MERRY CHRISTMAS, not Happy Holiday!

Housework Alternative

December 31st, 2006

When I have too much housework to do, I find myself engaged in creatrive endeavors, instead. Such as the following:

FOUND IN MY OUTLOOK EXPRESS MAIL BOX DURING A RECENT EXCURSION (Somebody knows I’m a softie but not that I’m broke):

Greenpeace

ImpeachBush.org

Center for American Progress Action Fund

NARAL Pro-Choice

Planned Parenthood

Humane Society

ACLU

DEFCON

MoveOn.org Political Action

Human Rights First

Common Cause

Earth Justice Network

Amnesty Intyernational

Consumer Union’s Action Fund

International Rescue Mission

Faithful America

Animals and Environment Alerts

ImpeachBush.org

Humane Society of the United States

Sierra Club Insiders

Save Our Environment.org Action Alert

Hilary Clinton

John Kerry

Al Gore

In the process of looking I recalled how the sneaky advertisers get you to open their e-mail. They title it something that spam blockers can’t interpret, such as:

“He it Killing” and “HO Jara”

So that’s my end of 2006 Journal Entry….