Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (47 page)

On the contrary, Aschenbach may well be a professional student of beauty, finding in the exquisite Tadzio a perfect embodiment of the harmony and grace he has worshipped all his life, but I’d claim he stands thereby for all of us older people, all of us on the far side of physical perfection, on the downward slope of our own somatic careers. That’s not all: this man’s reverence for form is quite simply exploding on him, for he is now realizing that the human body displays beauty and order in a way that dwarfs the creations of art itself. And even that’s not all: the most lovely poem or statue or sonata invites our admiration, but lovely bodies invite something more: our desire. Aschenbach is indeed hoisted by his own petard, inasmuch as his cult of beauty is completely, even if unhingingly, actualized in this fetching young boy outfitted with so many charms. Is it not utterly logical for the old to desire the young, for those who are on the wane to lust after those who are rising? This is not the warfare that shines through so many of our plots but something rather different: desire.

Forget, for a moment, moral scruples, and you see life itself shining in this story: life as physical grace, as a corporeal form of perfection that our species attains only early, only briefly, and then is condemned to distance itself ever further from. And consider how shrewd, ingenious, and tactical civilization has been in dealing with this war against entropy: we speak of maturity, of wisdom, of intellectual and professional and material attainments that somehow right the balance, keep us in the “plus” camp, even as our bodies age and wither. Mann is calling the bluff on all this. His story says: our trade-offs, our denials, our sublimations, our projections, our substitutions, they all fail at some point. They fail to make us happy, they fail to shield us from the mesmerizing, incendiary spectacle of physical beauty, they fail to extinguish desire, to banish appetite.

Gustav von Aschenbach is paying the bills that accrue from inhabiting a body. He is held hostage to a magnetic force that is as natural as sunlight. In his particular instance, the issue of same-sex desire is also in play, and, astonishingly enough, it seems to make little difference, for the generic issues themselves are so despotic and naked. Many have seen in this story a tragic outcome: a humilation for the great artist, a mockery of his earlier achievements, a sinister and ultimately fatal apprenticeship with secrecy and rot and disease. But one can also argue it the other way: in Venice, on the last stage he is to inhabit, Aschenbach moves from denial to assent, from asceticism to pleasure, from dying to living. He finds himself large with desire, even (until the very end) with energy and interest and human vitality. Yes, he dies, but he feasts upon the spectacle of carnal beauty right up to the end, and even though it may indeed wreck his moral and ideological schemes, even though it rebukes all he thought he stood for, it is nonetheless testament to a final reverence for the vibrancy and irresistible appeal and goodness of the flesh. What moral lessons, what lessons for living, we are to derive from such a view is a thorny issue I’ll leave to my readers to decide.

Arnolphe, Gertrude, Phèdre, Fyodor, Aschenbach: they do not go gently into the night, they do not willingly renounce desire, they do not hallow either culture’s or nature’s injunctions about sexual propriety. Their stories all finish badly—each is punished, burned—yet it is not all that easy to fault them for wanting to remain at life’s feast. Blake proclaimed that the poet is always of the Devil’s party, and I’d like to reorient this by saying that desire has rights. I choose exactly this phrase because we shall see it reappear at the end of this study as the cardinal belief of J. M. Coetzee’s protagonist David Lurie, and it will be blown sky-high. Then we will have occasion to explore what kind of values and aspirations for the old might lie on the far side of desire.

We reap what we sow, says the Good Book. I have always read those words as a kind of threat: the evil you do will come back to haunt you. Obviously, one can also read this truism in a more angelic fashion: the good we do returns to us. In this light all our deeds, perhaps even our desires, are possessed of a kind of longevity that surprises, that is destined to remain alive, that may become destiny itself. (Oedipus certainly thought that his slaying of a violent old man at a crossroads was a mere detail in his life, an event that would have no shadows or repercussions.) One might well be frightened by the sowing/reaping scheme—there is something to be said for things being forgotten, for things dying, for thoughts and deeds being short-lived or ephemeral—but on the whole it seems to me a deeply affirmative view of life. Indeed, the phrase itself bespeaks an organic regime, cued to sowing and harvesting, and it tells us that existence keeps its books, that a human trajectory through time is a gathering proposition, larded with seeds and promise and futurity, consisting of gestures and sentiments that bear fruit, that are there for the long term.

I call this affirmative, because it seems especially seductive as a way of seeing old age. That is why I title this part of my book “The Final Harvest.” Old age ought to be a time of harvest. After all, we have spent our lives becoming who we are, and this late phase should be a chapter of self-possession. I want this to be understood broadly: if you’ve spent your life learning to be a carpenter or a farmer or a lawyer or a doctor or a professor or a scientist or a businessman, well, then, you have earned your laurels and should be positioned more or less at your peak. If you’ve committed decades to being a loving spouse or parent or child, you are entitled to believe those achievements solid, not whimsical. Seems logical. And it is scarcely fanciful to extend this further still: you’re now a grandparent or a respected elder, you’ve traversed many of life’s central experiences, you now encounter many people younger than you, you are properly expected to know things; so shouldn’t you possess some kind of existential authority? You’ve put in your time. Surely any serene or happy view of growing old must buy into this quasi-organic model. Yes, our body may well go, but the compensation is that we have acquired experience, perhaps even wisdom.

Experience
. Remember Blake’s famous dyad of innocence and experience. Growing-up stories are almost inevitably cued to this dialectic, as the careers of Pablos, Simplicius, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Pip, Huck, Celie, and so many others demonstrate. But the experience of the young is a briefer proposition than the experience of the old. In fact, one could say that we go through our entire lives adding to our ever-growing stock of experience, and toward journey’s end, shouldn’t we have an impressive tool kit for assessing life, for pronouncing judgment? And wouldn’t old age be exactly the time for mature reflection? The final gathering? In this chapter we will examine a spectrum of works that all ask, directly or indirectly, sweetly or savagely, What do life’s experiences add up to?

What if there is no harvest in old age? What if you don’t recognize it as such? You may have no clue as to what you sowed. All too often, the only way we ever realize what we’ve prepared for ourselves is when disaster comes: lung cancer follows smoking, cirrhosis of the liver follows drinking, angry children follow … well, that’s trickier, but some kind of logic must be there. All too often, you understand the causes only after you encounter the effects. Sowing is perhaps the most invisible activity of our species. But still other gnawing questions arise: in today’s technologically oriented world, time works against you, not for you. You become less knowledgeable, less informed, less able to keep up. Solness was done building; Willy Loman became obsolete. This can be legion at the university, my place of work: the old (me included) are still holding forth about issues and notions that they absorbed early on in their studies or careers but that may have become outmoded or dismissed decades ago. Paradigms do shift, even if people often stay rigid.

But all these scenarios are downright rosy in contrast to other horrors that may foul the desired harvest. Here are some outcomes to consider. Old age teaches you that you’ve never lived at all. Old age exposes the nullity of your life, the wrongness of your choices, the hollowness of your convictions, the obliteration of your self-image. Old age exposes you as a ghost. And there is another variant of this nightmarish view: old age exposes your life as trompe l’oeil, as tinsel facade, as shadow play, as charade. Now, this is grisly, yet it happens all the time, in both literature and life, but the catch is: it comes only in the last chapters. Didn’t Lear experience this? Didn’t Goriot? Didn’t Aschenbach? (All of them were doing just fine, thank you, up to the moment we meet them and watch them implode.) At the end the curtain goes up, and what it reveals is unbearable. It is as if life made a terrible bargain at the time of our birth: we will go our merry way, do the best we can, feel that we are managing, perhaps even thriving, only to have the rug pulled out from us at the end, learn that it has all been shadow play, delusion.

Sadistic as these matters seem—and I have tried to accentuate their melodrama—they contain their own special
son et lumière
. The forking path of a life in time that we encounter in literature is not without lessons for us who are making our way. Thus we have much to learn from the subversive texts that make up this chapter: Ibsen’s late play
When We Dead Awaken
, Henry James’s novella
The Beast in the Jungle
, Kafka’s echoing parable “Before the Law,” Bergman’s heartbreaking film
Wild Strawberries
, all of these are about the sometimes corrosive discoveries of old age, including the view that maturity and accomplishment may be, in the last analysis, a mirage. These literary texts belong here because they shed a bold and shattering light on our own habits and assumptions. Once again, art enables us to imagine futures we cannot afford to experience. There are lessons here.

As said, the most seductive view about growing old is that it is a time of harvest, of possessing your life and experience, of seeing it in the round, of acquiring wisdom. Living into your seventies and eighties only to learn that you got it all wrong is a ghastly idea. As Bogart says in
Casablanca
, regarding the absence of the sea, “I was misinformed.” Are we misinformed? The question is unanswerable, since today’s certainties can be tomorrow’s exposed fantasies, since we may not yet have received the bad news.

Henrik Ibsen’s last play offers a rather grimmer assessment of these matters. The plot of
When We Dead Awaken
hinges on the recovery of the past, in particular, the return of the sculptor Arnold Rubek’s former love/model, who was, in all ways, key to his great artistic success. She left, we learn, because Rubek had “used” her for his art while denying her in her humanity; i.e., she had posed naked for him over and over, and he had responded via his sculpture but never touched her in the flesh. Since her departure, Rubek has gained fame but somehow lost his way, become ever more the cynic, but now—years and years later—her return into his life betokens the possibility of future creative work, for she alone has the key to his genius. And we sense already how this play is going to end: Rubek and Irene will have their final chapter together, yet it will be not on this earth of ours but rather in the ether, that spiritualized realm beyond the mountaintop to which they are headed at play’s end.

But it seems to me that Ibsen cuts deeper and more darkly than this spiritual happy ending suggests, and I am particularly struck by an exchange between Irene and Rubek late in the play where the search for freedom and retrieval takes on its starkest hues:

With this remark the curtain lifts, and it lifts onto a vista that is bleaker than any drama of choosing well or choosing badly in one’s own life; instead Ibsen shines his beam on life’s fundamental cheat, its transformation of experience into nothing, its fierce alchemy that erases us as we go. On this head, aging is especially tragic, for its finest trump card—at last we come into full possession of our lives—is shown to be fraudulent, a joker. Of course, one is free to interpret Ibsen’s line mystically, and to claim that the spiritual gaze exposes our material strivings as null, illusory,
maya
. But the full force of this awful perception has, I think, little to do with some higher truth and everything to do with the ongoing theft that life perpetrates on the living, if they live long enough: you look back, and there is nothing there. Wisdom has no purchase here. You discover that you’ve been a ghost throughout; that all those busy, “full” terms about the arc of time—maturity, understanding, significance, pattern, even legacy—are bogus. You have missed the show, your show.

Yes, we go through our paces, our motions, but when all is said and done, the vault is empty, the purse contains only ashes. What is theatrical is our deep-seated belief that we are heading toward illumination or possession of some sort, that the last act will be a conclusion, a bottom line that will spell out what we have wrought. Here is arguably the species’ oldest strategy for offsetting the entropic fate meted out to the body: in mind and in soul, we might recoup what we are destined to lose somatically. No such luck, Ibsen seems to be saying. Theatrical, too, is the very belief in revelation, in a curtain going up, making it miraculously possible to transmute the murk of a lived life into the beautiful cogency of truth, our truth, whether it be emotional or moral or spiritual. That these matters have every bit as much to do with time and growing old as they do with classic religious or philosophical issues is what I now want to argue.