The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (28 page)

On the other hand, mindfulness, attention and learning new skills do appear to extend life, as well as improving its quality.
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So the tendency of age to shy away from the new and difficult may literally be fatal. There is even evidence that the brain, far from being doomed to steady decline, can generate new neurons right up until death, a miracle known as neurogenesis.
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Best of all, the failure of imminence, which seemed so catastrophic, may be revealed as a blessing. For the spell of potential is an evil spell that occludes the senses and deranges the mind. When the spell finally lifts it is easier to learn the crucial lesson – that the journey is more important than the destination, the activity more important than the outcome. This is the conclusion that turns up again and again. The struggle to learn is more valuable than the learning itself, thinking with no particular purpose is the most enjoyable form of thought, absorption in a difficult skill – the flow experience – is more rewarding than any recognition, striving to love is more satisfying than being in love. Everything must be its own reward.

It becomes clear that the life being lived is indeed all it is – but,
hey
, it is not so bad after all to be able to see, hear, taste, walk unaided, run up stairs and sustain an erection with merely human rather than chemical assistance. In fact this is
astoundingly good
. The natural world stands revealed in all its sublime abundance and the human world in all its sublime absurdity. But this wealth is on offer for only a strictly limited period, so there is an obligation to appreciate. In what may be the last speech Shakespeare wrote, he said: ‘Let us be thankful for that which is.’
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The strange and unexpected gift of age is gratitude.

Whichever way life is regarded, it seems to assume a U shape. The curve of strength, energy and ambition is an inverted U with a high in the middle; the curve of temperament is a U the right way up with a low in the middle; and progress through life is a U laid flat, a switchback where stops are first passed going out and then again coming back but with less burdensome baggage and more appreciation and gratitude. So the ageing couple can be lovers again but without the exhausting battles of youth and the burdens of child rearing. And it is possible to be a student again but without the tyranny of career, curriculum or examination and with the ability to choose and actually enjoy the study texts. Of course, the final stage of the switchback is second childhood, a phrase that assumes more and more meanings as this stage approaches, though, for once, these are meanings best left unexplored.

The crucial factor on the return leg of the U is acceptance of ageing and mortality – not easy in a culture of eternal youth. Who now would say, like Rilke, ‘I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us’?
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And the cities of the sibling society have banished death. When I was growing up in a small town in Ireland death was a constant presence. Every time I visited my grandfather he listed, with malevolent delight, the contemporaries who had recently died. The local paper had one page of news and several of death notices. Funeral corteges regularly moved through the streets and all the passers-by stopped, removed hats and solemnly bowed their heads. There were large wreaths on doors and wakes lasting for days to give the entire community time to view ‘the remains’.

But now, in the city, death is invisible. There no corteges, no notices, no mention, no ‘remains’. Years can go by without even a trace of death. It is like the flourishing city rats – always close but never mentioned, much less seen. There are no wakes – and, in secular cremation services, most of the mourners never see the corpse or coffin, much less the cremation. It is like a retirement-from-work party but without the retired employee.

People used to say things like ‘when I’m gone’, ‘I won’t live to see that’ and ‘not in my time’. But now no one mentions finitude. As we draw closer to death we should become more aware of it, but the opposite is often the case. The problem is that living is itself as habit-forming as any of the activities living involves. We just get terribly used to being around. As E.M. Cioran put it: ‘The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.’
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So the new solution to death is to banish it from view and from mind, and to take refuge in habit. But only awareness of transience can give life its savour. Mortality is the spice of life.

In his essay ‘On Transience’ Freud rejected the argument of a young poet who believed that impermanence devalued everything in life: ‘On the contrary, its value is heightened! The value of transience is one of scarcity over time. The limitation of the possibility of enjoyment makes it even more precious.’
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Awareness of mortality can provide the focus and intensity so often missing from experience and is another gift of the later years. The time-rich young are as presumptuous and careless as the materially wealthy – if everything may be purchased then nothing has value – but the time-poor old know that very little may now be purchased and so everything is valuable. Sexual pleasure, for instance, is immeasurably enriched and intensified by the knowledge that it may not be available for much longer, cut off by incapacity or the death of a partner. One of the most heartfelt lines I have written is: ‘If every time could be the last it’s as good as the first.’

Literature, from Homer on, abounds in eloquent reminders to appreciate the miracle of earthly existence. When Odysseus tries to console Achilles in the underworld with news of his renown on earth, the legendary warrior replies:

Let me hear no smooth talk

of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.

Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand

for some poor countryman, on iron rations,

than lord it over the exhausted dead.
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‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’ is the English version of the French of Montaigne who took it from the Latin of Cicero who took it in turn from the Greek of Plato. Buddha was there before all of them: ‘I do not use magic to extend my life. Now, before me, the trees come alive.’
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To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life. As Elvis warned, ‘It’s now or never.’

Death may even extend life. The monks in the communities on Mount Athos in Greece wear black to remind themselves during every waking moment of mortality, and yet mostly live into extreme old age. So the secret of a long life may be acknowledging that it is short. And if this acknowledgement does not extend life, it certainly improves its quality. There are no cases of Alzheimer’s among the Mount Athos monks.

Acknowledgement is everything. Reactions differ, from the famous rage of Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, to the beautiful acceptance of Marcus Aurelius: ‘Observe how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of ashes. So spend these fleeting moments on earth as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.’
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These reactions appear to be opposites – but both face the unwelcome truth.

And only through this acknowledgement can come the unique flaring, an incandescence inspired by the prospect of extinction. One example is the phenomenon of late style, a flourishing common in the final phase of painters’, composers’ and writers’ lives. In spite of the many differences in artists and arts, there is a common wild impatience – verging on frenzy – that is possessed by obsession, rejects virtuosity, rhetoric and finish, bursts out of conventional form, transcends technique, surrenders conscious control for instinctive power and is utterly indifferent to audience and reception. So these works often shock contemporaries who dismiss them as childish, crude, fragmentary, unfinished and repetitive, the products of deteriorating minds. Only much later can they be appreciated for their exhilarating vitality, what the critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith defined as the ‘senile sublime’.
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And, paradoxically, by working exclusively for themselves, these painters, writers and composers communicate even more directly and intensely. With no desire to please, impress, charm or reassure, depth can speak nakedly and urgently to depth.

The works of Picasso’s last decade, produced in his eighties and nineties, have all these qualities and also a scandalous eroticism. Entirely unreconciled, Picasso could not bear to depart from the paradise of the flesh, and obsessively painted female nudes and embracing couples. The nudes are massive, with monumental limbs, huge wild staring eyes, onion toes and banana fingers, distorted, displaced breasts with large black nipples and, always drawing the eye to the centre, gaping, graffito-crude vulvae. Picasso wanted these women to be so physically present that the startled art lover could smell their armpits and vaginas. ‘You have to know how to be vulgar,’ he said. ‘Paint with four-letter words.’
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There is a work called ‘Woman Pissing’ which fully lives up to its title and another of a woman masturbating with both hands. The paintings of couples are crazier still, with the even more wild-eyed heads and bodies of the lovers merged and the man seeming to wish to devour or strangle the woman. Never has sexual fusion been so intensely portrayed. In the final embrace picture, painted when Picasso was over ninety and close to death, limbs are so enmeshed that it is impossible to identify which belongs to the man or woman, though there are two sets of graffito genitals. There are also late self-portraits. One, painted in his eighties, is of his upper body in a striped top. The torso is painted with cursory violence, the stripes of the top whacked on with a loaded brush so that the paint is encouraged to misbehave and splatter, dribble and run. The head is grim, the eyes two black sockets dead to the outer world and seeing only some terrible inner revelation. And, in the same month as the final embrace, there is a final self-portrait – a gigantic head with enormous wild eyes staring in terror at something close and approaching inexorably closer.

When these last works were exhibited they were almost universally derided; the consensus was that Picasso’s astounding technique had finally deserted him. In fact, Picasso had merely transcended technique. As he himself put it, he had so much technique it completely ceased to exist.
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More perceptive views came from outside the art world, for instance from the Mexican poet Octavio Paz: ‘He paints out of urgent necessity, and what he paints is urgency itself. He is the Painter of time.’
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This identifies the key quality of late style – urgency. Picasso: ‘I have less and less time and more and more to say.’
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Claude Monet’s late works contain no nudes or even people, but pulsate with the same sensual frenzy. He could not bear to leave the physical world, represented obsessively by water lilies in paintings that grew bigger and bigger and were worked over with increasing fervour – he regularly rose at four in the morning and worked all day. These works abandon representation almost completely for an abstract orgy of slashes, daubs and swirls, interspersed with areas of bare, coarse-textured canvas. The brushstrokes make no attempt to conceal themselves but are ragged and uneven, beginning in rich impasto swathes and tailing off in broken patches and long, straggly tendrils – he often deliberately used old, worn brushes for a more irregular effect. Paint exults in being paint, and clumps, clots, ridges and drips. In the macro view everything runs into everything else in a welter of fusing colour, which is his vision of the gorgeousness of the world he has no choice but to leave. Standing in front of these late works, mesmerized, exhilarated and terrified, you wonder how an old guy had the balls to be so mad.

In music there are the late quartets of Beethoven, which are more like ruminating aloud than attempts to capture the attention of listeners. And the same could be said about a musician of a completely different style and era – the jazz pianist Earl Hines. About the only things Hines and Beethoven had in common were playing the piano and growing old. In his youth an entertainer, showman and bandleader in a Chicago nightclub owned by gangsters, Hines was forgotten in his middle years and rediscovered only late in life, when he was invited to give a solo concert at the Little Theater in New York. There he came on stage to inform his audience that he intended to play as if he were in his own living room – and proceeded to astound them with boundless audacity and exuberance. After this, he rejected not only bands but even small groups and played almost exclusively solo piano, a rare and possibly unique development for a jazzman. And, in the recordings of these solo performances of long, dense improvisations full of abrupt tempo changes and jolting counterpoint, with each hand playing things not only unrelated but actually
warring
, he seems indeed to be in his own living room, arguing eloquently with himself. But there are always individual qualities in late style. The Hines wildness was an irrepressible jubilation that burst through even on ballads and blues. After his rebirth he said: ‘The greatest thing to draw wrinkles in a man’s face is worry. Why should I be unhappy and pull down my face and drag my feet and make everybody around me feel that way too? By being what you are, something always comes up. Sunshine always opens out.’
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And in literature there is Shakespeare, whose late plays burst out of the constraints of the play form, in particular its unity of time and place. The late works –
The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles: Prince of ‘Tyre
and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
– are known as romances but aspire to the freedom of the novel. And their language is equally impatient – urgent, compressed and dense, syntax twisted out of shape by the pressure of new ideas crowding in on the old. Shakespeare just couldn’t be bothered with the tedium of padding out sentences. When, in
The Winter’s Tale
, Leontes cries, ‘Stars! Stars! And all eyes else dead coals’
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, we have to work out that, in these eight words, he is comparing his wife’s eyes to stars and that, in turn, compared to his wife’s eyes, those of all other women seem like dead coals.