Thank you, Stefan

 

For my birthday, my only begotten son gifted me this plein air landscape. Many would find it an odd choice; his sister, a comically odd one. But I do not, unduly, though it did bemuse and raise a smile. Having grown up next door to a cemetery, I find them familiar places, homey even, a little melancholy, perhaps, but restful, quiet, still, old-timey, slow to change, literary, serious—grave. Like me. It is not unwise to consider Death next door. And I’ve visited my brother at one, All Saints, for almost fifty years now, the brother for whom my son is named, which lends his gift a particular and appropriate resonance. And while I don’t propose at last to rest in peace in one myself, cemeteries, and any image of one, are trenchant mementos mori. Reminders of mortality on any occasion are a true gift, as is mortality.

 

This Country of Old Men

Turned sixty-two yesterday, eligible to claim Social Security, the second milestone of old age—and the first official one.  And while I probably won’t for a few more years yet, it’s good to know that one can, and imagine subsisting, however precariously and thought experimentally, on that minimalist fixed income as some hermit, some bookish Aqualung. It’s not the retirement that I would prefer, that I would choose of course, but sometimes you don’t get to choose. Best to consider the whole spectrum.

At my spouse’s prompting, I have begun Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. It’s good, but nothing new to me, having long previously read Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die and Cicero’s On Old Age. I am reminded that “memory and the ability to gather and weigh multiple ideas—to multitask—peaks [sic] in midlife and gradually declines. Processing speed starts decreasing well before the age of forty.” Over twenty years ago for me and right about the time I finished my dissertation. Deferring my intellectual projects until such time as my intellect is not the thing that it was once can seem not a little mistaken, something of a waste. But however diminished, I can still be fully, subjectively engaged, which is how we should be passing our time, I think. That I may not have anything fresh to say to the universe is not really my problem.

Recently, two old men vied for the leadership of this country. And while the better old man prevailed—much to my relief, but hardly to any fond hope—a third old man, Mitch McConnell, and a rank crop of other men, many old, which is why we call them “senators,” (from L, senex: old man) loom patently unready and largely unable to address the divisions of these so-called United States. Having long studied the history, the institutions, and the political culture of this country, I am only slightly less doubtful of its future now, and my retirement in it. But we avoided the worst.