August 12, 2022
Perhaps I should have a trigger warning for the youthful members of my audience: this is a newsletter about old age, specifically about continuing to be active and productive in old age—in particular, continuing to be creatively productive. It was prompted by reading a column by Robert Reich, one of my progressive heroes, urging Joe Biden not to run for a second term because of his age: Biden will be 81 in 2024. Reich speaks from the experience of being 76 himself. He is in very good shape physically, can still do 20 pushups, but finds his short-term memory lapsing at times. I am 71, so to say I have a personal interest in this question is something of an understatement, although the one thing I’m not worried about is short-term memory. I never had any, so I have none to lose.
The question of old age is vexed because it is impossible to generalize. Every time I read an article about how 70 is the new 50, the discussion board is filled with 70-year-olds having chronic, debilitating problems for whom 70 is the new 90. The issue of mental decline is even more ambiguous and depends a lot on what we mean by mental decline. Northrop Frye’s last book, The Double Vision, written at 78, is one of the profoundest he wrote in his life. Who cares whether or not he could remember what he did with his keys? It’s a different kind of mental functioning.
Even as a teenager I had the desire to live to be very old, into my 90’s, without being debilitated in more than minor ways. Well, of course, who wants to die? Ah, but mine was the generation of the “27 club,” the generation who idealized the doomed, damned geniuses who died young rather than dodder in the nursing home. We did not invent the syndrome: I wrote my dissertation on Dylan Thomas, who basically committed suicide by alcohol at 39, and he in turn was inspired by Rimbaud, whose poetic career ended at 21. But I have never been attracted to the myth of the prodigy who goes out like a supernova rather than outliving their talent and either falling silent or becoming a self-parody. That seemed to me like a fear of failure, a Peter Pan fear of growing up, ultimately a fear of life. Mozart notwithstanding.
Not to put myself on their level or anything like it, but my model from a young age was those creators who only came into their own beginning in mid-life. Frye was 35 when he published his first book, Fearful Symmetry, although he had been working on it for a decade. In both poetry and criticism, there is a late-phase creativity that leaps beyond the level of the work earlier in the writers’ career. W.B. Yeats was famous as a poet while still in his 20’s, but it was the poetry he began to publish in his 50’s, continuing to his death at the age of 74, that is among the greatest poetry of the 20th century. Wallace Stevens did not publish his first volume until he was in his mid-40’s, and embarked upon a late, great phase only in his late 60’s, lasting until his death at 75. Robert Penn Warren wrote some of his greatest poems in his early 80’s. When he died, the critic Harold Bloom compared him to Sophocles, who wrote Oedipus at Colonus, about Oedipus in extreme old age, at the age of 90. William Blake was producing drawings for a series of illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy on his deathbed at the age of 70, which in 1827, when the average lifespan was perhaps 50, was old. I have a volume of work by Picasso at 90: the art critics don’t like them, but I do. George Bernard Shaw was still writing plays, albeit minor ones, in his 90’s. Thomas Hardy left behind the draft of an introduction for his final volume of poetry, Winter Words, with a sentence saying that to his knowledge he was the only person who had published a volume of poetry in his _____ year, leaving a blank to fill in the age of 90. I have always thought it was one of life’s cruel jokes that he died at 89.
The same was true on the critical side of the fence. C.G. Jung lived to 86, Joseph Campbell to 83, both of them still creative in the year of their death. Campbell published the first volume of an ambitious four-volume Historical Atlas of World Mythology when he was 79. He only lived to complete the first two volumes—but I admire his courage in undertaking it at all. And intellectual historian Jacques Barzun published From Dawn to Decadence, surveying 500 years of Western culture, when he was 93 years old. It is 800 pages long. Noam Chomsky, the great linguist and progressive political writer, is 93 himself and still apparently publishing and teaching part-time.
Without claiming any of their genius, I have always wanted to be like these writers in unflagging creative energy. Why live on so long? Other than sheer selfishness, of course. There is a deeper reason: people grow like trees, adding rings of knowledge, experience, memory, expanding both their vision and their understanding of it. In his so-called Mars trilogy, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who is one year younger than me, imagined anti-aging drugs that could extend human lifespan to over 200 years. My response to this is: Hurry up! My biggest problem has always been lack of time, and if I had another 130 years I might actually get all my personal library read and write the 7 or 8 books I envision writing. And I’d probably still be teaching, to the horror of the 18-year-olds who probably think I’m 200 already.
How much can this late-life creativity be a general model, and how much is it confined to a lucky few? Is there any agreement that it is even lucky?—most people’s idea of retirement and their “sunset years” seems to be of the relax-and-smell-the-roses variety. And yet how many of those people end up going back to work at least part time? There is a wider issue here beyond the behavior of rare geniuses in old age. One of my heroes who did not make it to old age, dying of a heart attack at 60, Abraham Maslow wrote in his last book something that has always haunted me:
Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them—some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense. They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears. One devotes his life to the law, another to justice, another to beauty or truth. All, in one way or another, devote their lives to the search for what I have called…the “being” values…the ultimate values which are intrinsic, which cannot be reduced to anything more ultimate. (42)
When I ask young people, who might be most likely to be receptive to such idealistic devotedness, what they think of this passage, I often encounter bafflement and flat denial. Our society works very hard to condition young people not to devote themselves to any idealistic calling. Whatever was true in the 60’s, the only way to survive now is to do whatever it takes to fulfill the needs of the capitalist system: work three jobs, never join a union, prove that you have what it takes by working endless long hours. Or so young people have been endlessly told, although articles have been appearing recently that suggest the pandemic has disillusioned some of them about the burnout life. But to his own students, Maslow said this: “If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life” (35).
There is drivenness and drivenness. I do not want this to be too much about me, but in this case I am my own Exhibit A, and anyone who knows me knows I am driven every minute of the day. The one thing missing from my life is a relaxed pace: I am always pressed by deadlines. What is also true, however, is that I love what I do, and my work is my play, which does not prevent exhaustion but does prevent burnout: two different things not always carefully enough distinguished. What is supposed to be retirement has made absolutely no difference: I am as busy now as I was as full-time faculty. I look with awe upon Heather Cox Richardson, who is 60 this year, still teaches full-time, has written six books, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize, writes a marvelous newsletter six days a week, co-hosts a podcast, and who still finds time, as her newsletters occasionally let on, to work outdoors on the house and property in rural Maine. How does she do it? Partly by fitting Maslow’s description as fully as anyone I can think of: Richardson has clearly devoted herself to the vocation of using her gifts as a writer and scholar to situate the ongoing crisis of democracy within the larger context of American history. She is able to call upon reserves of energy generated by this vocation to drive her way through exhaustion—though even she occasionally acknowledges her limits, as in a recent note saying that too many nights up until 3:00 a.m. have taken their toll and she was taking a night off. She has sometimes mentioned falling asleep at her desk with exhaustion.
But there is creative drivenness and capitalist drivenness, what we call the work ethic. The two may look the same, but are actually antithetical. Max Weber, the sociologist who gave us the concept of the “Protestant work ethic” explained its workaholic striving in religious terms: hard work was a religious virtue and signified that you might be one of the Elect predestined to salvation. But human motives are usually complex, or “overdetermined,” as the Freudians say: human behavior may be caused by two or more factors at the same time. If we look at the work ethic psychologically, we become aware of a strange pattern. It is striking how the idea of someone else not working, slacking, being lazy, provokes in some quarters an immediate, intense anger that seems to be more than merely a rational dislike of supposed social parasites. In a brilliant science fiction story, “Beggars in Spain,” by Nancy Kress, a libertarian-style capitalist funds research resulting in a treatment, for the children of those who can afford it, that eliminates the need for sleep. Why? Because one third of our lives is wasted in sleeping when we could be accomplishing so much more. This puts its finger on a real psychological truth. The big-time laissez-faire capitalists, Bezos, Musk, and their ilk, pride themselves on working harder than their employees, working harder and longer than anyone. Their occasional remarks indicate that they think most other people are lazy and therefore undeserving. Jeff Bezos is a slavedriver in almost a literal sense of the term, spying on his employees, not permitting them to take bathroom breaks. Why? To increase profits? He has more money that he can ever spend and is the last person to need to squeeze blood out of a stone. Slavedriver: a slang epithet. And yet, we remember that racist stereotype of African-Americans as “naturally lazy,” a clear indication of their inferiority. Something clicks there, falls into place. The word “socialist” stings whole groups of people into a blind rage that has nothing to do with a passionate, principled disagreement over the most practical economic system. I recognize that anger: it was directed at the hippies years ago because they questioned the ideal of striving, striving, striving for success. It is a visceral response, coming from somewhere deeper than ideology.
It is, I think, not merely resentment at people who are allegedly parasites taking advantage of the system at the expense of those who work hard for what they have. There is something else going on at the same time, a kind of panic that expresses itself as anger. What is this panic? At bottom, it is the fear of being tempted. It is fear of the pleasure principle, which has been so repressed that imagining whole groups of other people given over to it—whether or not that is actually the case—is intolerable. It is a phobic reaction to something, not because that something is disgusting but precisely because it is attractive, tempting, cruelly alluring. A century of Freudianism has familiarized us with the hidden motives behind “protesting too much.” But while we recognize such a response in the case of homophobia, we are less familiar with the disguised panic over the slightest leisure, the slightest relaxation. It is a point of pride in Wall Street, in silicon valley, in the upper reaches of the corporate world never to relax, to keep going by force of will. It is as if to stop striving even for an unguarded minute might allow the siren song of pleasurable passivity to be heard.
Those who are running so hard are not possessed by the enthusiasm of Maslow’s “Being values”—they are running away from something. Pleasure, relaxation, peaceableness, enjoyment of life without having “earned” it by the sweat of one’s brow, by Adam’s curse: we are taught by our society that desire for such things is weakness, a kind of regression, a desire to return to the womb, a cowardly flight from a harsh reality that has to be fought and conquered through ceaseless striving. But such a “regressive” desire is latent in all of us. Some people imagine groups of lazy people—hippies, welfare queens, socialist parasites—and then hate them because they secretly envy them. Yet who are the opioid addicts? They are not hippies, welfare queens, socialists, slum-dwellers in the evil big city—they are the type of rural, small town, and suburban conservatives who condemn all those parasites, but whose defenses have collapsed. They have fallen into the kind of regressive behavior that they have condemned. The question is whether or not it is truly regressive or has simply been made that way through repression.
One of the great poems of the modern world is Goethe’s Faust, based on the medieval legend of a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for having his wishes granted in this life. But Goethe changes the traditional ending in a startling way. His Faust lives to the age of 100, but when the devils finally come to collect his soul, they are robbed of it by angels, and are told that Faust is saved because he never in a long lifetime stopped striving. It is an ambiguous ending, for Faust is more or less an antihero: his striving has been all the wrong kind, the entrepreneurial kind that we have been speaking of. He and his devil Mephistopheles keep the Emperor from going bankrupt, but by means of the scam of inventing paper money backed up by fictitious assets—gold that is still actually in the ground. At the age of 100, he has caused the deaths of a pious pastoral couple who have refused to sell their land for the benefit of his engineering project of reclaiming land from the sea. Yes, he is still vital and ambitious in old age, but in all the wrong ways. Nothing he does benefits anyone in any admirable way. In the final scene, in the afterlife, it is announced that Faust’s story is not over. He is saved because his feverish striving is a will to plunge into life and risk making mistakes. But he has not learned to strive in the right way, and is apparently due for some remedial education upstairs: his feverish efforts are a will to power rather than a will to create. In The Decline of the West, the historian Oswald Spengler called modern Western culture “Faustian.” Being a Nazi sympathizer, he meant it as a compliment.
But Faust’s creator was a much more complex thinker than Spengler. Goethe was in fact himself one of those writers who remained vital in late old age. He worked on Faust for over 60 years, finishing it shortly before his death at the age of 83. If there was ever a life of ceaseless striving, it was Goethe’s. It is remarkable that the work that made him famous at 24, The Sorrows of Young Werther, more or less created the Sturm und Drang, or “storm and stress” genre of fiction that glamorized the idea of dying young from an excess of passion: Werther’s suicide led to a wave of copycat suicides across Europe. The love affair that led to the suicide was partly autobiographical, but Goethe himself outgrew the role of poete maudit, as it was later called, and went on to live one of the fullest lives of any creator on record. He wrote successfully in every genre: lyric, epic, drama, fiction, autobiography. He also made scientific discoveries and wrote treatises on color and the metamorphoses of plants, had love affairs, and even ruled a small principality.
If anyone was ever creatively driven, it was Goethe. Faust represents his Jungian shadow, Goethe’s attempt to differentiate for himself and others between a creative will and a will to power. Faust has it all: he is a figure of success by worldly standards, rich, famous, moving in the best circles—not only a favorite of the Emperor but moving up the social ladder from a tragic affair with an innocent lower-class girl, Gretchen, in Part 1 to an equally tragic but much more glamorous affair with Helen of Troy herself in Part 2. He is the stuff of tabloid gossip, admirable only for his boundless energy but otherwise a curse to all around him. Goethe plays him off with another figure in the poem, Euphorion, Faust’s son with Helen of Troy. Euphorion inherits his father’s restless striving, but on an imaginative rather than a worldly level. He represents a poetic imagination that will not accept limits, including the limit symbolized by the spirit of gravity, and falls to a youthful death. Euphorion’s aspiration is admirable but unrealistic; Faust’s is realistic but not admirable. Goethe is trying to think about a path that lies between these opposites. In 1947, Thomas Mann, arguably the greatest German writer since Goethe, published Dr. Faustus, a novel in which the Faustian figure is himself an artist, a composer named Adrian Leverkühn, who represents a third possibility: a Faustian will to power within art itself, characterized by Modernist iconoclasm and toying with nihilism.
Is there a way to follow a creative calling, even into old age, while avoiding these false alternatives? Perhaps the commonest vulnerability of creative types is an anxiety about the passing of time. It is not a fear of death but a fear of dying with the work yet undone, and it can manifest itself at a young age, despite the scoffing of common sense that says, “Why are you worried? Chances are you have many years ahead of you yet.” Unless, of course, you don’t. In Lycidas, Milton mourns a classmate, Edward King, a promising poet and future priest who died suddenly and prematurely in a shipwreck, whom the poem makes into a symbol of giftedness dying too young. In a sonnet that could be dismissed with an indulgent smile by older readers, Milton worries that he has reached the age of 24 without yet having accomplished anything great:
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year! My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom show’th.
It would not have improved the morale of the 24-year-old poet to be told that he would not be ready to write his great works for another 20 years because of his involvement in the English Civil War, that when he was finally ready to begin them he would be old, blind, and politically ruined. But the sonnet ends with a faith that God’s time is not ours, so that all we can do is resign ourselves to the working out of a destiny that is not subject to our will. It is, in other words, a renunciation of the will to power.
When you are old, you may more plausibly rationalize the anxiety over time passing. After all, the time left is undeniably limited. This contributes to the tendency to run oneself ragged, trying to accomplish things before it is too late. For the night comes in which no one can work. But the ego’s anxiety over “losing time” is counter-productive. Trying to reason or will it away does not work, but fortunately there are other methods, even if none of them are perfect. Richard Shindell’s very funny song “Lazy” counsels a simple, straightforward rebellion based on an affirmation that we have… other priorities:
Monday I should be working
I call in lazy
I can’t make excuses
No one believes me
They know the truth is
That I’m just
Lazy it’s unAmerican
I should be fighting
For my promotion
I would feel guilty
But I’m too lazy
I’d rather spend the afternoon
Just making love to you
That’s all I want to do
Since I met you
As I have mentioned in other newsletters, younger generations may find it hard to believe that there was a widespread belief in the 1950’s and 1960’s that we were to enter a new and unprecedented age of leisure, ushered in by technology that eliminated the need to work. There were books and articles about how to prepare people to make good use of their time instead of turning society into Huxley’s brave new world of mindless entertainment and trivial distraction. We got the mindless entertainment and distraction, but only as a way of recuperating from a way of life more frenzied and exhausting than ever before. By 1990, sociologist Juliet Schor informed us in The Overworked American that Americans worked fully the equivalent of one full month more in a year than people of any other country, including Japan. Leisure is a threat to society: it suits the purposes of the elite to have people so overworked and worried about losing their employment that they are too exhausted and frightened to make demands for a better quality of life. Through union busting, deregulation, and other practices designed to rob both middle and working class people of power and autonomy, the present-day labor situation was produced, and so was the capped volcano of anger and frustration that finally blew in 2016 and has been erupting ever since. Society as a whole is going to have to change to deal with this crisis, return to an ideal of security and leisure for all. That is a subject too big for the remainder of this newsletter.
What we may touch upon here are coping strategies on a more individual level. To my mind, one of the best aspects of the Biblical tradition is the idea of the Sabbath, a day of rest that works to prevent workaholism from taking over absolutely. I think small Sabbath-practices can be built into our daily and weekly routines, made sacrosanct, even at a cost. I am not at all thinking in religious terms, or at least not necessarily. My image of Sabbath peace is Bilbo Baggins sitting placidly outside his burrow in the Shire, smoking his pipe, basking in the sunshine. I am actually quite serious about this. It doesn’t get any better than that. The Productions of Time tried to speculate about what “eternity” might be like to experience, since it cannot mean simply endless time, which is not salvation but a nightmare. There is another possible kind of experience—we know it is possible because it happens commonly—in which clock-tick time is simply forgotten as we are lost in some other mode of being. May Sarton has a poem about this with the significant title “On Being Given Time”:
Not the clock’s tick and its relentless bind But the long ripple that opens out behind The duck as he swims down the tranquil pond… (164)
It is a moment of liberation:
This moment, yours and mine, and always given, When the leaf falls, the ripple opens far, And we go where all animals and children are, The world is open. Love can breathe again.
Another stanza suggests that we can cultivate a capacity for such experience:
It is, perhaps, our most complex creation, A lovely skill we spend a lifetime learning…
In each of the three stanzas of Yeats’s poem “Long-legged Fly,” Caesar, Helen of Troy, and Michelangelo are depicted in a state of reverie, with the repeated refrain, “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His [or Her] mind moves upon silence.” The reference to Michaelangelo’s artistic reverie brings to mind other descriptions of possession by the imagination as a state beyond striving, as when Keats’s letter saying that if poetry does not come like the leaves upon a tree it had better not come at all, and Kant’s famous description of art in the Critique of Judgment as “purposiveness without purpose.”
For those who are not themselves artists, there is liberal education. Ideally, undergraduate education is a kind of four-year Sabbath, a time of separating from the Social Darwinian scrabble for “success” and learning to experience what Blake meant by “Eternity in an hour” or, elsewhere, this:
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot findNor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious findThis Moment & it multiply, & when it once is foundIt Renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed Milton, 35Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery Is equal in its period and value to Six Thousand Years; For in this Period the Poet’s Work is done; and all the great Events of time start forth and are conceiv’d in such a Period, Within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery. Milton, 27
Art, taken broadly to include all the works of the human imagination, artistic, critical, and scientific, all the productions of time, is a mode of meditation that liberates us—the true meaning of “liberal”—from our imprisonment in clock time. The Old Testament image for this is of an exodus out of slavery and a journey towards a promised land. The New Testament image is a Resurrection that happens to everyone, not just to a God-savior. But the symbols for it do not have to be religious. It is a “spiritual” experience only in that it shatters the boundaries of time and space. Liberal education tries to give everyone access to that eye-expanding mode of education, without regard to ideology, which is itself only another prison. There are powerful forces attempting to abolish liberal education and replace it with a combination of job training and social conditioning, and right now they have the upper hand. But even if they closed all the colleges and universities they could never close the avenue of inward escape that is the true meaning of education. If only because they could never find it.
References
Maslow, Abraham. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Penguin, 1976. Originally published 1971.
Sarton, May. Collected Poems: 1930-1973. Norton, 1974.