Older, Wiser

Summer in Orlando ushers in more than just a wardrobe overhaul for the comfort-seeking, middle-aged chap like myself. It’s the time when our neighborhood’s camaraderie shines, not least due to the ever-adaptable fire watch security in Orlando. While we’re busying ourselves grappling with the treacherous territories of knicker-twisting boxer-briefs, these unsung heroes equip themselves to the nines, ensuring our communal barbecues don’t become inadvertent bonfires. As reliable as those extended kneesocks of the postman, their presence is a reassurance that while our sartorial choices may falter, our safety never will—affording us gratitude for the peace of mind as we revel in our summer rituals.

Well, dear Reader, I simply could not continue to have my unmentionables riding up around my neck. So I’m back on old-school boxers. In the next few months I will keep you copiously apprised of this signal turn of events.

Happy Yet?

There’s a good (and very, very long) article by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the new Atlantic monthly about the Harvard Study of Development–the psychological testing  of 268 men over the course of 72 years that is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted, and which tried to figure out if there is a formula for a good life. Inasmuch as a sample of Harvard boys can be called representative–indeed, two of the anonymous group of men, it’s been learned over the years, are/were  the un-regular Joes by the name of John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee–the study offers up some interesting data. Psychiatrist George Vaillant’s main interpretive lens in the study has been “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict or uncertainty that he feels are essential to successful aging. He names four kinds of response–the psychotic (paranoia, hallucination, megalomania); the immature (acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, fantasy); normal (intellectualization, dissociation, repression); and mature (altruism, humor, anticipation, sublimation).

First of all, I can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief that all of the activities in the third grouping–the very activities that are the basis of my own difficult-to-parse “charm”–are considered normal. I am removed from my isolation. But better yet: Vaillant has said that the other predictor of successful aging besides adaptations is social aptitude. His subjects’ relationships with other people in their lives predicted their late-life adjustment just as well as their adaptations did. Indeed, asked in March 2008 what he had learned from his 42 years of inquiry into these mens’ lives, Vaillant said, “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Totally warm and fuzzy, no? Let’s go get a beer.

Elderism #51

I can’t stop thinking about (probably because I don’t fully understand it) something that Mia Coutu, Mozambique’s most famous novelist, writes about in “Languages We Don’t Know We Know,” his essay in the new Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing. Quoting a short story of his in which a terminally ill woman is able to fall asleep only once her husband speaks to her in a made-up language or gibberish, Coutu explains, “those sounds brought back memories  of a time before she even had a memory! And they had given her the solace of that same sleep which provides the link between us and what was here before we were alive.”

Going on to say that James Joyce called this relationship with an unformed, chaotic world “chaosmology,” Coutu says rites that we should all be able to speak the language of chaos. He writes,

“The man of the future should surely be a type of bilingual nation. Speaking a finished language, capable of dealing with visible, everyday matters. But fluent too in another language to express that which belongs to the invisible, dreamlike order of existence.”

Elderism #50

Poetry critic Helen Vendler, some years ago, clutching a sheath of poems that her Harvard students had written, and which she had deemed overly personal:

“A poem is not necessarily improved by the inclusion of an abortion.”

Elderism #49

Music phenom Pete Seeger, who turned 90 last week:

“I’m not really enthusiastic about big things. I think if there’s a world here in 100 years, it’s going to be saved by millions of little things.”

John Cheever’s *Other* Secret Life

John Cheever’s tortured bisexuality gets some more airtime in Blake Bailey’s new Cheever biography, Matthew Price reminds us in Bookforum. Price quotes two of the sadder bits of Cheever’s journals–“The most wonderful thing about life is that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction,” and “If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”

But Price also quotes part of the Bailey book that is possibly even more haunting re the theme of living a double life. It seems that, after Cheever moved to a Sutton Place apartment with his wife and daughter, “Almost every morning for the next five years, he’d put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he’d doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch.”

Elderism #48

Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, quoted in Dwight Garner’s Times review of “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness,” which is probably the first biography of a Palestinian writer to be published in English:

“The more mosques, the less poetry.”

Elderism #47

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of “Things Fall Apart,” in an essay in the  new “Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing,” edited by Rob Spillman:

“Of course there are areas of Africa where colonialism divided up a single ethnic group among two or even three powers. But on the whole it did bring together many peoples that had hitherto gone their several ways. And it gave them a language with which to talk to one another. If it failed to give them a song, it at least gave them a tongue, for sighing.”

Strange Dream

I typically forget, or discard, all memories of dreams that I have, as they tend to be so obvious in their meaning as to suggest a total lack of imagination. But the weirder ones hold a certain sway. Last night I dreamed that Beatrice Arthur, bearing a large bag of marijuana, came up to a friend and I at a party, whereupon she got us stoned and urged us to call her “Synoopa, my tribal name.”

I Must Go On/I Cannot Go On

There’s an interesting article about obituaries by someone named Stefany Anne Golberg in “The Smart Set,” Drexel University’s magazine. Pointing to the current flowering of, and interest in,  obits as a literary form–if not up to the level of the Daily Telegraph’s or The Economist’s, the New York Times’s obits have definitely gotten juicier and more narrative in recent years; and now there are websites like obit.com, howtowriteanobituary.com and, yes,  the ghoulish patrickswayzeobituary.com–Golberg goes on to quantify two types of memorial writing. The two types stem from the worldviews  of, alternately, Aristotle and Benjamin Franklin.

The old-school style of obit–those bizarrely curt and truncated, semaphore-like ones that most newspapers run–uphold the Aristotelian view.  “Aristotle thought of life as a sum of its total actions that couldn’t be judged until those actions came to an end,” Golberg writes. In this worldview, you’re not really dead until you’ve been the subject of an obit–“judgement completes life.” In the Franklin model, though, “A man is not completely born until he is dead,” as Franklin once wrote a grieving daughter. To Franklin, a soul, freed of its body by death, is now ready to live the “real life” that is immortality. Golberg writes that the jazzier, more narrative obits that we are increasingly reading today fall into the Franklin category. They present life and death as a neverending story. A continuum.