PS--I should note (pride, pride, oh fatal pride!) that all the poems I reproduce here are lines I recited from memory during the talk.
Well, as I grew older, and moved out into the
world, became a teacher, I wasn't much more together than a Judd Apatow
character, but I realized very quickly that I still really needed some Big
People in my life—desperately so—and so I sought them out. I was
extraordinarily fortunate in the earliest years of my career to work with some
of the greatest teachers I would ever know. I’m going to tell you a little about
just one of them:
• Eileen
Kutinsky—“Mrs. K, the kids called her. She taught 6th grade science,
and her room was the most alive classroom I’ve ever seen—not just in the eager
interactions among the kids but in the room’s décor. Animal cages, plants,
displays—things, living and otherwise, were jammed
in her room (snakes-lizards-fish-cacti!); later, she brought a cow to school (she lived on a farm) and
had the kids taking care of it, milking it, making cheese and ice cream. It was
amazing.
But there were
others—a 1st-grade teacher, an 8th-grade math teacher, a
reading teacher, an art teacher, a high school English teacher. They worked the
kids hard, but the kids still loved them. Learned
from them. And seeing those magicians,
I decided: I’m gonna steal from
those people!
And when I
first came here to WRA in the fall of 1979 (the fall I would turn 35—more than
half my life ago), there were some
towering teachers here who taught me
as well as their students—you can see their pictures on the walls over in
Seymour: Bob and Velia Price (French teachers), Bill Appling (vocal music),
Sherwin Kibbe (history and English), Russ Hansen (biology), Bill Westfall
(history). I also had the great fortune to share a home with one of my own Big People—my
wife, Joyce Dyer (English), a superb teacher. Anyway, I latched onto them like a lonely leech. Learned and stole all I could.
So this is one
piece of advice I’ll suggest this morning—to all of us: Never stop
your search for the Big People. They’re around, wherever you are. And be alert:
They may be younger than you are.
Let’s leave
the young now and move on to the Old Guys—to the period, as Hamlet said, when we
suffer the whips and scorns of time. Old
age used to be simpler—and shorter. (Shakespeare died at fifty-two.)
In some cases
you end could be grim. In his 1901 short story “The Law of Life,” Jack London (The Call of the Wild/White Fang guy) wrote about a band of
Native Americans in the remote North. This tribe of nomads is moving on—and leaving
behind one of the elders, a man who can no longer, well, keep up. They give him some food, some warm
clothing, a campfire, a little extra firewood, then bid him a quick farewell
and move on. Most of the story deals with the old man’s thoughts and memories,
but near the end … the wolves arrive.
They circle him.
The old man listened to the drawing in of
this circle, writes London. He waved
his [fire]brand wildly, and sniffs turned to snarls; but the panting brutes
refused to scatter. Now one wormed his chest forward, dragging his haunches
after, now a second, now a third; but never a one drew back. Why should he
cling to life? he asked, and dropped the blazing stick into the snow. It
sizzled and went out. The circle grunted uneasily, but held its own. … [He]
dropped his head wearily upon his knees. What did it matter after all? Was it
not the law of life?
Well, that’s a happy story! But be grateful:
Things are a little different now … in most places. My generation—called the
Baby Boomers—are now retiring, aging, looking for places to spend our final
days. Recently, you’ve surely noticed that assisted-living and nursing and
stages-of-care facilities are popping up everywhere—some
right here in Hudson. They’re getting ready for me. I hope they have no wolves on staff. I can just see it:
ATTENDANT: Danny, how was you pudding today?
ME: Great pudding. Just great.
ATTENDANT: Danny,
you have some visitors today.
ME: Visitors? How nice. [door opens]
ROAR OF WOLVES
Poet and
novelists and playwrights have always written about the indignities—and fears—of old age. Take Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (are you still reading about the ancient mariner in English I?). In
another of his poems, “Youth and Age,” from the 1820s, Coleridge has a speaker
sigh about getting older.
When I was young?—Ah, woeful
when!
Ah, for the change ’twixt Now
and Then!
This breathing house not built
with hands,
This body that does me grievous
wrong,
O’er aery cliffs and glittering
sands
How lightly then it flash’d
along:
Like those trim skiffs, unknown
of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers
wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or
tide!
Nought cared this body for wind
or weather
When Youth and I lived in’t
together.
An aging
Coleridge would have other things to worry about today. We all know about the
acceleration of technology—and how it sometimes can leave the elderly behind. (Just
today I saw a Facebook meme: It shows an old man pointing to his electronic
device and saying, “I texted you several times.” And his younger companion
says, “That’s a calculator.”) The last piece of technology my dad could use was
a TV remote. He never learned to use a personal computer, an ATM, a cell
phone—he never even learned to use a self-serve gas pump. The self-checkout over
at Acme would have sent him over the edge.
My mom, by contrast, was a very early and skillful computer user. She was the
first to have one in our family—the mid 1970s, an Apple II. And until just a
few years ago we were able to keep in touch via email. Now, sadly, she can’t
remember how to turn her laptop on and off, how to navigate to her email, and
her arthritic fingers just won’t cooperate.
But she is a proud woman, and that old laptop still sits prominently on the
table in her assisted-living unit. Rage,
rage against the dying of the light, said poet Dylan Thomas in 1951.
So we’ve seen
that poets have raged. Novelists have, too. The final works by America’s great Philip
Roth deal with the issue over and over again—The Dying Animal (2001), Exit
Ghost (2007) and The Humbling
(2009)—the very titles revealing much
of their subject matter. Roth, by the way, was in his late 70s when he wrote
these books. He’s still alive (he just turned 83), but feeling he’s “losing
it,” he no longer writes. I could stand up here all morning and tell you about other novelists who’ve written about
aging—but you get the point.
Oh, okay, one
more: In 1882 the great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope published one of
his final works, The Fixed Period. In
this brief tale, he tells about a community on the fictional South Pacific island
of Britannula, where the new settlers decide to establish what they call “The
Fixed Period,” a law that says no one on the island can live beyond 67.5 years.
They see this as a move that's both humane (no more suffering and indignities
of old age) and economically responsible (it will save on medical costs!). As folks
draw close to the age limit, they will be taken to a nice facility where they
will live in comfort—until they’re, you know, killed. Nicely, of
course. Very nicely. No wolves involved! Well, all goes well
until the first few settlers begin to approach 67.5, The Fixed Period. Then,
let's say, attitudes begin to change.
And in films
and TV? In recent years, I’ve noticed, it’s become more and more common to show
the elderly as comic
characters—foul-mouthed, raunchy. You surely know about Hot in Cleveland, Bad Grandpa
and Dirty Grandpa.
But you've probably
noticed, too, that there are some films aimed directly at the Baby Boomers. The Most
Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Lady in
the Van—hey, anything with Judi Dench or Maggie Smith—or both! I loved The Lady in the Van, by the way. Stream it.
And
playwrights? Well, of course Shakespeare
wrote about it. (About the only subject he didn't
write about was zombies! Though
as you readers of Macbeth and Hamlet know, he's quite comfortable with
witches and ghosts—but no hot young vampires fall in love with Juliet/Bella.) In
his wrenching play King Lear—one of
his last—Shakespeare wrote about an aging English king who decides he will both
step down and divide his property among his three daughters.
Long story
short—and I mean long: Lear ain’t no Saturday Night Live sketch. The 2008 film of Lear with Ian McKellan (Gandalf!)
runs two hours and thirty-six minutes! Lear
is the seventh longest of the Bard’s three dozen plays—some 3500 lines. The
longest, Hamlet, by the way, comes in
at 4024 lines. The shortest, The Comedy
of Errors, only 1786. (I know what
you’re thinking: Why can’t we read that short
one in school?! I’ll tell you
why: Because it’s funny—and short—and
you can understand it—and that’s not
what school is for!)
Anyway … King
Lear’s two older daughters profoundly betray him, and the youngest, Cordelia,
whom Lear initially accused of disloyalty, turns out to be the most truthful
and honest and loving and loyal of all. Lear
is full of horrifying moments of old age—betrayal by children (at one point he
cries, How sharper than a serpent’s tooth
it is to have a thankless child (1.4)), depression, madness, and loss. For that is one of the most difficult
aspects of getting older. Loss. If
nonage is about acquiring, dotage is
about losing.
Near the end, the worst moment of all arrives—his beloved
daughter Cordelia is killed offstage, and a devastated Lear carries her out into
our view. And the words Shakespeare puts in Lear’s mouth at that moment? No words at all, not really, not at
first. Not articulate speech. Just four sounds: Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl! Lear tenderly lays her down, uses a
looking-glass to check for breath. There is none. Then he says some of the most
devastating words in all of Shakespeare’s work:
Those lines
resonated in a deeply personal way for Shakespeare. In 1596 he had lost his
only son, Hamnet, age 11. We don’t know a thing
about what happened to the boy—just the recording of his death in the local
church register. But the agony of that loss would inform Shakespeare's writing
for the rest of his career. You all still read Macbeth … Remember when the murderers arrive at Macduff’s castle? And
the Macduffs’ little son? Imagine the typhoon
of emotion in Shakespeare as he wrote that scene …
Well, I’m
really making old age seem like something to look forward to, aren’t I? But there are
wonders about it. The births of your grandchildren. The grandson who hands you
a book to read to him, the one who admires your behind-the-back passes, the
realization (or, maybe, the hope)
that the good you’ve done in your life might
just outweigh your failures, the touch of a loved one’s hand.
All right,
we’re steaming toward the end here (no cheering! silent sighs of relief are
fine). We’re now at the part about, well, about what you do when you’re occupying those years when it’s possible people will
listen to you.
What do you say? And how?
First—You echo
the best of what you’ve learned from the Big People in your lives. You want to
be able to say—until the day you die,
“I took notice and done better.”
Second—You
share those ideas—maybe even truths—you’ve
drawn from your own study, your career, your reflections, your experience. How
has your thinking changed? Evolved!
Third—You
reveal the contents of your heart …
What have you stored there? How did
it get there? What has love taught you? What have you learned
about loss? And pain? Speak of it. Teach!
Poet Emily
Dickinson called this sort of thing her “letter to the world.”
And how should you deliver your letter? Well, let’s steal some more
from Miss Emily. [PAUSE]. Her grandfather Samuel Dickinson was once
treasurer of Western Reserve College. Right here. He sat in this very Chapel
when it was fairly new. And if you ever see his grave in the Dickinson family
plot in Amherst, Mass., you’ll note that his headstone records that he died in
Hudson, Ohio.
[PLAY]:
Emily Dickinson
has a poem from 1862 about a novelty at the time: the railroad. (Not
coincidentally, in the mid-1850s, her father had helped bring the railroad to her hometown of
Amherst.) In the poem, she
compares the engine to a horse. Before I recite it, a bit about a biblical name
she mentions—Boanerges. That name appears only once in the New Testament—in
Mark 3:17. It’s a sort of nickname that Jesus gives to two young men, a name
that means “sons of thunder,” according to the King James Version. So we assume
those two dudes had loud voices.
Here we go—a
train, a horse.
I like to see it lap the Miles -
And lick the Valleys up -
And stop to feed itself at Tanks
-
And then - prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains -
And supercilious peer
In Shanties - by the sides of Roads
-
And then a Quarry pare
To fit it’s sides
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid - hooting stanza -
Then chase itself down Hill -
And neigh like Boanerges -
Then - prompter than a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At it’s own stable door –
Well, here’s
what I say: During your middle years, when people decide you're worth listening
to—or not—I urge you not to be like multi-dark
Jaques and retreat to a cave. Instead, neigh like Boanerges—not necessarily
bellow out in the streets, causing dogs to bark and babies to cry and neighbors
to call 911. But you should neigh like Boanerges in a metaphorical sense. Get
it out there. Work to become one of
the Big People—one whom people want
to listen to. Need to listen to. Keir
Marticke did. We should too.
Oh, and even when
you’re much older? Keep neighing like Boanerges—neigh like
the wildest of wild horses—until you simply no longer can. A quick example, a very contemporary one—
• The retired Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, a
towering figure, now 87, continues to
write eloquently about the life of and
threats to this planet. Just last
month he published yet another book—Half-Earth:
Our Planet’s Fight for Life. In it, he
neighs like Boanerges: Meanwhile, he
writes near the start, we thrash about,
appallingly led, with no particular goal in mind other than economic growth,
unfettered consumption, good health, and personal happiness (2). And the fate
of our biosphere? To far too many people, he says, it’s just no biggie.
It’s
fitting, I think, to give Keir the last word today. In her collection of poems,
Through Her Window, she has one I
especially love. Admire her talent—listen to her words—they’re a guide to life.
“She Who Carried Hope,” pp. 68–9 in Through Her Window
She walks alone.
Out in the rain,
And the world around her comes undone,
The ground beneath her bends and cracks
Like bone,
The trees split limb through limb,
Revealing insides that are dried and brittle,
And the brown leaves peel like paper from the stem,
Flayed in flight by venom winds,
Settling on the earth in a red dust shadow,
Death sweeps the barren land upon which she walks,
Where her soft feet land they falter,
Her knees buckle, head bows,
But in her work this girl is tireless.
Footfall after footfall, hour follows hour,
She walks.
An orb cradled in her hands,
Callused palms, long thin fingers
Drawing warmth and strength from this small thing,
Called hope.
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