One of the effects of great age is a penchant for reflecting
on the arc of life. As Erik Erikson
observes in one of the most beautiful passages of his great work Childhood and Society, “An individual
life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment
of history." None of us chooses where in the unfolding of human
history he or she will be born, but very little is as important in determining
the arc of life. Wordsworth wrote of
the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young
was very heaven.” Edmund Burke was sixty
when the Revolution broke out [or fifty-eight, depending on when you date it
from], and that fact, as much as anything else, may have contributed to his jaundiced
view of it.
I was born in December 1933, during the depths of the Great
Depression. World War II was the first
big geopolitical event of which I was at all aware, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was, for the first eleven years of my life, Mr. President. My father was born in 1901, during the Gilded
Age, and my two sons were born in 1968 and 1970, during the Viet Nam War. None of us chose the moment for our
particular life cycle to begin, of course, but nothing could have been more
significant in shaping our different perceptions of the world.
Since so much of my life has been devoted to the production
of words, and since I wrote so much when I was young, I have always been
especially fascinated by the life experiences of authors who made a splash
early and then lived off the fame, as it were, for decades on end. I think of J. D. Salinger, who published The Catcher in the Rye at thirty-two,
went into seclusion shortly thereafter, published his last work at forty-six,
and died forty-five years later at ninety-one.
Or Ralph Ellison, whose one and only novel, the great work Invisible Man, was published when he was
thirty-nine.
How strange to be so successful so young and then to depend
for a sense of oneself on that fame as the decades pass by. I have always thought it must be rather like
having a great sports career as a young man or woman and then being forced by
the inevitable aging of the body to retire at thirty-five, just about when
those in other lines of work are beginning to have some success. If you are an old baseball star, you can open
a sports bar and sit around signing autographs, or if you are a basketball
immortal, like Michael Jordan, you can open a Nissan dealership in Durham, NC,
not too far from the site of your earliest triumphs. I suppose if you are a novelist who peaks
early, you can always teach Creative Writing to undergraduates.
Salinger strikes me as somehow a failed writer for having
written nothing during the last forty-five years of his life. But suppose he had been born in 1879 rather
1919 and had published all of his work in the last fifteen years of his life. I would view his career as a triumph of persistence
and ultimate success. And yet, the words
on the page and the dates of publication would in either case be the same.
In 1981, when I was offered a professorship in the Brandeis
Philosophy Department so that I could follow my first wife to Boston as she
took up a position at MIT, the appointment was vetoed by Brandeis President Marver
Bernstein. In his letter of denial, Bernstein
wrote that I had done some good work when I was young but that I was played
out. It is the only time I have ever
paid any attention to what critics said about me, and the words really stung.
Life is strange. There are the lucky/talented few. There are the great unwashed. And stuck in the middle are most. We are each the hero of our own story.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your meditations. Who knows what we would have been under different circumstances. Or to flip the coin, think of how lucky we have been to be born when we were and had the breaks that we got.
You've hit the right tone. We shouldn't brag if we hit it big and then rest on our laurels. We shouldn't mourn if life hands us lemons and at best we make some lemonade. Life is what it is, we can only make the best with what it has handed us.
I remember reading somewhere that, for many American men, the day they start feeling old is when they realize that they are older than every active major league baseball player. That day is now a few years past for me, but it didn't have that much impact, as I don't care about baseball nearly as much as I used to. A more pertinent one is that, this year, I am officially no longer a "young philosopher", I think. Many prizes or awards for "young philosophers" base this on being no more than 10 years since completing the PhD. I had liked the fact that one could be a rather old mammal and yet a young philosopher, but I passed the 10 year mark in May. Because it took me a rather long time to find a "permanent" position, I still do not feel like an aged philosopher, but I suppose I am on my way. I comfort myself by the fact that I am still younger than Kant was when he wrote the 1st critique, or for that matter, Rawls was when A Theory of Justice was published.
ReplyDelete"Anonymous" sounded a bit like Norman Vincent Peale there for a moment. I suppose that if your'e handed lemons the best you can make of them is lemonade. Me, I was handed limes, but I made of them Margaritas (as the old joke goes). I never let a cliche' pass without trying to one-up-it. Flippancy befits the age, no less than concern.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the judgement of Pres. Bernstein was an instance of projection rather than a reasoned judgement. Did Bernstein publish, or do, anything of great social and political import while an administrator?
ReplyDelete