Tuesday, October 10, 2023

SOMBER REFLECTIONS

Yesterday afternoon, the 35 or 36 people who live in my building gathered to celebrate the 95th birthday of one of our residents, Mary McNulty. Mary is a lively, cheerful, energetic Catholic lady who has seven children, 17 grandchildren, and 24 or 25 great-grandchildren. She is also one of the three or four Republicans in the building, a fact which I joked with her about at the party. Although Mary is only six years older than I am, she seems to me from another age. As I sat there, looking at all the other old folks with whom I live, I reflected on the fact that although I will almost certainly live long enough to see the results of the 2024 election, at which point I will be a month short of my 91st birthday, I am unlikely to see the results of the 2028 election.

 

I am now 10 years older than my father was when he died, and yet it seems like such a short time from childhood to old age. Two days ago I received six copies of the new Spanish translation of In Defense of Anarchism, a book I wrote 58 years ago and published 53 years ago. Sometime soon I will receive my copies of the Arabic translation of the same little book.

 

Two weeks from now, I will spend an hour chatting with a group of Harvard students who are majoring in Social Studies, an undergraduate program of which I was the first head tutor back in 1960 – 61. It occurred to me that if I had met an 89-year-old Harvard graduate in 1950, when I began my undergraduate education, he would have been born at the start of the Civil War!

 

And now I sit safe in my apartment here in North Carolina, watching the endless news reports of the terrible events in Israel. Those events have affected me more deeply than I would have imagined. I was, for example, not much affected at all by the events of September 11, 2001, but as I watch the reports from the Middle East I feel as though my world is falling apart.

 

I can remember clearly every one of the 32 courses I took as an undergraduate at Harvard between 1950 and 1953, and yet relentlessly, inexorably I have grown older and older each year until now I am two months from my 90th birthday. When I was 12, my mother offered me a choice between a big bar mitzvah party with lots of presents or hundred dollars to buy something for myself. I took the hundred dollars and bought Natie Gold’s Lionel train set, which I coveted. It seemed like a good deal of the time. Perhaps I should have gone for immortality.

5 comments:

  1. The events in Israel affect me a lot more than 9-11 did too.

    I find that as I get older, my empathy with human suffering increases just as my belief in big principles, socialism or anti-colonial struggles or human rights or anti-terrorism, decreases.

    I care a lot more about people and I care a lot less about principles.

    I never expected that to be part of the ageing process, but of course ageing is a process that no one prepares you for.

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  2. I've found myself thinking about this post all morning, and in the early afternoon I recalled Wallace Stevens's 'A Postcard from a Volcano':

    Children picking up our bones
    Will never know that these were once
    As quick as foxes on the hill;

    And that in autumn, when the grapes
    Made sharp air sharper by their smell
    These had a being, breathing frost;

    And least will guess that with our bones
    We left much more, left what still is
    The look of things, left what we felt

    At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
    Above the shuttered mansion-house,
    Beyond our gate and the windy sky

    Cries out a literate despair.
    We knew for long the mansion's look
    And what we said of it became

    A part of what it is ... Children,
    Still weaving budded aureoles,
    Will speak our speech and never know,

    Will say of the mansion that it seems
    As if he that lived there left behind
    A spirit storming in blank walls,

    A dirty house in a gutted world,
    A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
    Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

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  3. John Rapko

    What a great poem, esp. the last two lines. Thank you for sharing.

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  4. Since you brought up the situation in Israel again in this post, I would would recommend that you see the movie Golda, about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war (1973). I am sure you remember it. It is very insightful.

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