Recently our daughter and son-in-law celebrated the sixteenth anniversary of their marriage, which made me think back to our own sixteenth anniversary. That was in 1979, when we were living in New York during my first sabbatical from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the time, I thought of myself as long married, but now that we’ve been married for 48 years, I look at that time as just the beginning of our marriage.
I’m happy to say that I’m easier to get along with now, less compulsive, less driven, less judgmental, and more willing to entertain the notion that my wife’s ways of doing things are not necessarily worse or less efficient than mine. Just as I’m not the same person that I was in my twenties, as I wrote in a recent post, I’m not the same person that I was on that first sabbatical, when I was 48. At least, that's the way it feels.
Is, then, the continuity of our identity an illusion, fostered in part by our memories, or is there some unchanging basic core that differentiates us from others? A recent article in the Times (September 20, 2011, p.D3) (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/health/20amnesia.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Lonni%20Sue%20Johnson&st=cse suggests that there is a basic core. Four years ago, Lonni Sue Johnson, an artist and illustrator, fell ill with viral encephalitis, which severely damaged parts of her brain. She remembered little of her life before her illness. “At the beginning of Ms. Johnson’s recovery,” reported the Times, “She had to relearn to how to walk, talk and eat… She did not recognize purple, black and orange, and could not put pen to paper.” But she now paints again, although her art is simpler than it was before. The article quotes Michael McCloskey, a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins, who has studied her case. “Here you’ve lost an awful lot of what makes you who you are – what’s left for art? But you see in her art that she’s very much the same person. She is not an empty shell. There is something about your identity that’s distinct from memory.” Although her art is now more childlike than it was before her illness, it has retained its uniqueness, according to Barbara Landau, another Hopkins professor involved in the research. “You can recognize it’s Lonni Sue. Her personality is preserved.”
That identity is distinct from memory makes intuitive sense inasmuch as memory is unreliable. It changes over time, as will be seen if you watch a film for the second time after an interval of 50 years. You will find only a partial overlap between what you remembered and what actually transpired in the film. Some of what you remembered may in fact have never occurred at all.
So if we possess an essential core independent of memory, how can I explain the changes that I’ve witnessed in myself over the years? One factor is age. In the twilight of my life, with a not breathtakingly long life expectancy, many matters that assumed great importance in the past now seem trivial. Since very little now upsets me beyond the welfare of my family and my friends, I find myself more serene than ever before. Also, I’m no longer striving to succeed in my profession or indeed in any other field, another reason I’m more relaxed now than I once was. One more factor is experience of life. Greater experience helps me respond to challenges in a more measured and, I hope, more sensible fashion than once was possible for me.
So if some of my behaviors have changed since my twenties and forties, if some of the less attractive features of my personality have been muted, the essence of the person I was has not changed. I'm not a new creature, a butterfly that was once a caterpillar. A better metaphor might be a wine that’s matured, except that I hope to keep developing. The wine may not be grand cru or even premier cru, but nonetheless I hope that the vintage was decent enough to allow for continued improvement with age. When the bottle is finally uncorked and the wine poured out, I hope that those who sip it will think it good.
2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved
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