Life Report

In last Friday’s Times, an op-ed piece by David Brooks asked readers over 70 to “write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way.” He gave two reasons for this request. First, there are “few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture.” Second, young people can benefit from their elders' experience, helping them to understand “how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood.” Around Thanksgiving, Brooks will write a few columns based on his readers’ responses and will post some of the self-reports he receives on line. I’m dubious that many young people will alter their behavior after reading Brooks’s columns or the essays on which they are based. Nonetheless, I present some of the lessons I’ve learned during the past 80 years. An invitation to talk about oneself, is, after all, irresistible. What follows is what I sent to Brooks.

Chance has played an enormous role in my life, from the choice of a spouse to the choice of a career. Had my brother not married my wife’s sister, I would not have become a member of my wife’s family circle, which gave me both the opportunity and the courage to ask her to marry me. If my doctoral dissertation adviser had not recommended me for a job with one of the fathers of the sociology of language, I would not have entered that field, of which I hadn’t even heard at the time. He hired me for a project the second half of which was to be carried out in Nigeria. If the Biafran war hadn't scuttled that plan, I wouldn’t have been able to take a position in Addis Ababa with the Ford Foundation’s Language Survey of Ethiopia, which gave me one of the most memorable years of my life. If my job interview in Dublin, for a two-year research appointment, had been a success, I wouldn’t have been able to accept a two-year appointment in Jerusalem, which led to a satisfying university career there and a thirty-six year stay, with all its implications for learning a new language and culture, both secular and religious. If one lesson is the importance of chance, another is the notion that what seems like a bad outcome, can in the long run lead to a good result.

My career as an academic gave me great pleasure – I was often amazed that I was being paid for it – until somehow I lost interest in it. It no longer engaged me. So I took early retirement when I turned 60 and embarked on new ventures. I went around the world solely by surface transportation and later my wife and I followed Mark Twain’s 1895/6 year-long world lecture tour, 100 years later, and I published a book about that adventure. Those projects made the decade of my sixties deeply engaging, but in my seventies I never found a comparable project. I worked for several years on a history of the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed most of Manhattan's business district, but I never was able to summon much enthusiasm for that project and I finally dropped it. I regret having started it in the first place. I should have kept searching for a topic that captured my imagination more forcibly. I've learned that engagement in one's work is a great blessing.

Freud has written that work and love are the pillars of our lives. I’ve been fortunate in both respects. I was reasonably successful as an academic, enjoying my work for 25 years. I regret the death of my long-standing engagement with it, but I’m grateful that it lasted as long as it did. As far as love is concerned, I’ve been married now for 48 years to a woman whom I’ve always considered too good for me. She has made me happy. I’ve also been fortunate in my children, of whom I am proud but for whose virtues and accomplishments I take little credit. I’m sorry I was not more attentive as a father when they were growing up, more attuned to their needs. I’m not sure I would have acted differently, though, had I the benefit of foresight, because I wanted badly to succeed in my career, which demanded so much of my time and energy. I take comfort in the thought that while I could have been a better parent, I was probably good enough.

If chance has played an important role in my life, so has luck. I've been lucky in my doctors, who have caught potentially fatal diseases early enough to be neutralized. I was lucky in my parents, who could afford to give me a first-class education and, in the case of my father, who provided a role model for the world of work. Had I been born in less favored circumstances, it is doubtful that I would have been as successful as I managed to be. Life is unfair - many good people suffer and many are the wicked who prosper. But beyond this intrinsic unfairness, our society is deeply unequal. I fully recognize that I was born on third base, so I should have tried to do more than I've done to help repair the world.

No one can live as long as I have without making mistakes or without acting in ways which make them ashamed. I know I've hurt others in my journey through life and I'm sorry that I haven't always been able or willing to ask them for forgiveness. I console myself with two thoughts: nobody's perfect and there's no point on dwelling on what can't be changed.

Life is unfair and there is much ugliness in the world. But life is nonetheless glorious, to be enjoyed and lived to the fullest extent possible. This I try to do in the time that is left to me. Onward and upward!

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