High Points

The other day we spoke to an acquaintance, the oldest active person we know.  He’s 92 years old, was married for 56 years, and now lives by himself in his house in Brooklyn.  Slim and quick moving, he appears to be in excellent health.  He still drives, although he confesses that when he has to park downhill from his destination, he sometimes finds the walk uphill trying. 

During the Second World War he served in the Navy, at one point the radio operator for an admiral.  He served on seven ships, two of which were sunk from under him.  He participated in four invasions: Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and as for the fourth one I’ll have to ask him to remind me.  Clearly it’s something he’ll never forget.  The stories he tells about his time in the navy are colorful and arresting.  It’s fun to hear them even when we’ve heard them several times before.  The Second World War was, I believe, the highpoint of his life.   He continues to relive it, not only in the stories he tells his younger listeners but also in his volunteer service with the American Legion and the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.

He’s not alone in regarding wartime experience as a high point in his life.  This is said to be true for the survivors of the Blitz, for example.   Perhaps it’s the combination of involvement in a great undertaking supported by the whole population, the adrenalin rush from danger, and the camaraderie forged in battle, siege, or bombardment that was responsible for the feeling that every fiber of their being was wholly alive.

What must it be like to reach the high point of your life when you are so very young?  Is your life a long anti-climax?  I can’t answer that question from personal experience, for my own high points have been spread out over my lifetime.   Between the projects that have so enlivened me, among them the Language Survey of Ethiopia and Mark Twain’s world lecture tour, I feel a sense of anticlimax as  I search for a new project that will recapture the thrill of total involvement.  I’m in one of those troughs between projects today.  Like Helen Trent, who refused to believe that romance was over at 35, I refuse to believe that engagement in a great project is over at 80.   So I continue to look.  In the meantime, I'm grateful for the peaks of engagement I've experienced.  Even if I never find another, life won't have owed me a thing.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Doing Nothing

Have you ever noticed those ads for insurance companies that offer you annuities for your old age?  They feature impossibly good-looking, sportily dressed men and women engaged in various leisure activities, such as fishing, playing tennis, and golfing.  I suppose that some retirees actually spend their time like that.  In fact a good friend of mine, an extremely distinguished judge (and as good-looking as the male models in the ads, if older), and his wife retired to a community known for its golf courses, and every day of the week, from Monday through Friday, they played golf.  This was their principal activity when they weren’t traveling.  I admired him greatly, but such a life in retirement would drive me mad.

I first met him and his wife on board a freighter sailing from Suva to Hong Kong, a two-week leg on what would be for them a two-month journey.  We were the only passengers.  One of the things he told me as we sailed northwest is that retirement is a career for which you have to plan and prepare.  I was only a year away from retirement and I took his advice seriously.  I began to research a book on a history of vacations, with the intention of continuing it after my retirement. For reasons that are still opaque, the project later turned to ashes in my mouth and I had to find other projects with which to occupy myself.  This I did.

But why did I feel a need to occupy myself with a serious project?  Why do I feel the same way today? Why can't I be content meeting friends for lunch, visiting art galleries and museums, spending an occasional afternoon at a film or play, reading books for more than twenty minutes at a time, and taking long, leisurely walks?  Why do I feel guilty when I have nothing to do – or, since there’s always something to do (right now my books and files are hollering at me, “put us in order!”) – why do I feel guilty when I’m doing nothing?  Why is the Protestant Ethic attacking me when I’m not even Protestant?

Doing nothing, after all, can be delicious.  Mark Twain wrote about the delights of ocean travel when “you have nothing to do but do nothing.”  Of course, when he wrote that line he was in the midst of a hideously strenuous year-long world lecture tour and besides he was suffering from boils.  Naturally, he welcomed the surcease from effort offered by his ocean journeys.  Still, I recall my own pleasure on freighter voyages, as I lounged on a chaise longue, an open book face down on my lap, and gazed at the immense sky, as the vessel gently rocked me to sleep.   Years ago, I recuperated from a major operation for several weeks on an Aegean island.  I walked along the coast, drank coffee in cafes, wandered into ancient churches, read the Greek edition of The Herald Tribune, sat on my room’s balcony with a scotch in my hand and looked out at the islands dotting the sea.  When I make up my mind to do nothing, I’m pretty good at it. 

But in both these examples, on the ocean voyages and on the Aegean island, I had an excuse to do nothing.  Now I must learn to do nothing without an excuse and without feeling guilty about it.    I suspect that I will need the rest of my life to learn.