My friend, Emerson Stamps, three years ago wrote a letter to his father. At that time, November 2008, Emerson was 85 years old and his father had been dead since 1939.
As he explains, Emerson did not expect either to have his letter read by his father or receive a response from him. Nonetheless, he wanted to share in some way his excitement at an event of November fifth of 2008.
If you are like me, you value the wisdom of people who have lived long and have had important experience in world affairs. That explains my pleasure whenever I see Zbigniew Brzezinski, now 83, interviewed on television.
Last Sunday morning, at the pool where I swim each day, my path took me toward a young child in the arms of his mother. When the woman smiled, I paused and asked the child’s name. “Truman,” the woman told me, a name that caught me by surprise because of my not having previously encountered anyone with that name. In reply, I muttered something about Harry S. Truman, the former president. She did not answer directly but looked accepting of my remark.
Later, having finished my swim, I walked past the same child. This time he was with his father so I paused and said how pleased I was to hear Truman’s name. I added something about the pleasure of hearing the name of a Democratic president, here in Cambridge where almost all of us favor the party Harry belonged to.
The father, however, promptly corrected me. His child was named, he said, not for Truman, the president, but rather for Truman Capote, the writer. Astonished, I could only express my enjoyment of the two major Hollywood films I had seen a few years ago about Capote.
For the last two weeks, I have been haunted by a sentence of six words. They were spoken unwittingly by a guide at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The person reporting these words, in an essay published in The New Yorker, is the writer Donald Hall. A former poet laureate, he is one of America’s most distinguished literary figures.
I have felt a kind of kinship with him ever since discovering, after the fact, that we were classmates in college. Not knowing him in those days may be counted as yet another of my young manhood’s failed opportunities.
Now 83, Hall lives in a New Hampshire farmhouse that has been inhabited by generations of his family. Burdened by disability and illness, he now spends much of his days looking out the window and contemplating the surrounding landscape.
His visit to Washington had no trivial purpose. He was going to the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts from President Obama. His fellow medalists included Meryl Streep and pianist Van Cliburn.
At the National Gallery, Donald Hall moved through the rooms in a wheelchair pushed by his friend Linda. They stopped to admire a carving by Henry Moore, whom Hall had known well, and about whom he had written a book.
Eager to be helpful, the guard, a man in his sixties, came over and told them the name of the sculptor. Hall and his friend were tempted to mention the friendship and the book, but decided that to do so might embarrass the guard.
The two visitors went off to the cafeteria. On their return two hours later they see the same guard. He asks Linda how she enjoyed her lunch.
Next, in the writer’s words, “he bends over to address me, wags his finger, smiles a grotesque smile, and raises his voice to ask, ‘Did we have a nice din-din?’”
Such events and others, for Donald Hall, are part of the winter landscape of old age. He writes about it, not without irony: “It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.”
Recalling the episode with the guard, he adds: “People’s response to our separateness can be callous, can be good-hearted, and is always condescending.”
Clearly, the guard’s words were painful. They would offend almost anyone; but, for a master of language like Hall, the indignity had to be particularly sharp.
When they patronize the old, many people are unaware of what they are doing. They may even think they are being nice. Most likely, that’s the way the guard felt, with his physical gestures, his use of the plural, his louder tones, and, at the end, his baby talk.
Virtually all of us who can boast advanced years have faced similar treatment. I do not have to use a wheelchair or even a cane. Yet people sometimes condescend to me because I am old.
What strikes me about the guard is his own age. You would think that his sixties would have made him realize how close he himself is to being old. But even from his vantage point he seems not to have grasped any vision of elders as his future self.
Few young people can ever envision themselves as old, and that’s a fact elders may have to live with. Our juniors should perhaps be granted the privilege of focusing on their own stage of life.
But they need to remember that we are not an alien species. To respect us is to respect what they will be one day, if they are lucky.
Wax cylinder recordings found in Thomas Edison’s laboratory have revealed the voices of Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke, two powerful figures of 19th century Germany. In 1957 the box containing the cylinders had been found but no one knew their contents till last year.
How many languages are spoken by the world’s people?
Try seven thousand. That’s an impressive number— at least until you discover that many are on the way out.
In the next hundred years, fully half of these languages will have died. What, if anything, can we do about it? Should we even care?
To help give meaning to my later life I have created a mantra. This three-word phrase expresses spiritually a response to the events that mark my days.
My brief formula for dealing with those happenings is “The mystery deepens.”
I apply these words to gains and losses, insights and impasses, surprises and well-worn actions. Throughout, the phrase says something about the kind of person I am.