Words R’Us

We have met the words, and we are them. Apologies to Pogo and Walt Kelley, but the sense of Pogo wisdom applies in many ways to my life. We are both shapers and shaped, by everything we see and know. Language extends the reach of both. We are such stuff as words are made on, and our little life is rounded with a speech. And such speeches we may draw upon to exalt our days, and resonate in our experience. “Words are made on,” my play on Shakespeare, in Prospero’s speech defining imaginary worlds spun of words, from The Tempest:

Our Reuels now are ended: These our actors,
(As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and
Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre,
And like the baselesse fabricke of this vision
The Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Pallaces,
The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolue,
And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded
Leaue not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe
As dreames are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleepe

So words, when a Shakespeare wields them, can conjure up characters and scenes that never were, and make us believe them for that little time. In an incremental process, the way we think is shaped by each such experience – which by itself is justification for reading and literature – and we begin to find congruences between our lives and the words we read. Words and passages we have read pop into our internal pages, triggered by all sorts of allusive links.

At my stage of life, so much is behind me, but still I yearn for new experiences and hope for something yet worth an effort. I often remember another poet’s words, in the persona of an aging man of great consequence in our world, though he was crafted entirely of words; in Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, the aging king of Ithaca said:

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A friend of mine, long departed, once said in mock admiration of some drunken oration of mine, “You certainly have a way with words,” to which I answered, “No, Billy, words have had their way with me.”

And for that I am truly thankful.

Time Elastic

Today my father would have been 88 years old. He died September 13, 2000. Didn’t quite make it into the 21st century. Gone not quite eight years. Eight years at my age seems a flash of time, an eyeblink. When I was a child, such a span of time contained enormous changes in me and in my world. My first memories fixable in time concern the imminent birth of my sister, when I was just turned three. Eight years from that date encompassed for me nursery school, kindergarten, another sister being born-prematurely, I remember clearly seeing the pink ribbons taped by the neonatal nurses to her hairless head in the hospital-and almost all of grammar school. Within that familiar school-based calendar of a child, many events crowded; my brush with polio, my grandparents maternal moving from one post to another, where we visited our Colonel and his Lady each summer, birthdays, report cards, hot summers, snowy winters. My life, looked back on at the lofty age of eleven, eight years from my first sister’s birth, the same span of time that seems so trivial from my sixty-fifth year now in progress, was a great stretch of eventful time.

And since my father died, my youngest son married, he and his bride bought a house, they conceived and brought forth one, then a second grandchild, I abruptly departed my job of seventeen years and dwelt in the lotus-eaters land of retirement for five of those eight years. It seems so short a time compared to the years of my childhood, despite all the events thickly clustered. Time is so much shorter when you are old; for a child, Christmas seems an eternity in coming each year, while for a person as full of years as myself, the dates whip by like telephone poles on an interstate highway, when you are driving at ten miles over the speed limit.

Time, like supply and demand in the “dismal science” of economics, is always elastic, and the relativity of age sets the parameters for that elasticity. Now my years accelerate, and options shrink with the realization of an indeterminately shorter road ahead of me than behind. Carpe Diem is paradoxically better suited to the young, who have the energy to act upon that dictum; at my age I sputter and halt my way towards each fresh pleasure.

The Three Ages of Man

There are many divisions of a man’s (or woman’s) life into distinct parts, from Shakespeare’s “Seven ages of man” passage in As You Like It, to the riddle of the creature who walks on four, then two, then three legs. The last is answered by the progress of a human from crawling to walking to leaning on a cane as age works its way through our lives.

It has occurred to me lately that attitudes towards our own age fall into three categories: From early childhood to our early twenties, we eagerly anticipate each birthday, which by stages enlarge our freedoms and powers. Starting in our late twenties, we begin to realize we are no longer young, and especially at thirty lose our enthusiasm for each birthday. This distaste for our own aging lasts until late in life, when we begin to revel in surviving yet another year, albeit with declining health and powers. We go from qualifying our age as some year, and a half, or “nearly” our next birthday, to minimizing our age and finally to exaggerating our age, proud of our longevity.

I have begun in the last few years to tell anyone who will listen, no matter if they really want to or not, exactly how old I will be on my next birthday. I haven’t yet begun to pad the total, but that will come, I am sure.

Empty Pockets

Everybody, to live, needs a certain level of income, a minimum base of possessions and supplies replenished when needed to survive, and more than survive, to live, not just exist. As I grew up, the necessity for training myself to work, to contribute and thereby to support myself and my family were impressed on me. Somewhere, though, I neglected to fire up the furnaces of ambition, to seek urgently to acquire, to amass, to “build an estate.”

I worked. Children came. Eventually my wife went to work. I didn’t work for awhile, then I did again. In a haphazard way, a middle-class lifestyle rode out these varied stages, and I never doubted that my responsibilities were, at the bottom, who I was. But I still didn’t feel the drive to build an estate. While the children were little, I kept life insurance, against the possibility that I might not outlive their dependence on my income.

I had seen at close hand many families with fathers who unwaveringly pursued careers, not just jobs. Rewards in material possessions flowed to such men. Their children benefitted, and many of these same men were excellent fathers. I tried to be a good father, with not too bad a result, I think. But increasingly, seeing the disparity in income and level of comfort of many in our society, I felt less and less inclined to drive myself to accumulate. Mostly, I admit, this was because I felt no “fire in the belly” to succeed. I have many temptations to which I gladly give in, but ambition that way is foreign to me. In short, I am what is called lazy. I work when and in the degree necessary, and that is it.

The more I saw of wealth and status, the more my tendency towards white liberal guilt thrived. Early on, I resolved to die as close to penniless as possible, after giving my sons whatever they needed from me, short of blocks of capital. I have joked in the past three years that I am a bit ahead of my timetable, and life threatens to outlive my savings plus Social Security. I am headed back to work in the next year. Partly financial necessity, partly a need for the structure employment gives you. I want to be part of the productive sector of the economy again.

But I still think I would like to die as close to penniless as a decent provision for my final care and disposal allows. My pockets will be empty. I hope my soul will not be.