Chapter One
It is commonly said-but I believe it anyway-that old people are wise. I don’t
mean that anyone who hits the age of seventy or so suddenly starts speaking in
haiku or engaging in the kind of hyperextended, meaning-drenched eye contact
that makes you look nervously down at the floor in search of a dog to pet.
No. Rather, I think that the older we get, the more life experiences we are
likely to have-and the more experiences we have, the greater the body of
information we have to work from. I happen to think that there are some very
wise thirty-year-olds out there in the world, too-but the chances of an
eighty-year-old’s knowing something important about life are much greater.
We humans are one of the few species with an average life span that extends
beyond the age at which we can procreate.
Why is this?
Maybe it’s because old folks have something else to offer.
* * *
Every year or so, I have an epiphany about some aspect of life. Usually, these
insights are small. Take, for instance, the one I had a few years back, after
buying a lot of food for a breakfast I was making for some friends. Having
carefully selected an assortment of bagels, which I then gingerly placed into a
brown paper bag, I was struck, two hours later, by a very, very, very profound
realization: a bag of assorted bagels with one garlic bagel in it is a bag of
garlic bagels.
But sometimes my insights are larger. Sometimes they reveal to me truisms about
life or people and compel me to sit up and take notice. (And “truisms about life
or people” is, in this instance, what I’m talking about when I say “wisdom.” I’m
not talking about quantum theory or knowledge comprehensible only by experts.)
When this knowledge is of a universal nature, it almost unavoidably verges on
being clichéd-take my realization, after a long and difficult friendship with a
strikingly candid friend whose bald assertions often hurt my and others’
feelings, that our greatest strengths (her candor) are usually our greatest
liabilities (her candor).
When this knowledge is of a more personal nature, it can hit you with all the
subtlety of a gong-like my discovery, once I’d determined that neither my
crush-inducing cinema-studies professor nor my charismatic boss at my first job
nor the attractive young intern I trained at that job reciprocated my
affections, that most crushes are narcissistic. Their engine is flattery.
* * *
But there’s another kind of wisdom, too-the ability to predict the consequences
of certain actions. This kind of knowledge is even more hard-won, forged as it
is in the crucible of failure. And, unlike truisms about life and people, which
are sometimes articulated by the young, the ability to predict consequences is
almost necessarily a function of advanced years: to know that A, when followed
by B, leads to C, is to have seen A and B in some rather compromised situations,
very possibly at 2:00 a.m. in their underpants, in front of the kitchen sink.
This ability to predict consequences does not operate without effort. Sherwin
Nuland, the clinical professor of surgery at Yale who wrote How We Die, writes
in The Art of Aging, “Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to
continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends
on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do
otherwise.”
As songwriter Eubie Blake, who lived to ninety-six, said, “If I’d known I was
going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”
* * *
Following my line of logic about aging and insights, you might think that I
believe that a typical ninety-year-old is twice as wise as a typical
forty-five-year-old. I don’t. I don’t because we humans tend to forget things.
We must account for attrition-valuable information is slipping through the
cracks in the wall and seeping into the bed linens and evaporating into the
current Boca Raton weather system.
But maybe I can catch and curate some of it before it slips off into the night.
* * *
Wisdom is slippery. It comes in many forms and guises. Sometimes it is
intermingled with a certain amount of unwisdom.
But however difficult wisdom can be to pin down, one thing is certain: the
curtains don’t come crashing down when you hit seventy. In fact, the years after
“threescore and ten”-the decade that Psalms 90 tells us is the span of our lives
because anything after eighty “is only labor and sorrow”-are a ripe time for
realizations and breakthroughs. The reasons for this are varied. For some
people, retirement finally gives them the time to contemplate their navels. Some
come to conclusions as a result of their or others’ increasing proximity to the
end. Cicero wrote in 44 B.C., “Since [nature] has fitly planned the other acts
of life’s drama, it is not likely that she has neglected the final act as if she
were a careless playwright.”
We tend to think of life after seventy-outside of medical ailments, of course-as
being soft and muzzy and fairly static: lots of cardigan sweaters and an
increasingly housebound devotion to a small, irritable pet. But for many people,
it’s anything but. Grandma Moses started painting in her seventies; Michelangelo
finished sculpting the Rondanini Pietà when he was nearly ninety. Benjamin
Franklin helped frame the U.S. Constitution at eighty-one; Golda Meir assumed
leadership of Israel at seventy, and Nelson Mandela assumed leadership of South
Africa at seventy-six.
Others aren’t starting new projects or professions or life situations but are
altering their involvement with professions or life situations they’ve been in
for years-rethinking their marriage, changing how they write or paint, deciding
never ever again to tolerate anyone who calls them “Dollface.” In 2006, Newsweek
ran a story about how eighty-seven-year-old preacher Billy Graham, who’d spent
most of his adult working life in the spotlight, had in his old age shifted his
animus from partisan politics to the purely heavenly. The former political
gadabout now refused to offer either an opinion on stem-cell research or counsel
to world leaders. He told the magazine, “The older I get, the more important the
eternal becomes to me personally.”
Whatever the realizations are that these older folks make-and whether these
realizations apply only to themselves or have a more universal nature-it’s safe
to say that these mental breakthroughs are not always easily won and that the
paths that lead to them are sometimes full of misdirection. As with any creative
process, there is often a period of doubt and mental thrashing.
Over the years, I’ve seen my mother, now eighty, grapple with questions about
her life in ways that seem specific to her age. I remember lying on a Caribbean
beach with her two years ago when she said, “Let me talk about Will. I want to
know what you think my obligations to him are.”
I’d taken her along with me on a glamorous travel-writing assignment, which had
necessitated her leaving behind Will, whom she’d lived with for thirty-one
years, twenty-three of them as his wife.
My mother and stepfather, it seems, had taken different approaches to aging. Mom
was increasingly out of the house, more eager than ever to create a whirlwind of
travel and painting classes and rug hooking and fun, while Will had grown
increasingly morose and sedentary. He was still a voracious reader-Will has been
known to polish off three books in a week-but he was increasingly bedroom bound.
As my brother once put it, “Will sleeps fourteen hours a day. He’s like a male
lion.”
I asked Mom if she felt guilty coming on the trip with me; she said no, Will had
always been very supportive of her travels. But she worried that his life had
become so small-semiretired, he’d resigned from the local historical committee
and from the town board in the small central Massachusetts town they lived in.
She said, “His only activity besides napping and reading and watching TV is
going to get the mail.”
“Well,” I said, trying to put a nice spin on it, “at least his situation is
self-created. It’s not like you’re running off to the Caribbean while he has a
fatal disease.”
“True,” she said, reaching into her bag for some suntan lotion.
“Do you miss him?” I asked.
“Not really. Isn’t that awful?”
“Did you use to miss him when you traveled?”
“Yes. But I have a thick shell now.” I pointed out, “He’s sort of gotten harder
to love as he’s gotten older.”
“Yes,” she said. “And maybe my thick shell is my fear of losing him.”
The heart wants what it wants, especially in later life. But what if the heart
hasn’t yet made up its mind?
* * *
The fact-or should I say, cliché-that old people are wise is not merely rooted
in anecdotal evidence. There’s medical evidence, too. Until the 1970s or so, the
mind was considered merely to be part of the brain and not part of one’s
biological being. Recent studies in neuroscience, however, show that the brain
has a powerful ability to influence its own aging. Nuland explains in The Art of
Aging that “it is no longer enough to conceive of the mind as a function only of
the brain; it must be thought of as influenced by the very factors that it has
long been recognized to influence, namely the body and our perception of the
environment in which we find ourselves.” Although we experience a 5 percent or
so decrease in brain weight and volume every decade after we reach forty, the
actual number of brain cells in healthy older people decreases only marginally.
From a neurological point of view, it takes us longer to learn things as we grow
older and older, and our creative thinking, short-term memory, and
problem-solving abilities dwindle, but, Nuland writes, “the ability to
assimilate information and to learn from the experience does not change
appreciably.”
And according to some, that ability actually improves. In his book The Wisdom
Paradox, Elkhonon Goldberg, a clinical professor of neurology at the New York
University School of Medicine, writes that, as we age, we get better and better
at pattern recognition. According to Goldberg, “we accumulate an increasing
number of cognitive templates,” so that “decision-making takes the form of
pattern recognition rather than of problem-solving.”
The basis of this pattern recognition is so-called generic memories. Goldberg
gives an example: say you’re unsuccessfully trying to come up with someone’s
name. But then, as soon as the person walks into the room, you suddenly remember
it. In order for this to happen, your brain must have housed a network that
contained both a visual component (the face) and an auditory component (the
name). Goldberg writes, “Despite the fact that these two kinds of information
inhabit very different cortical areas (the parietal lobe for facial information
and the temporal lobe for name information) they are intertwined in a single
attractor.” He concludes, “This, in a nutshell, is the mechanism of generic
memory.”
Goldberg illustrates the importance and power of this decades-tested intuition
in a very unusual way. He points to the various forms of brain disease evidenced
in the leaders of the twentieth century-Reagan’s Alzheimer’s, Hitler’s memory
decline and Parkinson’s, Stalin’s and Lenin’s multi-infarct diseases, Mao’s ALS,
Churchill’s and Thatcher’s series of strokes, Brezhnev’s senility. “What allowed
these remarkable personalities to prevail despite neurological decline,”
Goldberg writes, “was the rich, previously developed pattern-recognition
facility, which enabled them to tackle a wide range of new situations, problems
and challenges, as if they were familiar ones.”
I’m no neurologist, but I can certainly attest to my own increased powers, even
at the modest age of forty-five, of intuition. For instance, I’ve gotten much
better over the years at immediately gauging which of the acquaintances I make
will become longtime friends; and I now know that any movie trailer that
features a lot of extreme close-ups of a fountain pen skritching along a piece
of paper is an ad for a movie that is going to view The Life of the Writer with
a kind of gauzy romanticism that will make me feel like I’ve crossed the
Atlantic in a rowboat.
The paradox inherent in our increased ability to recognize patterns, of course,
is that it occurs simultaneously with large amounts of memory loss. And it is
this memory loss that I hope will give my quest a special urgency. If people are
repositories of knowledge-the death of an old person, an African saying runs, is
like the burning of a library-then I want a library card. I want borrowing
privileges for the rest of my life.
As if this attitude weren’t self-serving enough, there’s an even more selfish
element to my quest, too. Namely, I hope to get a preview of my own old age.
Having three older siblings-the eldest, my sister Kendy, is thirteen years older
than I-has been a boon to me because I have constantly been served examples of
what lay, or did not lie, before me. Maybe my interactions with older folks will
provide a similar forecast. If you know the advantages and disadvantages of a
destination before you reach it, you can sometimes savor or extend the former
and delay or thwart the latter. Leonardo da Vinci once wrote, “If you are
mindful that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so exert yourself in
youth, that your old age will not lack sustenance.”
Like many people, I have a strange relationship with aging. When I started
getting gray hairs at the age of forty-three, I spent two years carefully
cutting them from my temples; but I’m also someone who would never choose to
live in a new building and who will sometimes wash a new shirt ten or eleven
times before wearing it for the first time. Why do I want everything around me
to be old while laboring under the misconception that I myself am ever youthful?
I see the changes that life visits upon me-I used to be svelte, but with age I
have svelled-and wonder, Am I ready for what’s ahead?
And so I have decided to interview and spend time with as many fascinating
senior citizens as I can. I will ask them about their dawning realizations, and
I will ask them what they’ve learned, and I will ask them, the next time I’m
putting together a picnic, whether I should be putting the one garlic bagel in
its own biocontainment bag.
A word about this book’s title. I in no way mean to suggest by it that I myself
am proposing a way for others to live. Rather, I am the listener here; it is my
interviewees who I hope will be making all the recommendations.
Mark Twain once said, “Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening
when you would rather have talked.”
And, oh, how some oldsters can talk.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from How to Live
by Henry Alford
Copyright © 2009 by Henry Alford.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Twelve
Copyright © 2009
Henry Alford
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-446-19603-1
