Essays After Eighty Quotes

It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.

But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended.

Exercise is boring. Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair (reading and writing) or in bed.

It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.

But nothing in human life is unmixed, and honors inevitably balance themselves with self-doubt. Everyone knows that medals are rubber

I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.

Every time I write, say, or think "lung cancer," I pick up a Pall Mall to calm myself.

Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, 1642: a weakly and diminutive infant, of whom it is related that, at his birth, he might have found room in a quart mug. He died on March the 20th, 1727, after more than eighty-four years of more than average bodily health and vigour; it is a proper pendant to the story of the quart mug to state that he never lost more than one of his second teeth.

Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

Once I had read in an Edmund Wilson essay of his dislike of women past menopause. He said they were like dried fruits, withered on the vine. The juice was gone. I understood what he meant. Although the words stabbed my heart even then, before I was forty. What about your juice? I had written in the margins of the book. But I knew that crones were female and old men were kings, stallions, and producers of heirs. Saul Bellow had a baby at the age of eighty-three. He didn't live long enough after that for her to play Cordelia to his Lear.

In newspapers and magazines I read about what’s happening. Apparently Facebook exists to extinguish friendship. E-mail and texting destroy the post office. eBay replaces garage sales. Amazon eviscerates bookstores. Technology speeds, then doubles its speed, then doubles it again. Art takes naps.

I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.

From April to October I watch the Red Sox every night. (Other sports fill the darker months.) I do not write; I do not work at all. After supper I become the American male--but I think I do something else. Try to forgive my comparisons, but before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book. Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well—better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?

Berlin failed to illuminate much with it beyond Tolstoy. The great man had wanted to be a hedgehog, Berlin claimed: War and Peace was supposed to reveal the laws by which history worked. But Tolstoy was too honest to neglect the peculiarities of personality and the contingencies of circumstance that defy such generalizations. So he filled his masterpiece with some of the most fox-like writing in all literature, mesmerizing his readers, who happily skipped the hedgehog-like history ruminations scattered throughout the text. Torn by contradictions, Tolstoy approached death, Berlin concluded, “a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded [like Oedipus] at Colonus.” 5 Biographically, this was too simple. Tolstoy did die in an obscure Russian railway station, in 1910 and at the age of eighty-two, after abandoning his home and family. It’s unlikely that he did so, though, regretting loose ends left decades earlier in War and Peace. 6 Nor is it clear that Berlin evoked Oedipus for any deeper purpose than to end his essay with a dramatic flourish. Perhaps too dramatic, for it suggested irreconcilable differences between foxes and hedgehogs. You had to be one or the other, Berlin seemed to be saying. You couldn’t be both and be happy. Or effective. Or even whole.

Eighty-five years after the storms of steel of the German-French fronts, sixty-five years after the peak of the Stalinist mass exterminations, fifty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and just as long after the bombardments of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, the swinging back of the Zeitgeist to the preference for middling circumstances is to be understood as a tribute to normalization. In this regard, it has an unconditionally affirmative civilizing value. Furthermore, democracy per se presupposes the cultivation of middling circumstances. As is well known, spirit spits what is lukewarm out of its mouth; in contrast, pragmatism holds that the temperature of life is lukewarm. Thus the impulse toward the middle, the cardinal symptom of the fin de siècle, does not have only political motives. It symbolizes the weariness of apocalypse felt by a society that has had to hear too much of revolutions and paradigm shifts. But above all it expresses the general pull toward the conversion of the drama of history into the insurance industry. Insurance policies anchor antiextremism in the routines of the post-radical society. The insurance industry is humanism minus book culture. It brings into shape the insight that human beings as a rule do not wish to be revolutionized, but rather to be safeguarded. Whoever understands this will bank on the fact that in the future contra-innovative revolts from out of the spirit of the insurance claim are most probable of all.

In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.

Let’s call it the theory of receptivity. It’s the idea, often cited by young people in their case against the relevance of even marginally older people, that one’s taste—in music or film, literature or fine cuisine—petrifies during life’s peak of happiness or nadir of misery. Or maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe a subtler spike on the charts—upward, downward, anomalous points in between—might qualify, so long as it’s formative. Let’s say that receptivity, anyway, can be tied to the moments when, for whatever reason, a person opens herself to the things we can all agree make life worth living in a new and definitive way, whether curiosity has her chasing down the world’s pleasures, or the world has torn a strip from her, exposing raw surface area to the winds. During these moments—sleepaway camp right before your bar mitzvah; the year you were captain of the hockey team and the baseball team; the time after you got your license and before you totaled the Volvo—you are closely attuned to your culture, reaching out and in to consume it in vast quantities. When this period ends, your senses seal off what they have absorbed and build a sensibility that becomes, for better or worse, definitive: This is the stuff I like. These films/books/artists tell the story of who I am. There is no better-suited hairstyle. This is as good/bad as it gets for me. The theory suggests that we only get a couple of these moments in life, a couple of sound tracks, and that timing is paramount. If you came of age in the early eighties, for instance, you may hold a relatively shitty cultural moment to be the last time anything was any good simply because that was the last time you were open and engaged with what was happening around you, the last time you felt anything really—appallingly—deeply. I worry about this theory. I worry because it suggests that receptivity is tied closely to youth, and firsts, and also because as with many otherwise highly rejectable theories—Reaganomics and communism come to mind—there is that insolent nub of truth in it.

It is best to believe the praiser and dismiss the praise.

These days most old people die in profit-making expiration dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don’t want to forgo the routine of their lives.

It sounds like a lot of work for my mother, but cooking was almost all she did. In suburban Connecticut, middle-class women were required to stay at home and do nothing but cook and iron. Housecleaning was for immigrants.

Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game.

If you have an overdeveloped ego, you are not scared of surrender.

There’s one advantage to smoking, about which we agree. When our breathing starts to vanish, we will not ask, "Why me?

She said that one of the advantages of being ninety was that she could read a detective story again, only two weeks after she first read it, without any notion of which character was the villain.

When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.

Generation after generation, my family’s old people sat at this window to watch the year. There are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later.

Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.

So many of the books were faded and unreadable. After all, we’re all in the same boat. Memento mori

As I work over clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little connection to import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey. Sentences can be long, three or more complete clauses dancing together, or two clauses with one leaning on the other, or an added phrase of only a few syllables. Sentences and paragraphs are as various as human beings.

After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other--thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty began to extend the bliss of fifty--and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I traveled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone. There is only one road.

April is Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April of 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.

It's okay to be pleased when an audience loves you, or treats you as deathless, but you must not believe it. Someone says that my reading is the best she has ever heard; a man tells me that he has read me for thirty years and that I am a giant in American letters. I know I’m not. Doubtless many praisers believe such extravagance when they say it, and it does no good to argue. I could tell them nasty things people have said about me in print. I could list the prizes I have not won and the anthologies from which I have been omitted. It is best to believe the praiser and dismiss the praise.

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

Interviewing T.S. Eliot, I saved my cheekiest question for last. “Do you know you’re any good?” His revised and printed response was formal, but in person he was abrupt: “Heavens no! Do you? Nobody intelligent knows if he’s any good.

Then the surgeon general put terrifying labels on each pack, and by the millennium everyone decent knew that smoking was unforgiveable, like mass murder or Rush Limbaugh.

Exercise hurts, as well it might, since by choice and for my pleasure I didn't do it for eighty years.

An op-ed in the Boston Globe, remarking on near-corpses who keep on doing what they've always done, compared me to Mick Jagger. Never before had I been so honored. The columnist mentioned others: Keith Richards, Alice Munro, and William Trevor, who was born the year I was. At seventy, Jagger is a juvenile among us eighty-five-year-olds—but his face as he jumps and gyrates resembles something retrieved from a bog.

The people I love will mourn me, but I won't be around to commiserate. I become gloomy thinking of insensate things I will leave behind. My survivors will cram into plastic bags the tchotchkes I have lived with, expanding a landfill. I needn’t worry about my Andy Warhols. I fret over the striped stone that my daughter picked up at the pond, or my father’s desk lamp from college, or a miniature wooden milk wagon from the family dairy. My mother approaching ninety feared that we would junk the Hummel figurines that decorated her mantelpiece, kitsch porcelain dolls popular from the forties to the sixties. Thus, a box of them rests in my daughter’s attic. More important to me is this house, which my great-grandfather moved to in 1865—the family place for almost a century and a half. In the back chamber the generations stored everything broken or useless, because no one knew when they might come in handy. My kids and grandkids don’t want to live in rural isolation—why should they?—but it’s melancholy to think of the house emptied out. Better it should burn down.

Pam is cute and loves to work out. When her marriage ended, she found a new companion on an Internet site called Fitness Singles. At the moment, the two of them are bicycling through Italy. When I divorced, I looked for women who lazed around after poetry readings.

At sixteen, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs.

My problem isn’t death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. Yesterday I fell asleep in an armchair. I never fall asleep in a chair. Indolence overcomes me every day. I sit daydreaming about what I might do next: putting on a sweater or eating a piece of pie or calling my daughter. Sometimes I break through my daydream to stand up. At Christmas or birthday, I no longer want objects, even books. I want things I can eat, cheddar or Stilton, my daughter’s chili, and replacements for worn-out khakis, T-shirts, socks, and underwear.

When I was thirty, I lived in the future because the present was intolerable. When I was fifty and sixty, the day of love and work repeated itself year after year. Old age sits in a chair, writing a little and diminishing.