The book has that interesting interlude about faces in which you make the observation that it's our encounters with the faces of others -- the experiences they contain, the hardships and triumphs and needs they display to the world -- that form the basis of our ethical sensibilities. Then you write, "If the face is where the ethics of society begins, then what happens to a society when the aging face is surgically altered, cosmetically subdued, and its accumulated character falsified?" Well, what does happen then?
The elder who is eliminating what time has done to the face, what life has done to the face, is making a statement for others to see: This is the way to be a good old person -- it is to defeat this body that is doing things to you. Because you haven't changed. Your body's changing. It's doing these things to you, and it's unfair. You feel like you did when you were 30. Your innocence remains. And this is the message these changed faces are presenting. The supermarket's filled with many other faces, especially if you live in a poor district as I do, there are many faces that carry suffering and tragedy and defeat. But no one wants to look at them, and usually no one does.
Here's another quotation from the book: "The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way." What does one need to do, or to remain mindful of, to cultivate that harder way?
To yield a lot. Yielding. Let the other guy win. Take a simple example: You hire somebody to do something around your house and you pay them their price without arguing about it. Or you give a little larger tip than you're accustomed to at dinner. Or you allow the waitress to make her mistake. Now these are usually infuriating things, and it's very easy to go right off. Restaurant rage! But there's something about yielding -- presenting your opinion about something, as the old buzzard that you are, but letting it go, too.
What is it you gain by yielding?
You're more flexible, you can go with life, you can receive life. You don't know what impressions you'll be open to once you've let down your own fixed positions -- which tend to be defenses, refusals to let anything else in. You lose some of the fears you have about defending what you believe, or what you experience. Fear is a huge thing for older people. The older people that one admires seem to be fearless. They go right out into the world. It's astounding. Maybe they can't see or they can't hear, but they walk out into the street and take life as it comes. They're models of courage, in a strange way.
One more passage from the book: "Late in the night, we realize that the acts of our lives have not been shadow-free, that we are shadowed by curses and sins -- not because we are cursed and sinful by nature, but because with the very origins of the world, one half of which belongs to night, come fearful figures who demand we know them." This suggests that as we age, it becomes easier to forgive ourselves for the missteps and transgressions that have gone before. Can you say more about why this becomes easier?
I'm not sure it becomes easier. I put a lot of emphasis on contrition. I think that you really face the hurts you have done to people close to you -- lovers, wives and husbands, associates. I think that contrition goes with aging. There's more time for reviewing those things, because the projects -- what I've got to do every day -- are diminished. A lot of the advice we give to old people in America is about starting a new career at 65! "I used to work for the railroad, but now I've taken up pottery and opened my own little shop." And that's fine. I don't object to it. It's only that there's something else the soul may need besides activity.
This reckoning with past demons that you're talking about -- is it fair to say it's partly a matter of coming to take one's actions and oneself less personally in a way?
Yes, yes. I think that's a good point. It doesn't sound that way; it sounds like a matter of personally owning your past. But I think you begin to see them in a larger perspective. "Wow, I was really wrapped up in envy. I really did envy that guy." Or "I was really paranoid for a while -- I was haunting my husband." Or my wife. We get a better perspective on the phantoms that have taken hold of us at different times in our lives. And you can be a much better mentor, a much better elder to others, if you've met all those night-time demons. Because a mentor needs to have faced the fears and the shame that assault younger people -- and as you get older, you do come to better terms with those bugaboos known as fear and shame.
This is obviously a book whose point of view and whose imperatives have been dictated to a large extent by your own experience of aging. If you don't mind my asking, what has been the hardest thing about growing older for you?
Well, it's not physical. The most difficult thing I have to cope with is that I'm still terribly crowded with things I haven't finished and want to do. I mean, my own work. It isn't that I want to go to the Gobi Desert. What I wrote about pulling in the outposts, that's absolutely true. When I say things I want to do, it isn't things I want to own or things I want to learn, or even duties that I feel I need to serve, like some political cause. It's really the fact that I owe my work something, and I don't feel I have the time, or maybe even the competence, to do it justice. That's the most difficult thing I have to deal with. I've given up a lot of keeping up with things. I can't read all the books I want to read, I can't watch all the phenomena that interest me in the world. The work calls me, and sometimes I wonder whether this is an obsession and I should drop it, or it's a necessity I'm obliged to fulfill. How do you tell a necessity from an obsession?
About the writer
Steve Perry is a writer and critic who lives in Minneapolis.
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