Travels with Epicurus (11 page)

I too listen to music more and more. Throughout my life, music has stirred me more than any other art form, and now, in old age, I find myself listening to it almost every evening, usually alone, for hours at a time. Lying on the couch in the dark, listening to, say, Mahler's Ninth Symphony or the Fauré Requiem or Puccini's “E lucevan le stelle” from
Tosca
, I too sometimes take off for a realm where self-consciousness and my separateness from everything in the universe fall away. I am lost in the stars. Like Henry, I am hesitant to name this a spiritual experience, but at times it feels awfully close to one. Eyes closed, breath stilled, listening to the exquisite melancholy of Cavaradossi's
romanza
to Tosca under the stars as he awaits his execution crying out, “Never have I loved life more!” sometimes—just sometimes—I can feel my yearnings made sublime.

And what about those all-too-rare moments when a glimpse of sky or a leaf dancing in the wind suddenly plucks me out of my day-to-day consciousness and sets me floating in some transcendent kingdom? Are these enough to answer an old man's spiritual yearnings? And is there any way I can make them more of my daily life?

I guess all I really know how to do is to be
open
to
enlightenment, wholly alert to it in my head and heart. Zen Buddhism teaches mindfulness as the path to enlightenment. Mindfulness has several meanings, some considered ineffable, but fundamentally it appears to mean full consciousness, a continuous, clear awareness of the present moment. A mindful person is fully engaged in what he is presently doing—be it walking, pondering, or simply breathing. And he is ever on guard against slipping into everydayness, that is, losing full consciousness or numbing himself to it. In my old age, freed from one of my chronic “mad masters”—reflexive skepticism—I may finally be able to do that.

One of my favorite William Blake poems, “Auguries of Innocence,” begins:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Perhaps I am most likely to find the answer to my yearnings that way, by being here now—
fully
here now.

ON THE HOLINESS OF THE ORDINARY

The pungent aroma of roasting lamb pervades my terrace. The Greek name for Easter, Pasha, is derived from the Hebrew name for Passover, Pesach, and the paschal lamb that was sacrificed during the first Passover feast celebrating the Jews' liberation from Egypt. Greek Easter and Passover are also related by the dates on which they fall each year: both are calculated by the phases of the moon. Lamb is always the main course for Easter dinner in Greece.

I am having dinner tonight with Tasso and Sophia at their home. A few days ago, as Tasso was leaving his group of friends at Dimitri's taverna, he stopped at my table and asked me if I had plans for Easter dinner. When I said I did not, he insisted that I join his family for the feast.

Before I knock at the door to Tasso's courtyard, I rehearse my greeting, “Kalo Pasha!” (Good Easter to you); as a Jew, even if a nonpracticing one, I feel more comfortable with that than with the alternative Greek Easter greeting,
Christos anesti!
(Christ is risen!). I then primp up the bouquet of field gladiolas I picked on this morning's walk. I knock, and Tasso opens the door.

“Kalo Pasha!
”

“Kalo Pesach!
”
Tasso replies and he embraces me.

Did I hear that right? Did Tasso say,
“Good Passover”
to me?

He did indeed. I am convinced of it by the sparkle in his eyes. And when his lovely, white-haired wife, Sophia, appears behind him, and I present her with the flowers, she too says, “Kalo Pesach!
”
Clearly, she has rehearsed her greeting too.

In this moment, I realize the depth of lovingness in my dinner invitation. I am certain that Tasso anticipated my discomfort with the boisterous burning of Judas in the bay. In fact I am sure he understood my sensitivity to it better than I did myself: it did not just spring from my generalized Christopher Hitchens–like antipathy to the corrupting influence of organized religion; it came from my knowledge—Tasso's and my knowledge—that hatred of the betrayer, Judas, often contains overtones of anti-Semitism. What an incredibly compassionate man Tasso is.
Christos anesti
,
indeed!

Tasso and Sophia's son, Kosmas, and Kosmas's wife and teenage son are here too, in from Athens for the holiday. Like Tasso and Sophia, they are warm, welcoming, animated people.

The leg of lamb is still roasting on a spit over an open fire in Tasso's garden. After all, it is only nine in the evening, far too early for the main course of a Greek dinner on a warm spring night. First, ouzo and mezes, a seemingly endless parade of plates containing grilled octopus, toasted cheeses, pork sausages spiced with orange zest, olives, stuffed grape leaves, cucumber and yogurt salad, on and on. The cook for each of the mezes proudly passes his specialty around the garden, announcing his personal touch—for Kosmas's son, Nikolaos, it is the mint leaves he stirred into his eggplant salad.

Toasts are made: to Niko for passing his college-qualifying examination; to Kosmas's wife, Despina, for publishing a poem in an Athens magazine; to Tasso and Sophia's aging dog, ­Cybele, for surviving another winter. Cybele is named after the ancient goddess of nature, and this is the only tribute that has a reference to anything remotely theological. Neither Jesus nor the Resurrection is mentioned, nor, for that matter, is Moses or the parting of the Red Sea.

For devout Christians, what is happening in Tasso's garden represents a corruption of religion. Easter has lost its meaning here. They are removing the divine Resurrection from this holy day and replacing it with a profane holiday party. Even if I had not been invited, I am pretty sure Tasso's feast would have skipped religious testimonies and gestures.

But sitting here, under a budding lemon tree, among these lively, loving people, I am absolutely certain that Tasso's garden is alive with something essentially holy. I see it in the warm glances exchanged around the fire. I hear it in Kosmas's tender teasing of his father for his habit of depositing olive pits in his shirt pocket. I feel it all around me.

I owe much of my appreciation of what is happening here in Tasso's garden to my age. As an old man, I am at peace with this peacefulness. There is nothing I want from these people except their companionship. There is no new excitement or accomplishment I long for. Indeed at this moment there is nothing more I want from the cosmos than I have right here: “to see a World” in their faces
.

This must be what old Epicurus felt at his long table of friends in the Garden—the sublimity of being among good people. I find myself suddenly missing my wife and daughter more acutely than I have in the entire month I've been away. I wish I could be sharing these blessed moments with them.

And now I remind myself that I must heed William Blake's warning not to attempt to cling to a sublime experience, but rather allow it to come and go with grace. In another of his metaphysical poems, the four-line jewel called “Eternity,” he writes:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in Eternity's sunrise.

—

I stand and raise my glass. “It is a great privilege to be here,” I say. Then, smiling, I add, “In fact, it is a great privilege simply to  be.”

Epilogue

Returning Home

ON A MINDFUL OLD AGE

T
he pale green hills outside my window offer a soft contrast to the piercing landscape I have left behind. I am home in our small wooden house in Western Massachusetts, sitting at my study's desk, with my Hydra notebooks in front of me. Across the hallway, my wife, Freke, is working on an article for a Dutch magazine. My dog, Snookers, snoozes at my feet.

For the first few days of my return, I did little but talk with Freke; we had a month's worth of stories stored up. We chattered happily for hours on end. Coincidentally, while I was away, Freke's editor in Amsterdam had sent her down to Florida for several days to investigate a new American phenomenon: old people who return to work for financial reasons. The Dutch “hook” was that in Holland retirement at age sixty-five is mandatory for everyone.

Some of the oldsters Freke interviewed in Florida said that going back to work exhausted them. Many had taken jobs less interesting than the ones they had in the prime of their lives, and they found this disheartening. Yet a good number of them confessed that they could “make do” on their pensions but were unwilling to downgrade their living accommodations and general lifestyle to do so. I wondered if these people might take a lesson from Epicurus—scale down and enjoy the leisurely pleasures of old age.

Yet Freke also told me that many of these old folks said they were reinvigorated by being back in the workplace. It felt good to be a productive member of society again; it was gratifying simply to be busy. One oldster said she felt like she had “come out of seclusion.”

As it happened, on my last day in Kamini, Dimitri handed me an article, from the Greek news blog Ekathimerini. It ­described how a good number of Greek pensioners—many of whom were still waiting for their pensions from their bankrupt government—had returned from Athens to their home villages in Crete, where they had taken up farming. One was quoted as saying, “Here you can go a week without spending a single euro. You get fresh food from your farm and if you need something extra, like olive oil for example, you can get it from a fellow far­mer.” This man, and many others, sounded delighted with this surprising turn in their lives in old age. It is tempting to say that they have serendipitously unearthed Epicurus's garden.

—

One problem with philosophical thinking—as with most academic disciplines—is that it tends to stick ideas into absolute categories, leaving little wiggle room for the complexities and inherent internal contradictions of ordinary human experience. One of Aristotle's lasting contributions to philosophy and science was his counsel, “We must not expect more precision than the subject-matter admits.” And the question, “What is the best way to be an old man?” is far from being a precise one. In fact it's about as open-ended as they get.

Maybe Epicurus's rather dogmatic prescription for ­happiness—to first and foremost free oneself from “the prison of everyday affairs and politics”—simply does not correspond to what makes many old men and women in America today genuinely happy. To be true to oneself, a person needs to make his own decisions about what brings him happiness. Indeed if I am going to be true to myself, I have to ask myself what I think I am doing here at my desk, with my notes spread out in front of me, at the age of seventy-three. Clearly, I think I still have some work left to do.

Is there an acceptable golden mean between the “forever young” ethos and the Platonic/Epicurean/existential ideal of a fulfilled and authentic old man? Can we split the difference without compromising both extremes so much that we end up with a mushy philosophy of old age?

Could it all come down to something as mundane as how we schedule our remaining time? Say, work twenty hours of the week and devote the rest of our time to these essential last-chance old man's endeavors? But that way, wouldn't we inevitably be reentering a “schedule mode” of existence, complete with time limits? And once we have opted for that mode, even if we have scheduled time for playing with our friends (and dog) and reflecting on our past, we will still have one eye on the clock, forsaking the rich and luxurious “lived time” of an unhurried old man.

—

For hours now, I have been reviewing my Hydriot notebooks and trying to decipher my marginal scribbles in my philosophy books. My notes to myself alternately strike me as simplistic and compelling, occasionally both. I find myself feeling like Guido in
8½
: “Everything is just as it was before. Everything is confused again, but this confusion is
me
!” I cannot help wondering if my quest for a relevant philosophy of authentic old age was nothing more than a befuddled old geezer barking at the moon.

But just maybe there was something faintly Heideggerian in my quest. Clumsy as it was, maybe it was “a daring attempt to fathom” the “unfathomable question” of what makes a good and gratifying old age. Perhaps simply raising the question has been some kind of end in itself
.

ON GROWING OLD MINDFULLY

Maybe that Buddhist notion of mindfulness will lead to the most valuable way of living a good and authentic old age. Perhaps whatever we do, we must try to remain mindful that we are old: that this is the last stage of life in which we can be fully conscious, that our time in this stage is limited and constantly diminishing, and that we have extraordinary opportunities in this stage that we never had before and will never have again. Perhaps if we are as mindful as we possibly can be of where we are in life right now, the most fulfilling options of how to live these years will reveal themselves to us, not by rigorously following the prescriptions of the wise philosophers, yet by being ever mindful of their wisdom.

By simply being aware of the old-age options that men like Plato, Epicurus,
Seneca, Montaigne, Sartre
,
and
Erikson
examined and commended to us, we can make authentic choices for how we want to conduct this period of our lives. We can try their ideas on for size, see how they fit with our considered values. This may be what it means to grow old philosophically.

—

Out my study window, I see that my wife is now sitting in an old wooden chair by the garden. She has a manuscript in her hands, but she is not reading it; she is gazing lazily out at the pale green hills. I leave my notebooks scattered on my desk and go out to sit next to her. I now realize that a request has been twitching in the back of my mind for several weeks now—a request I wish to make of her and our daughter and some of my friends.

“I think I need your permission to become an old man,” I say.

She laughs, of course. “My permission? What for?”

I laugh too. “I don't know. I guess I think you'd rather I stay young or at least
try
to stay young.”

“Permission granted,” she says, smiling. “Anyway, I think it's too late—that sounds like an old man's question.”