Travels with Epicurus (5 page)

So, according to Svendsen, in order to fill his time, modern man got busy cooking up personal goals, seeking out challenging activities, and, most significantly, looking for
newness
. New experiences and new things couldn't possibly be boring, could they? Well, apparently they often could. After finally getting to be vice president of the company, another goal looms just ahead—becoming senior vice president, then president, then president of a larger company, and then of an even larger one. It can feel endless and never completely satisfying, and at a certain point it can start to feel pointless. Newness itself gets old. At the twelfth place to see before dying, viewing exotic terrain can get to be old hat—you've already done “exotic” eleven times. Old people are often particularly conscious of the half-life of newness. The phrases “the more things change, the more they remain the same” and “nothing would surprise me at this point in my life” come easily to our lips.

If a man cannot invest his life, or any part of it, with meaning, all he has left are distractions from meaninglessness, although few of us acknowledge them as such. But here and there we probably have intimations that these distractions are meaningless themselves. Svendsen writes, “The most hyperactive of us are precisely those who have the lowest boredom thresholds. We have an almost complete lack of downtime, scurrying from one activity to the next because we cannot face tackling time that is ‘empty.' Paradoxically enough, this bulging time is often frighteningly empty when viewed in retrospect
.
”

I can relate, especially in my old age. Looking back at the entire year I spent desperately trying to capture the heart of a certain wild, glamorous, and extremely fickle woman, I now see quite clearly that I had convinced myself that winning her would give my life some desperately needed meaning. At the time, I was recently back from my dropout year and having one hell of a time trying to reignite the enthusiasm I once had for writing funny stuff for television. I felt lost—at loose ends. Of course, chasing this woman ultimately did not give my life any meaning; in fact at a certain point, after breathlessly achieving my goal, I became bored. I inevitably returned to the emptiness that had sent me running after her in the first place.

The predestined disappointment built into desperately yearned-for newness has found its expression in many ironic aphorisms, like the bedouin saying, “Beware of what you desire, for you shall always get it.” And my favorite, from Oscar Wilde: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.”

In Svendsen's view, modern man has tried to deal with boredom by treating the symptoms instead of the disease, by searching for “meaning surrogates”—like my fickle woman—instead of sitting still and, just possibly, contemplating what a meaningful life might be.

The “forever young” strategy of combating old age's boredom with super busyness certainly sounds like the “same old, same old”—an epilogue of “meaning surrogates” right up until the bitter end.

But what's an old man to do if he doesn't keep busy? Vegetate? Sleep all day? Relentlessly bellyache, as my mother did, about the fact that she,
of all people
, had been singled out to become an old lady?

ON PLAYING IN OLD AGE

For many philosophers, idleness—both the idleness that is forced upon us and the idleness we choose—is actually one of old age's greatest gifts. It gives us time for that wondrous human activity,
play
. In his popular political essay “In Praise of Idleness,” the twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell chides us for failing to use our free time for, of all things,
fun
: “It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”

The contemporary wit Steven Wright makes a comparable point more succinctly: “Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.”

Play's the thing wherein we old folks can be rescued from boredom; that is, if we can only remember
how
to play. Russell got it right: just having fun for its own sake has been devalued to a waste of time, and as a result we seem to have lost our capacity for one of life's greatest delights, a delight to which we old folk are singularly suited.

Another book I brought with me is the classic text on recreation
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
, by the Dutch historian and philosopher Johan Huizinga. Alas, unlike Svendsen, who brings boredom to life, Huizinga analyzes play to death; after several dozen philological deconstructions of the words “seriousness” and “fun,” we really do get the idea that the two concepts have very little in common. Still, some of Huizinga's ideas strike me as pertinent to a philosophy of old age.

Not only is play a human cultural universal, but most animals are top-notch players too. Whether it is a pair of bear cubs splashing one another in a stream (where, judging by their mother's impatient reaction, they are
supposed
to be learning how to fish) or my dog, Snookers, running ever-expanding circles around the spruce tree in our yard back home—the animal instinct for aimless fun is clearly built in. Ditto for us wingless bipeds, especially when we are still at that stage of life when notions of accomplishment and making something of ourselves have yet to put the damper on just plain fooling around.

The transformation of pure play into competitive play—the ancient Greeks were Olympic champs at this—constituted one of the first such dampers. We went from pointless play to keeping one eye on the scoreboard. And our current dedication to sports as self-improvement, complete with personal trainers and strange garments made out of spandex, has virtually wiped out any lightheartedness remaining in play. Even when taking a walk, distance and elapsed time are now often recorded, then measured against previous records as we compete with ourselves for our personal best. Play is no longer something we do with our idle time; it is another ambitious activity crammed into our schedules.

This idea of losing oneself is fundamental to most uses of the word “play.” When a person does some playacting, she loses herself in the part she is playing; indeed the whole enterprise is called “putting on a play.” In play, we leap into the realm of imagination. Plato pointed out that “leaping” is at the root of many words for play; he believed that the desire to leap, as in leaping for joy, is basic to all leg-bearing animals, including humans. Inside our imaginations, we play out a fantasy—say, that we are a knight of the Round Table or that the fate of mankind depends on whether we beat the odds in a game of solitaire. And even when we play a game that has clear parameters—say, stickball—the rules of play are ultimately inconsequential: whether we win or lose, or even follow the rules to the letter or not, it has no serious consequences in the nonplay world; after all, it's just a game.

Of course, we also can lose ourselves in serious matters, such as work, but the critical distinction is that in nonplay activities we never lose our sense of purpose, our goal. We could, for example, lose ourselves in the activity of writing a business memo, but hovering over us throughout is the fact that we have to get it done, and done well, before the end of the business day. The only goal of pure play is itself. We do not even play
in order
to have fun; we simply have fun playing. Just ask a child or, for that matter, a talkative bear cub: he doesn't initiate play for the
purpose
of enjoyment, but he nonetheless has a dandy time doing it.

ON OLD MEN AT PLAY

My earliest memory of seeing old men happily at play was in Paris in the early sixties. At the time, I was taking graduate courses in philosophy at the Sorbonne, courses that would have baffled me in English let alone French, and I was feeling a bit lonely and pathetic in a late-adolescent, vaguely romantic, Parisian sort of way. Lugging around my seven-hundred-page copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's
L'être et le néant
(
Being and Nothingness
), I took moody walks, and on one of these I wandered through a stone archway in the fifth arrondissement that led into a park called the Arènes de Lutèce. In this nearly hidden spot, I came upon the remnants of the Romans' first-century outpost, complete with a mammoth amphitheater.

I climbed to the top of the gallery and sat. Below me, on the same ground where gladiators once played their lethal games, a group of six old Frenchmen were playing
pétanque
, a variation of the lawn-bowling game
boules.
What struck me immediately was the grace and decorum of these old guys: all wore jackets and ties or cravats, some sported berets, and their demeanor with one another was both genteel—a finely executed bowl was acknowledged by the others with polite bows—and warmly familiar. They smiled and laughed frequently; they touched one another's backs and shoulders easily and often. But above all, this sextet of handsome, dignified old geezers played with gusto.

I found the spectacle deeply moving. For reasons that were not clear to me at the time, I was suddenly filled with a hopefulness that had been absent for so long I did not at first recognize it. The players' happiness floated up to me, embraced me. Looking back now, I believe that much of the exhilaration I felt came from the fact that these were
old
guys, at the far end of life from where I sat, yet they were still reveling in the joy of being alive. I cannot imagine anything that would have been more inspiring for a young man stepping unsteadily into adult life.

Was the joy that filled these old Frenchmen a result of their immersion in play or was the play an expression of the joy that already resided inside them, an outlet for that joy? This is the kind of question that philosophers and psychologists (and Huizinga) ask, but I am content simply to know that pure play and joy are intimately connected.

I am sure it was no coincidence that only days after watching that game of
pétanque
I withdrew from graduate school and set out to have as much fun as I could before my money ran out and I needed to return to the States to earn a living. Maybe it was the Epicurean in me: I was inspired to play. I may also have taken comfort in a neat piece of etymology that a wry Sorbonne classmate had recently taught me: in ancient Greek the original meaning of the word for school was “leisure.” This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue
Euthydemus
, in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by “playing” with ideas in his leisure time than by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and senses to the pleasures of life.

Enough said. I was outta there!

Only weeks after witnessing this game of
pétanque
,
I was roaming the Spanish countryside and came upon a group of old men and young children harvesting almonds. Together they had spread blankets under an almond tree; then the youngsters jiggled the limbs of the tree with poles and rakes, shaking the hulls loose while the old men stood around the blankets' edges, kicking back fallen nuts that were skittering off them. It was a perfect division of labor: the very young jiggling vigorously, the very old kicking leisurely.

After watching them for a few minutes, I sensed a regular beat to their movements, a captivating cross rhythm of jiggles and kicks worthy of an Elvin Jones drum solo. And sure enough, a little later they all began to sing a folk song that I am sure had been sung for centuries by Spanish children and old men gathering almonds together, a song that matched the cadences of their movements.

Although the song was clearly well known to all of them, it burst from their throats with the spontaneity of, well, a leap of joy. They had transformed work into play and, as with all pure play, they had lost themselves in it. It was an act of communal transcendence, more uplifting in my view than the chanting of any hymn or prayer I ever heard in a synagogue or church. Listening to the almond pickers' song, my spirit soared.

Young children make natural playmates for old folks. We have fabulous qualities in common that have gone missing from people in that sticky stage between immaturity and old age. For starters, we are both naturally into patient slowness. A little kid can spend hours unhurriedly repeating the same operation: say, constructing a tower out of building blocks, and when it totters and falls, giggling and starting all over again. In my old age, I can get into that one; I can easily lose myself in it. I am in no hurry to get that tower up there once and for all, as I was when I was a middle-aged father perpetually conscious of the pressing responsibilities that awaited me once I was done with this endless tower-building business. In those days, I might have even become frustrated by the utter futility of trying to get that tower up permanently; it would have smacked too much of Sisyphus and plunged me into existential angst. Not now. The goal—a fully erect tower—is only incidental to the game. In fact, when the tower collapses, I have a good laugh too. The kid and I are having unadulterated fun.

This natural affinity for slowness that young children and oldsters share tips over into shared intellectual games—yes,
intellectual
games. The little kid who asks his grandfather, “Why do birds fly?” or “Where do babies come from?” has come to the right person. An old man can get down on all fours for questions like these; he is in no hurry to get to conclusive answers. Both young and old alike sense that after the facts about wings and fertilized eggs have been dispensed with, they are still faced with some basic philosophical questions, say, about the purpose of a life (to fly?) and the ultimate beginnings of things (but where did the
first
egg come from?). They share the foundation of all philosophical inquiry: pure and playful wonder. That is why the child keeps asking “But why?” after every answer Gramps gives him, and why Gramps could happily keep trying to come up with answers until the sun goes down.