Travels with Epicurus (7 page)

No, I am not wandering off into a la-la land where I claim a memory is true simply because I
think
it is true. If I vividly recall my first moon walk as an astronaut, despite having it on good authority that I was never an astronaut and never came closer to the moon than the peak of Mount Washington, I will have to say that I have waited too long to meditate on the story of my life and have crossed the border into
old
old age where I simply cannot think straight. Somewhere between my possibly misremembered conversation with Professor Erikson and a moon walk fantasy-memory, I will need to draw a line. Not easy.

A series of lectures on the art of memoir held at the New York Public Library was called Inventing the Truth. Cute, but they were also on to something important with that title: when we try to put together our life story, we seek out patterns and themes, and that, in turn, determines which memories make the cut. And, of course, the other way around too: we sift through our memories for themes and then search for memories that validate them.

In our way, we are attempting to pull off the same artful trick that Dickens did: by picking and choosing scenes from our lives, we are trying to give it coherence, even—heaven help us—
meaning
. But arbitrary as our choices may be, they are all that is available to us for this task. In his five-pound magnum opus
Being and Nothingness
, Sartre wrote: “There is a magic in recollection. . . . In remembering we seem to attain that impossible synthesis . . . that life yearns for.”

In a philosophical old age, there is nothing I yearn for more than that impossible synthesis.

ON THE WISDOM OF WILD STRAWBERRIES

Toward the end of his popular course The Human Life Cycle, given at Harvard in the 1960s, Erikson would pull down the shades in his lecture hall and show Ingmar Bergman's classic film
Wild Strawberries
. Erikson said that no case history or psychological survey captured the “overall coherence, the ‘gestalt,' of a whole life” as well as this film. He considered it an extra­ordinarily sensitive and evocative modern portrayal of an old man reviewing his life and attempting both to make sense of it and come to terms with it.

It is easy for me to understand why Erikson found so much richness in
Wild Strawberries
. The film traces a single long day of travel, memories, dreams, presentiments, and encounters with family members and strangers in the life of a retired Swedish doctor and bacteriologist, Dr. Isak Borg. In the company of his daughter-in-law, who is currently estranged from his son, Borg drives to Lund University, where he is to receive a medal for fifty years of dedication to his profession. At the beginning of this journey, he is an embittered old man, isolated and cynical in the extreme about the consolations of religion and the possibility that his, or any, life could have some transcendent meaning.

Before his journey even begins, Borg is forced to confront the imminence of his death in a chilling dream of a clock without hands and a runaway horse-drawn hearse, which is revealed to contain his own corpse. The shadow of his mortality follows him for the rest of the day, compelling him to attempt one last time to make some kind of sense of his life. It is an extremely painful process for Borg.

Many of the memories that come to him, especially of his childhood, are virtually indistinguishable from his dreams, and, dreamlike, these memories are distorted by his emotions, particularly by his pervasive feeling of regret. Do these distortions make his memories any less real? Or do they highlight the significance of the memories for him? For Erikson, both of these questions miss Bergman's striking insight that we are able to “invent the truth” of our memories by the wisdom we bring to bear on them. Regret is not the only lens through which Borg can see his life.

But regret cannot be dismissed either. This is not a feel-good film in which Borg, in the end, concludes that all in all he actually made a pretty good go of it. Not at all. Still, by day's end Borg does achieve a redemption of sorts. He accepts his life, regrets and all, as
his own
—a human life, a life deeply connected to “my kind.” And he painfully reaches out to the people around him.

The Italian director Federico Fellini's classic life-review film
8½
tackles the question of regrets more directly and perhaps less subtly than
Wild Strawberries
, not to mention more lightheartedly, even comically. Living near the Mediterranean will do that to a man. In
8½
the central character, Guido, a filmmaker bereft of inspiration, finds himself reminiscing about the people and events in his life; these memories, in turn, become his sought-after film. Along the way, Guido has to contend with the comments of a cynical Greek chorus in the form of his archcritic, Daumier. Says Daumier, “What a monstrous presumption to believe that others might profit by the squalid catalog of your mistakes. And what good would it do to yourself to piece together the shreds of your life, your vague memories . . . ?”

Yet by the end of his journey, Guido is ecstatic bordering on manic: “Everything is just as it was before. Everything is confused again, but this confusion is
me
! . . . I am not afraid anymore of admitting that I seek and have not yet found. Only this way can I feel alive, only this way can I look into your eyes without shame. . . . Accept me as I am if you can. It is the only way we really have to find ourselves.”

—

The conversation I believe I had with Professor Erikson was about the ending of
Wild Strawberries
. I was twenty at the time and generally angry at the world, as many of us were in the early 1960s. I could not even begin to imagine what it would be like to be an old man looking back on my life, but this did not deter me from saying to my teacher, “Wasn't it a little late for Borg to try to connect to other people? After all, most of his life was over.” And Professor Erikson replied, simply, “He still had time.”

—

I get up from my bed and walk slowly to my desk window. Tasso has withdrawn from his terrace, but I am still able to see him inside his house, sitting at a table almost directly across from me. He is blotting raindrops off an old photograph with the sleeve of his shirt.

Chapter Four

A Sirocco of Youth's Beauty

ON EXISTENTIAL AUTHENTICITY

T
here is a hot wind blowing today, streaming up from ­Africa by way of Crete. It is neither fiery nor powerful enough to qualify as a sirocco (in Greek,
sirókos
), but that does not prevent the islanders from claiming that they are being stirred by the “
sirókos
effect”—hot tempers and intemperate passions. This is said to be the result of the dissonance caused by one's nerves expecting, as usual, to be cooled by a wind but instead being heated by it. From my seat at Dimitri's, not all the doors I hear slamming are caused by the wind.

Some islanders, like Tasso, are pretty sure that many people use the
sirókos
effect as an excuse for indulging in a tirade or some uninhibited sex. But Tasso, for one, is not likely to bring this analysis to anyone's attention. He once told me that he believes the so-called
sirókos
effect provides a welcome catharsis that keeps the body politic in balance in the same way that the excesses of Carnaval prepare Brazilians to endure the deprivations of Lent. I am sure Tasso was once a broad-minded, enlightened judge.

He and his friends are again seated at their table, chatting amiably, so far exclusively about the weather and what it portends. Then quite abruptly, they all go quiet. To a man, they are gazing up at the top step of the stone stairs that lead down from the coast path and past the taverna's terrace. A young woman has appeared there, and the wind is pressing her blouse and skirt against her splendid, voluptuous body. For a moment, she pauses there, perhaps enjoying the warm breeze, but more likely enjoying the effect she is having on the men looking up at her—her personal
sirókos
-effect indulgence. A few seconds later another woman appears, an older woman swathed in the traditional black garments of a reverent widow. She sizes up the situation immediately and brusquely grasps the young woman's arm and leads her down the steps. The young woman is named Elena. She is nineteen years old and is a classic Greek beauty with lustrous jet-black hair; clear, light olive skin; and large, dark, flashing eyes. The matron is her grandmother.

The old men unabashedly keep their eyes on Elena as she and her grandmother draw near to where they are sitting. When Elena and the old woman are directly in front of them, all the men rise slightly from their chairs and greet them. While saying, “Good day,” Tasso offers an elegant bow from his none-too-supple waist. It is clearly a bow of admiration and gratitude for Elena's beauty.

A moment later, grandmother and granddaughter gone, the conversation at Tasso's table resumes, but it is no longer about the weather. Flushed and animated, the men talk about beautiful women they have seen and known in their lives. Tasso takes the lead this time; he has traveled the most and married later than his companions. He begins by declaring that there is nothing more beautiful than a
young
woman and that is because youth itself is incomparable in its beauty. There is more than a hint of the philosopher-poet about Tasso on this subject. I am reminded of a friend of mine who, in a similar situation, riffed on Keats, saying, “Youth is beauty and beauty is youth.”

ON SEXUAL URGES VERSUS SEXUAL NOSTALGIA

Once word got out that prostitutes were welcome at Epicurus's table, a rumor spread in Athens that behind the Garden's walls, they were conducting orgies of, well, epicurean proportions. But the gossip could not have been further from the truth.

On the topic of sex, Epicurus was even less of what is now thought of as an epicurean, because sex, he believed, had a tendency to get out of hand, to skitter outside the all-important comfort zone. Marriage and procreation, yes, these provide lasting satisfactions (although Epicurus himself never married), but sex—and purely sexual love—inevitably leads to more unhappiness than its fleeting pleasures are worth. Sex exposes unnecessary and insatiable needs that bare vulnerabilities and promote anxieties. Epicurus mapped out the sequence in which sex causes misery: it starts with lust, moves on to ardor, peaks with consummation, and then goes directly to jealousy or boredom or both. No comfort for Epicurus there.

And not much there that I believe would resonate with Tasso and his friends or, for that matter, with me. For the likes of us, sex was usually well worth its headaches, even as we look back on it now—perhaps
especially
as we look back on it now. I am not suggesting that any of us are “dirty old men,” still preoccupied with sexual fantasies and future exploits. The closest Tasso comes to that is when he confesses to his friends that for a brief moment while gazing at Elena at the top of the stone stairway he felt a tingling in his groin; said Tasso, smiling, “The sleeping giant awakened. But then he yawned and went back to sleep.” No, I will leave such lusty, virile fantasies to my seventy-three-year-old friend who wears a testosterone patch and consumes seventy-two-hour Cialis.

ON EXISTENTIAL AUTHENTICITY

Thinking again about this forever youngster with the testosterone patch helps me sort out my evolving philosophy of a good and authentic old age. It is one thing to have an active libido but a listless phallus; in that case Cialis seems like a perfectly wonderful solution. But it is quite another to don a testosterone patch for the express purpose of
reactivating
one's libido. The latter amounts to wanting to want something that you currently don't want. And that is a very peculiar mind-set in which to be.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the twentieth-century existentialist who seems to have taken up a perch on my shoulder alongside ­Epicurus, provides a compelling way to look at this “forever young” conundrum. In Sartrean ethics we are directed to live authentically—“authenticity” being Sartre's take on the almost universally accepted injunction “To thine own self be true.” A person lives authentically if he operates from the principle that his existence precedes his essence. He is not
essentially
, say, a waiter or a Democrat or a daytime drinker; these are roles he may
choose
to play, but not innate qualities that he cannot transcend. For example, an authentic person cannot in good faith say, “I drink two scotches at lunch simply because that is just the way I am.” He would be treating himself as an object with immutable characteristics, not existing as a subject with the ability to choose who he is and what actions he takes.

For me, the most relevant piece here is Sartre's warning against treating oneself as an object. This is a rare bit of moral philosophy that I can actually
feel
: treating myself as an object makes me feel less alive, less myself. When, say, I find myself in the frame of mind where I am convinced that I am
essentially
an inconsiderate person and there's nothing to be done about it, I not only feel defeated, I feel that in denying my ability to willfully change I have stopped being truly alive. But at the same time it would be ridiculous not to accept what is beyond my control: I can no more choose to be a young man than I can choose to be tall and blue eyed.

Basically, most of us want to be as responsible for our lives as we can be—it is fundamental to making our lives our own. I choose, therefore I am who I am. So if in old age a man finds himself well past the period when he is perpetually “on the make,” is it authentic for him to infuse himself with testosterone so he can feel like someone he is not—namely, a horny young man? Wouldn't that be turning himself into an object—in this case some kind of sexual object?

I suppose a testosterone patch advocate could argue that the hormone supplement will not turn him into someone else but will simply add vigor and vitality to who he is now, much as an energy drink might. In fact, he may even contend that
choosing
to become horny again is a supreme act of self-creation, the height of authenticity.

Maybe. But I keep thinking that there are discrete stages of life, each with its own qualities, and that fudging these stages is to fudge the inherent value of each of them. It feels more authentic to me to recognize that human desires and capabilities change from one period of life to the next, and that to deny that they do is to miss out on what is most fulfilling about each stage. I am not about to try out for the role of the local young lothario; that would make about as much sense as trying out for third baseman in the local Little League—even if I were on steroids.

Why Cialis, yes, but testosterone, no? I admit I am making a somewhat arbitrary distinction here—generously, Sartre leaves loads of room for arbitrary distinctions—but taking Cialis seems more like getting treatment for a broken bone, so to speak, while the testosterone patch seems like tampering with what makes a man who he is at this particular point in his life. His libido isn't broken; it has run its natural course. Wanting to want something that he doesn't really want that much, and in his eighth decade, no less, just seems counterfeit, untrue to himself.

I don't know what to make of my sixty-eight-year-old friend who had her bosom beautified. Heaven knows, her surgeon did an impressive job. This friend told me that she now feels younger and more attractive, both of which make her happier, and it is always hard to argue with happiness.

ON EXISTENTIAL DENIAL

This testosterone patch/breast implant business is more than just an example of a typical “forever young” decision; it is emblematic of the entire enterprise of denying old age.

For the existentialists, as well as for most contemporary psychotherapists, there is nothing more deadly than the denial of the truth about our lives. A person living in denial is said to be not fully and truly alive, like the clueless denizens of Plato's cave, who mistake the shadows on the cave's wall for reality, while the facts of life—some hard to take—are vividly illuminated just outside the cave's wall.

Søren Kierkegaard, considered the father of existentialism, declared that man's ultimate denial is of the fact that he is mortal. We construct any number of death-denial strategies to avoid confronting this fact, from believing in an eternal afterlife to convincing ourselves that we will somehow “live on” through, say, our recently completed book of intimate poems. We do this for a perfectly understandable reason: the idea that we will die one day, never to live again, fills us with terror. But the alternative, Kierkegaard says, is to not wholly and genuinely live the one life we were given. Instead we clunk around in a cave of illusion.

In the mid-twentieth century, the anthropologist Ernest Becker further developed Kierkegaard's thesis in his Pulitzer Prize–winning work,
The Denial of Death
. Becker added a psychological and cultural dimension to death denial, seeing it as mankind's basic survival mechanism. Without this illusion, he argues, civilization would dissolve in despair. Becker believed that in this age of reason, when our hold on religious beliefs is tenuous, our failed attempt at grappling with mortality is the fundamental cause of the current upsurge of mental illness.

Denying that we are old is certainly not anywhere close, in order of magnitude, to denying that we are mortal, yet the two denials are clearly related. According to a recent survey, roughly half of Americans do
not
believe in an afterlife or any other form of immortality, the percentage of these nonbelievers increasing significantly among the more educated and affluent. Be that as it may, many of the forever young seem to be in denial that their personal expiration date is coming up soon. The result is that they do some fuzzy arithmetic when scheduling the rest of their lives. They figure they have loads of time to stay young, to remain in their go-get-'em stage of life.

But it doesn't add up that way. Because what happens then is that we proceed directly from the “forever young” stage of life to
old
old age, missing forever the chance at being a fulfilled old man “docked in the harbor, having safeguarded his true happiness.” We lose out for eternity on what I am beginning to agree with Epicurus is the pinnacle of life.

Kierkegaard and Becker would probably see a death-denial strategy hidden in the denial of old age. After all, one thing about the old-man stage of life is that it is the
last
stage—that is, not counting
old
old age, when we are barely alive. By skipping old age we can easily forget that we really are in the final stage of life.

So opting for the “forever young” route may turn out to be a tricky death-denial strategy after all: our defense system figures out that if we forgo old age, we might be able to give the slip to our consciousness of our mortality. Yes, Kierkegaard's admonition to acknowledge our mortality is addressed to people of all ages, but the forever young, like genuinely young people, believe they will have plenty of time to think about it later.

ON FRANK SINATRA AND A WISTFUL OLD AGE

The warm wind appears to have run its course, but Tasso and his companions are still reminiscing about past loves. The vivaciousness that was initiated by Elena's appearance at the top of the stone steps has settled into a more lyrical mood. There is bittersweetness in the air.

Even as a young man, Francis Albert Sinatra, a.k.a. “Old Blue Eyes,” had an uncommon gift for expressing the phenomenon of looking back at the joys and sorrows of past romances from the vantage point of a meditative and wistful old age. He conveyed nostalgia of the highest order, a nostalgia worthy of our attention. Like the European balladeers of his era—Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf, Gilbert Bécaud—Sinatra inhabited his songs. And especially as he grew older and his voice rawer, no one ever doubted that Sinatra was singing from personal experience. He knew whereof he crooned.

I am thinking of the song “Once Upon a Time” (by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse), on Sinatra's quintessential “looking back” album,
September of My Years
: