Travels with Epicurus (8 page)

Once upon a time

A girl with moonlight in her eyes

Put her hand in mine

And said she loved me so,

But that was once upon a time

Very long ago.

And later in the lyric:

Once upon a time

The world was sweeter than we knew.

Everything was ours,

How happy we were then.

But somehow once upon a time

Never comes again.

Sentimental stuff? You bet. But I have never been of the opinion that philosophy and sentiment—even sentimentality—do not mix. In fact it is the estrangement of ordinary human emotions from philosophy that has made much of contemporary academic philosophy irrelevant to many of us.

Sinatra is sharing with us how it feels to recall being a young man blissful with love and hope. He relives his feelings from those years and, by God, they were absolutely wonderful. Yet it does an old man good to realize that was then and this is now. What remains, the memory of young love as seen through the filter of subsequent experience, has a sweetness of its own. The singer reminds us that we have lived through this period of intense, sometimes tempestuous emotions, and our lives feel richer for it. Not the least of it is that we have lived through those astonishing loves and heartbreaks and we are still here.

When Sinatra sings that “once upon a time never comes again,” he manages to convey both the sorrow in the fact that this former stage of life can never be repeated and relief that this is so. He appears to be saying, “Those days were astonishing, yet I don't think I could handle that tempestuousness now—­actually, I don't even think I'd
want
to now.”
And in this he is very clearly acknowledging his mortality: once upon a time 
never
comes again.

While Kierkegaard would have us face death straight in the face and tremble with fear, Sinatra would have us offer a mournful nod to the face of death while at the same time wistfully extracting pleasure from our recollections of the sweetness in our younger lives. I am not convinced that Kierkegaard's ­acknowledgement of his mortality is any more authentic than Sinatra's.

ON ROMANTIC PLEASURES RESERVED FOR OLD AGE

We find the same bittersweet appreciation of the poetic consciousness of old age when Sinatra sings the Alec Wilder and Bill Engvick classic “I See It Now”:

That world I knew is lost to me

Loves have come and gone

The years go racing by

I live as best I can

And all at once I know it means the making of a man

I see it now

I see it now

The “making of a man”: the accumulation of vivid experiences and the opportunity to look back upon them with both wonder and gratitude.

And in the ballad “This is All I Ask,” by Gordon Jenkins, Sinatra puts an aging boulevardier's spin on Plato's appreciation of the “calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold”:

Beautiful girls,

Walk a little slower

When you walk by me.

Lingering sunsets,

Stay a little longer

With the lonely sea.

Like Tasso and his companions, Sinatra is still entranced by the sight of a beautiful woman, but now he can appreciate her beauty more purely, more aesthetically, than in his younger life, and that is because her beauty puts no demands on him. He is not compelled to chat her up, to initiate a seduction. For one thing, that is no longer an option for him—and, yes, there is something terribly sad about this. But now to simply and freely behold this beauty in front of him is refined enchantment, a pleasure reserved for old age. This is all he asks.

ON THE GRATIFICATIONS OF BEING MARRIED IN OLD AGE

Neither Epicurus nor Plato devoted a great number of recorded thoughts to the subject of marriage. It was necessary for procreation, and procreation was natural and good, but beyond that these philosophers don't appear to have much of interest to say on the subject. Plato's student Aristotle even went so far as to argue that only men and women who would be
likely to have children together
should be allowed to be united in wedlock. (One does have to wonder how Aristotle would have determined that likelihood; after all, we all come from a long line of fertile ancestors.) Different times these were, including the fact that Plato, like many others in his culture, appeared to enjoy gay sex more than heterosexual sex; and since gay marriage was not an option at the time, this probably put a crimp in his philosophical thoughts about wedlock.

But even if Aristotle stressed utility over sentiment in his appraisal of marriage, he clearly appreciated the companionship it provided, a quality that grows in significance as a couple reaches old age. Wrote Aristotle: “Between man and wife friendship seems to exist by nature; for man is naturally inclined to form couples—even more than to form cities, inasmuch as the household is earlier and more necessary than the city.” Then again, Aristotle, who apparently never met an old man he liked, wrote in Book II of his
Rhetoric
that the old “neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but following the hint of Bias they love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love.” Aristotle is said to have had a warm relationship with his second wife (his first wife died) up into his sixties, a ripe old age in those days, but one does have to wonder how his love-hate paradox played out around the family hearth.

Succeeding philosophers had a great deal to say about both the value and pitfalls of marriage, although few commented on a union that endures into old age. The big Christian thinkers viewed the married state less as a utilitarian enterprise than a sacrament, even if they qualified this sacrament as the only ­acceptable option for dealing with one's lust. Wrote Saint Augustine, “Abstinence from all sexual union is better even than marital intercourse performed for the sake of procreating.” In other words, if you cannot control yourself, get married, but for heaven's sake don't enjoy it.

Since Saint Augustine, many philosophers have weighed in on the subject of wedlock, primarily as just one social contract among many others in a well-functioning state. In his
Meta­physics of Morals
, Kant attempts to reconcile his imperative not to treat others as objects with what happens when two people bind themselves in matrimony: “While one person is acquired by the other
as if it were a thing
, the one who is acquired acquires the other in turn; for in this way each reclaims itself and restores its personality.” It is a sort of “turnabout is fair play” argument. And, of course, contemporary feminist philosophers have focused on marriage as the fundamental way that men limit women's freedom; the feminist Shulamith Firestone goes so far as to argue that women would do better to opt for nonmonogamy or lesbian separatism.

To my surprise, I find the most relevant commentary on a marriage that continues into the sunset years comes from the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an atypically practical frame of mind, wrote, “When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”

Who would have thought that at heart that nutty nihilist Nietzsche was actually a marriage counselor?

—

I know from a private conversation with Tasso that he has always loved being married, and now in old age he particularly values the unique companionship marriage offers. I do also. Although both of us married relatively late in our lives, by now each of us has been married for a very long time. We agree that a long marriage provides one of old age's greatest consolations, in no small part because as the marriage ages, the number of shared memories increases.

On Dimitri's terrace, Tasso is now telling the story of the first day he saw Sophia, his wife of forty-two years and the mother of his three children. He says the sunlight followed her like a spotlight as she strolled by him on Konstantinoupoleos Avenue just as he was leaving his office. He tells his friends that often when he looks at Sophia at breakfast in the morning, he sees that beautiful young woman strolling down Konstantinoupoleos Avenue.

Sing it, Frankie!

Chapter Five

The Tintinnabulation of Sheep Bells

ON MELLOWING TO METAPHYSICS

W
ith a bag of books slung over my shoulder, I am walking the ancient mountainside road to the tiny village of Vlihos, a few miles west of Kamini, where I am lodging. During my first long stay on the island, in my twenties, this was a fifteen-minute stroll; now, factoring in my rest stops, it takes close to an hour. I imagine that the brisk stride of my youth felt more invigorating than my current puttering pace. There was a sense of urgency to everything I did as a young man—the general urgency of youth. I can imagine a forever youngster jogging past me in collegiate shorts and T-shirt, full of youthful, or at least
youthlike
, vigor. He would definitely get to Vlihos before me. But I am not in a hurry today. I am a contentedly dawdling old man.

For the second respite on my walk, I perch on a granite slab that offers a panoramic view of a grassy valley where sheep are safely grazing. I now become conscious of the faint tintinnabulation of the sheeps' bells, a plainsong from another era. A few moments pass and another sound joins the bells, scattered bursts, sharper, higher up on the treble scale, like a flute capriccio in a Vaughan Williams pastorale; it is the insistent call of a migrant babbler bird. A dog barks from somewhere down in Kamini and is quickly answered by a donkey's bray in the mountain above me—the horn section. I set down my bag, light up a cigarette, and listen.

Yes, I smoke—shamelessly. Back home in America, I have to endure insulting looks and comments—often from perfect strangers—when I light up. It is more than the scourge of secondhand smoke that offends these people; it is what they see as my perverse self-destructiveness. They are right, of course; tobacco is undoubtedly bad for my health and will probably shorten my life. As a defensive response to their comments, I often say, “Hey, I'm too old to die young.”

Not exactly brilliant repartee, but it does make some personal sense to me. Like many men at my stage of life, I routinely scan the obituary page to find the age at which people are dying these days. Most often, it is in their seventies and eighties, the latter usually after a “long illness.” If a person dies in his fifties or younger, this is sometimes labeled an “untimely death,” and if I am in a Kierkegaardian frame of mind, I grimace at that description:
all
deaths are untimely compared to immortality; the exact age of a death is just a quibble.

Nonetheless, when I was younger, say in my fifties, I would shudder at the obits' reminder that in all probability I only had twenty-odd years left. And, because obituaries are usually devoted to people of noteworthy accomplishment, I would go into a panic—I only had twenty-odd years left to make something of myself!

But much to my surprise, when I, at the age of seventy-three, read the obituary of a man who passed away at the age of, say, seventy-five, I actually find it consoling. I have lived to a respectable old age. I have enjoyed the privilege of a complete life, partaking in all its stages (except, of course,
old
old age, which I would not mind skipping). When I read the obits now, Epicurus's dictum that the happiest life is free from self-imposed demands of commerce and politics strikes me anew. The “mad master” of “making it” has finally released me. I can savor the privilege of having lived to an old age. I am too old to die young.

That word, “privilege,” has a special resonance for me. When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him—as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, “It was a privilege to have lived.” The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.

ON THE FOLLY OF DENYING PLEASURE IN OLD AGE

As it happens, smoking brings me pleasure and, at times like this, atop my granite roost on the Vlihos road,
great
pleasure. For that matter, so does a cheeseburger with a side of french fries and some mayonnaise in which to dip them. No doubt about it, these pleasures are bad for my health—very bad. I also have no doubt that a dedicated forever youngster forsakes these pleasures for this very reason; he has devoted himself to good health habits, especially now that he is in his midseventies
.
Yes, I can easily imagine him jogging past me, and I readily admit that he may take pleasure in his jog, not the least of which is the feeling of youthful vigor it yields to him. To each his own. But I do have to say that I am really enjoying this cigarette.

Perhaps I am guilty of some fuzzy arithmetic myself, but I have to wonder if the forever youngster's scrupulous health habits and the self-deprivations they undoubtedly involve will add an appreciable number of years to his robust old age or just prolong his
old
old age of merciless decay. Impossible to predict. But I am still left with the question of how many pleasures I am willing to forgo, never to enjoy again, in the name of longevity. If not these pleasures now, when? In the do-not-resuscitate ward of the
old
old folks' home?

Corny old joke: An elderly man and his wife die in an airplane accident and up go to heaven. An angel welcomes them and starts showing them around. The man gets hungry and asks if they may get something to eat. The angel points to a lavish buffet of pâtés, cheeses, ribbed steaks, and creamy desserts and says, “Sure, help yourself. You can eat as much as you like and you don't need to have any health concerns.” As they walk up to the buffet, the husband looks at his wife and says, “You know, Gladys, if you hadn't made me eat that revolting oat bran every morning, I could have had this ten years ago!”

With a few adjustments, this could be a gag about the pleasures available in old age rather than in heaven.

ON MODERATION IN ALL THINGS

An overriding theme in Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics
is the virtue of moderation in all things, the golden mean between ex­cessiveness and insufficiency. As an example, Aristotle cites the virtue of courage: too much of it results in recklessness, too little in cowardice. Find the middle ground, he advises us; it makes for an all-around better life. I particularly like the idea that Aristotle ties this virtue in human behavior to an aesthetic ideal: there is something pleasing and beautiful about moderate behavior just as there is something pleasing and beautiful in an artfully proportioned object like an isosceles triangle or a well-balanced piece of architecture. Beauty is equilibrium, and equilibrium is beauty.

Like Epicurus, Aristotle has also had an influence on modern Greeks. A large proportion of them eat fatty meats, drink alcohol, and smoke cigarettes, but for the most part they enjoy these pleasures in moderation. Yes, they may choose to smoke a cigarette or two at the end of a long meal, but they don't ­anxiously puff on cigarettes all day long or enlist in a stressful behavior-modification program to cease smoking altogether. It is little wonder that the Greeks are among the longest-lived people in today's world; it isn't just the olive oil in their “Mediterranean diet.”

ON PONDERING TRANSCENDENT QUESTIONS IN OLD AGE

I am now sitting alone under an awning on the terrace of the sole taverna in Vlihos. Today I want to read and think a bit about some philosophical ideas that have always eluded me.

In addition to being at the perfect stage for reviewing his life, an old man is in a prime position to noodle about the “meaning of it all” questions that burned in his mind as a young man but then receded as he got down to the business of making a life for himself. (To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens while you are philosophizing about its meaning.) But now these questions feel significant again; in fact they feel more urgent than ever.

For all his negativity about old folk, Aristotle did say that “education is the best provision for the journey to old age,” and part of what he meant is that acquiring good tools for thinking—and thinking philosophically—prepares us for one of the principal callings of an authentic old age: pondering the big questions.

I need to take a step back when considering such questions. Sometimes I think my basic philosophical impulses, those “what's it all about?” churnings in my gut, were ruined by studying academic philosophy. Too often I became preoccupied with the heady, abstruse concepts of the great thinkers and lost that sense of wonder that made me read them in the first place. I need to remind myself that to head off in the direction of philosophy, a person really only needs the basic intuition that the unexamined life doesn't quite cut it for him.

ON TAKING PHILOSOPHICAL RISKS IN OLD AGE

In the comedy film
The Bucket List
, two terminally ill old men compose a list of experiences they want to have before they kick the bucket, and they then set off to have them. High on their list are skydiving, climbing the pyramids, going on an African safari, and, for one of them, visiting a high-priced call girl. The idea is that they have nothing to lose at this point, nothing to fear, so why not go for it? For my part, I can go to my grave ­regret-free without doing any of those particular things, but the spirit of their adventures speaks to me. I have nothing to lose or fear by taking some philosophical risks at this point in my life.

When Epicurus said that our minds gain a unique freedom in old age because of our “absence of fear for the future,” among other things he was saying we can now take mental risks that were too scary for us when we were younger. And taking some philosophical risks—say, the one Camus famously dared us to take when he wrote, in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”—is almost as scary as jumping out of an airplane fastened to a flimsy-looking canopy. Come to think of it, these risks are pretty closely related: they both demand us to stare death straight in the face. Kierkegaard pulled no punches when he challenged us to take philosophical and spiritual risks; he famously wrote, “To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.”

ON DARING TO THINK ILLOGICAL THOUGHTS IN OLD AGE

Here in the Vlihos taverna, with people seated around me, I pull Heidegger's
Introduction to Metaphysics
out of my shoulder bag. This is the tome that opens with the stupefier, “Why are there things that are rather than nothing?”

Whatever could have possessed me to lug this baby across the Atlantic to this remote island village? It must have been the inevitable thoughts of mortality that hover over me. Heidegger's question seems to go beyond the start and stop of an individual life—say, mine—to
being
itself. What is that all about?

I have this nagging suspicion that for the past fifty-odd years I have been dismissing Heidegger's question as total twaddle without ever really trying it on for size. Martin Heidegger was a twentieth-century German existentialist who focused—if hundreds of pages of dense, enigmatic prose can be called a focus—on the concept of being. As much as I can grasp his question, I gather that he is
not
asking why some things exist and others do not, or even asking what it is that causes something to exist and what constitutes its existence. No, he is after even bigger game than that. Heidegger is asking us to confront the idea that ex­istence itself can be called into question, and this, he believes, is the ultimate philosophical question. He writes: “To philosophize is to ask ‘Why are there things that are rather than nothing?' Really to ask this question signifies: a daring attempt to fathom this unfathomable question by disclosing what it summons us to ask, to push our questioning to the very end. Where such an attempt occurs there is philosophy.”

I need some retsina.

In Greece the accepted way to summon a waiter is to clap your hands loudly. I still have trouble getting myself to do this: it feels impudent, like issuing a command to a slave. Not that Greek waiters appear to mind in the least—actually, it allows them to sit and drink on their own rather than hovering about to see if a customer wants anything or, as waitpersons in America are prone to ask, “Are you still
working
on your dinner?” I clap. I order a half-kilo carafe of the taverna's best. I sip down a few generous mouthfuls and look again at Heidegger's fundamental question.

This time around I am struck by a couple of things that had not penetrated before. Heidegger states that the question is “unfathomable.” First he tells us that this question is fundamental to all philosophy, and then he tells us that we are never going to get it anyhow. Something perverse in that.

But what about those phrases “a daring attempt to fathom” and pushing “our questioning to the very end”? Is Heidegger suggesting that simply
raising the question
, grappling with the idea that being itself can be subject to doubt, is some kind of end in itself? I am reminded of Aristotle's observation, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Might this also apply to entertaining a question that most likely has no conceivable answer?

When I was in college, I chuckled smugly about Heidegger's fundamental question. In those days—the 1950s and 1960s—we were all enthralled by the school of philosophy known as logical positivism and its sister, linguistic analysis. Philosophers like Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, and A. J. Ayer brought logic, mathematics, and the scientific method to bear on the big concepts of metaphysics and ethics, and found them wanting. Concepts of good and evil? Nonsense! They have no rational basis, so forget about them. We only consider questions that have logical content and solutions.

Heidegger, of course, was not spared, starting with that “why” in his basic metaphysical question. The positivist Paul Edwards argued that there is a “logical grammar” to the word “why” that Heidegger violates in his question, therefore his question is meaningless. Next question?