I have never quite understood
boredom, by which I suppose I must mean extended periods of boredom, as opposed
to the fleeting experience of a bad lecture or a committee meeting. For the most part life has been a Heracletian
fire, full of crackling rapid movement that has left me wondering what comes
next. Even retirement itself, which I
expected to devolve in some pastel monochrome, has already been punctuated by a
series of vivid, not to say garish episodes—some of them, admittedly, of the
sort I could do without—that have been anything but boring. No doubt this in part arises from the fact
that aging makes many intrinsically simple and ordinary things rather complex
and extraordinary, and consequently their achievement more notable. In the twenty-third canto of the Inferno Dante conjures up a procession
of the Hypocrites. These damned souls
can move only at snail’s pace, burdened down as they are with cloaks, flashy on
the exterior, but actually lined with lead.
Perhaps I can find a more positive analogy in the sight of some of our
young college athletes in training, burdened with heavy backpacks as they run
up and down the long ranks of seats in the football stadium. In any event, I feel leaden a good deal of
the time. When locomotion itself becomes
a kind of ordeal, simply showing up can be an adventure.
On Monday night we went to a
remarkable musical event in the University chapel—a performance of Georgian
folk music by the Ensemble Basiani, the Georgian State Vocal Ensemble. This was a male choir, thirteen strong, all
dressed in traditional ethnic finery, sort of decorated black soutanes, over
very elegant high black boots in supple leather. The singing, which included both religious
and secular songs, was amazing. Only a
few pieces included some kind of minimal instrumental accompaniment; the main
instruments were deep, powerful male voices.
Georgian folk music is characterized by a lot of orchestrated
noise—shouting, clapping, and a very distinctive kind of yodeling, sometimes
supplemented by dance.
But the seemingly mundane tasks of getting
to and from the venue were slightly more than routine. It was, in the immortal words of
Bulwer-Lytton, a dark and stormy night, fraught with possible geriatric
anxieties. Driving visibility was poor;
finding a parking spot demanded competition and an adrenaline flow. Triumph in that arena left us still with a
bit of a walk through a cold rain. I
was armed, but insufficiently; I couldn’t get my five-dollar umbrella
open. Every few steps of the way we
would be overtaken by lither juniors.
This process was repeated in the return trip to the parking lot. Now if age is daily presenting you with an
anthology of petty quotidian reminders of your incremental geezerdom, it is
only fair that it offer also some contrasting compensations. It does that marvelously by giving you grandchildren. A grandchild is not simply a child at one
remove, or a smaller version of their own parents. A grandchild is a unique blessing, a living
symbol of vital continuity, a tolerant and ever-surprising companion, a rewarding
student and so bounteous a fount of frank and uncomplicated affection, however
undeserved, as to repair a souring view of human nature.
We have six grandchildren, five
lovely girls and the most delightful little chap you will ever meet--all
geniuses of course, all faster than a speeding bullet, each more powerful than
a locomotive, and every single one able to leap tall buildings at a single
bound. Furthermore, you have to bear in
mind that buildings are now considerably taller than in the heyday of Superman! Admittedly, the oldest “girl” is in her
mid-twenties, beautiful and brainy, and
a high-powered executive in New York. But
do not press me as to what, exactly, it
is that she executes. It’s one of these
techie “platform” things that, so far as I understand, empowers other
platforms. In my mind it must be similar
to Garrison Keillor’s National Organization of Organizations. What really keeps me on my toes, I just
realized, is not kefir or yoga; it is grandparenthood. In a healthy familial setting grandchildren
are like works of art as written about in Eliot’s great essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” They
recapitulate a respected cultural inheritance while applying, modifying, and
expanding it through individual personality and experience. They are teachers as well as learners.
The youngest of the grandkids, also
female, has only arrived at the beginning of her schooling, though she already radiates an executive aura.
Four of them live in New York, and the other two not so very much
further away, in Montreal. We see the New
Yorkers very frequently and the Montrealers perhaps too seldom but still not
infrequently. We are rapidly coming up
to Thanksgiving, which will involve the usual stuff-and-groan contest, and for a
New York kid a leafy New Jersey back garden opening on a sylvan path to Lake
Carnegie is as good as Camp Gitche Gumee any day. All the grandkids will be there save Lulu who
on her own initiative is spending a (high school) junior semester is Marseille
in order to keep up with her French. But
I could feel her sitting next to me at the Basiani concert. For right in the middle of it the golden
youth of the Princeton University Glee Club briefly claimed the stage (i.e.,
the cathedral-like chancel steps) for a couple of beautiful numbers. The talented director of this group, Gabriel
Crouch, wrote thus in the Program Notes: “…[W]e’ve never come so close to a
tradition which makes our own feel so…adolescent.” According to Chaucer’s Miller, an exponent of
the generational war, “Youthe and elde is often at debaat.” But on Monday night
youth and elde were in harmony, or at least sweet and fulfilling complement.
The ancient music of these
Caucasian singers had another special balm for my geezerdom. We were sitting in the second row of the
nave, which, as the first row had been left empty, was in effect the very
front. I don’t know how large a Georgian
expat community there is in central Jersey, but judging from the friendly
personal exchanges between singers and audience members I’d say quite a
few. There is a subsidiary entrance to
the chapel at the chancel level on its east side. During an applause pause midway through, a
group of three sodden late comers came in: a middle-aged woman, a very ancient
woman in a wheelchair, and what I must describe as an ecclesiastical Gerontius. They came to the front row immediately in
front of us. The man, though not in full
ecclesiastical regalia, was obviously of some high order of Orthodox Christian episcopacy,
in the autocephalous Church of Georgia.
His beard, though not quite so long as his full-length cassock, was
perfectly proportioned to it. He wore an
elaborately embroidered tall, flat cap that puts to shame the one I bought in the
Istanbul market. He carried a beautiful
stick, half cane and half crosier, topped with a large metal ornament in a
material I took to be gold. He was
probably not much if at all older than I am, but he radiated the aura of
Blake’s Ancient of Days. He also
radiated an unfeigned “child-like” joy for the music both of his foot-stamping,
hand-clapping compatriots and the sober reticence of the American teen-agers in
the Glee Club. In that moment neither
walking sticks nor wheel chairs seemed a very big deal.
William Blake, "The Ancient of Days"
