Fig Tree and Grapevine

Cicero

We are coming down from a very self-indulgent weekend.  Our actual sixtieth wedding anniversary was in early June, but as it was only two days before the wedding of our granddaughter Sophia and her husband Raymond, it was decided in family conclave that the “official” anniversary celebration be postponed for about six weeks until a time was available when the whole family could once again reconvene.  Although the pandemic has somewhat slowed down the globetrotting of its younger members, it is still not easy to get all Flemings on the same continent at any particular moment.  This past weekend, however, found everybody here save for granddaughters Lulu, who is helping somebody mount an art show in Paris, and Ruby, who is at a non-negotiable summer camp.  These serious lacunae were in some ways compensated for by the happy fact that the whole family of Joan’s niece Elizabeth and Alan Dignam, normally resident in Cambridge but fortuitously in the States for a vacation, were able to be at the celebrative dinner.  Eighteen of us in all dined under awnings at Mediterra, an upscale eatery in the center of Princeton.  I felt like a patriarch of old with my own fig tree and shade-giving grapevine.  I think we both are feeling rather old, but in a pleasant way.  For just as children can be injured by being made to grow up too fast, the elderly can abuse themselves by failing to acknowledge their antiquity.

 

I cannot help but think about this in terms of our disturbing politics.  After two years of heroic silence on the subject, the New York Times has finally discovered and found worthy of mention that President Biden is an old guy in a very demanding job requiring physical energy, mental acuity, and elementary linguistic coherence that he does not now possess.   Whether the press is leading or following the likewise geriatric leadership of the Democrats in Congress in this realization, a general awareness seems to have emerged, with a panic brewing in certain quarters that he appears ready to run for a second term.  I have no personal animus against Joe Biden.  I voted for  him.  He was in my opinion elected for who he was not more than for who he is, and he has persevered in not being Donald Trump.  I believe that has been a useful achievement, but not one in itself sufficient to address our very difficult problems, some of them indeed insoluble, nor even mitigable, without a spirit of national self-effacing cooperation not to be found in our ailing politics today.  Why cannot Mr. Biden be allowed his own fig-tree and grapevine?  Why must he be forced to fly about the globe fist-bumping with autocrats or stare dully into a teleprompter, puzzling over the three-syllable words?  I feel sorry for him.  I know what it’s like to need a nap or forget a name or lose your place while reading a document.  He ought to be at the beach, or in a Florida condo, or at a black-tie dinner getting an award for the latest service of his post-political career as the honorary chairman of notable charitable enterprises.  In sensible societies seniors, the old guard, the elders, los viejos, are venerated for their achievements and sometimes sought out for their wisdom but relieved of the obligation of having to pretend they are still young by trying to rush up to the podium.

 

Being old is a sufficient occupation on its own.  Old age, life’s final stage, is unlike all the others in the degree of its necessary unpredictability and capriciousness.  In any event that has been my experience of it.  Not too many authors have taken it head-on.  Great stories of youth are a dime a dozen, one of the greatest, indeed, being Conrad’s Youth.  Old Age, on the other hand, is a subject to avoid.  Who can forget the chilling final lines of the “Seven Ages of Man Speech” in As You Like It, that thus rounds out life’s pattern: “Last scene of all, /That ends this strange eventful history, /Is second childishness and mere oblivion; /Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”   Mere oblivion.  Dr. Alois Alzheimer had not yet appeared on the scene.  And Arnold Bennett’s truly great novel The Old Wives’ Tale, which terrified me when I was twenty, I would not dare reread today.  But there is at least one great treatment of the subject: Cicero’s On Old Age (De senectute), an essay written in the voice of the sage Cato, imagined to be about my own current age.  That would make him a real Ancient of Days in his historical setting.  Cato does not pussyfoot around in identifying the downers: the first of all, the necessary retirement from public life with the likelihood of infirmity, always potential and frequently actual; then the disappearance of old pleasures, the growing awareness of the proximity of death, followed of course by the thing itself.  But he insists also on a philosophical maturation—I would call it spiritual growth—that can lead to a more mature wisdom and the more mature pleasures of the mind of which Cicero speaks.

 

The ancients saw their ideal world in terms of harmony and hierarchy, principles they thought they found everywhere in Nature.  A place for everything, and everything in its place.  All parts of the ideal world were linked, or as we say, connected.  Existence was according to one favorite image a Great Chain of Being.  I prefer Chaucer’s phraseology: the fair chain of love.  And though human beings exist in dazzling variety and have organized themselves in myriad ways, what is called the nuclear family with its biological basis in stable heterosexual mating, its economic basis in cooperation, and its spiritual basis in love, has a pretty impressive record of ubiquity and longevity.  Sixty years seems a long time until you compare it with sixty generations, and sixty behind that of productive familial transition.  But as Dr. Johnson remarked, precept is generally posterior to performance.  At our anniversary dinner we were having no such lofty philosophical musings, surrounded by the energy, ambition, promise and achievement of our wonderful children and grandchildren, happily conversing  and laughing as we downed a good meal in a happy setting.  We were not required to try to jog up any podium stairs, or to fist-bump even a tolerable tyrant.  Mostly we were exchanging a few highlights of happy memories too numerous to count.  It was all very age-appropriate.  I was not trying to run anything.  I had had to arrange nothing, or even pay for it.  All Joan and I had to do was show up.  Then we could just sit there and bask in  a seniority sentimental rather than executive in its nature.  Naturally, my favorite lines from Tennyson, ones from the “Morte d’Arthur” once again came to mind.  It is the response of the old king to Sir Bedivere as the latter laments the dissolution of the Round Table.  The ailing king says this: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”  We do hope, of course, that we really have been a good custom.  There’s less doubt surrounding the new order.

 

Shakespearean Old Age by Robert Smirke, R. A.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Singin' and the Rain

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"

You can hear a short piece by the Basiani Ensemble HERE: or their whole 2017 concert in Saint Petersburg HERE.