PERSPECTIVE UK
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Camus: An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
On life and living- 1
If there is an art to living, few have found it. And as one grows older the seeking becomes more interesting. What is life? Impermanence in search of the eternal without any real expectation of it existing. Beyond that is faith. But since faith is defied by reason, there lies a fragile path. You can't take it much further than that whatever the state of your education. There is an art to living long, one suspects, but there is no particular point to it beyond the stage where you have sufficient independence to drink well, eat well, and walk a mile.
LIving to the full has little to do with age or length of life. It sometimes involves living outrageously (say, Dorothy Parker and any number of politicians), with some expectation of earthly immortality (William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Albert Schweitzer and so on), heroically and piously (Thomas More, Mother Teresa), flippantly (Beau Brummel), monstrously ( Vlad the Impaler, Hitler), thoughtfully (Plato, Socrates).
Living well, then, is what we are addressing here; not a question of morality , but rather one of choice and opportunity. To be enthusiastic about the choice, however bizarre it might be to others, is what sustains the chooser and there are lessons to be learned. One man's obsession is another's triviality. The end of the world is, to a scientist, a matter of exploding atoms; to many a man, it is an own goal in the 89th minute when the scores are equal.
To be listless about the choice, to have it imposed by someone else, is to abandon the birthright. If all life is suffering, as Buddhists believe, it is as well to be one of those suffering least. The great, the good and the not so good establish reputations in their lifetimes which illuminate continents, and in theory , at any rate, one should be able to pick up the crumb of information or instruction that might rub off. The choice is inevitably random since we are not sure what we are seeking. Let us begin, however obtusely, with -
Dorothy Parker: the American humourist and tragedian, not because she was the most eminent, or influential, for any number of people would precede her, but because she concentrated such a large number of human faults and attributes in one frame and from them forged a world-wide reputation. Here was endeavour, imagination, persistence, ability, tragedy, pathos. This troubled and troublesome creature was a monument to suffering, but throughout, there was background laughter, and her biggest joke was Dorothy Parker. She chose her path in life fearlessly, and often disastrously, but the sum of it all was a remarkable legacy. Here was an underweight person with hollow eyes and poor sight, with stringy hair; four feet eleven at her best. She authored some of the most cutting remarks ever uttered by a human being. She married badly, drank abominably, and her ashes ended in the filing cabinet of her lawyer. True!
With a hand like that a poker player would throw up. That she endured until the age of 74, defiant and promiscuous, was more accident than design. The Salford artist, Harold Riley, painted her portrait in New York towards the end of her days and in it, she looks like a bad road accident.
Oh, seek, my love, your newer way (she wrote);
I'll not be left in sorrow.
So long as I have yesterday,
Go take your damned tomorrow/
Is there a lesson here? Is that the way to live? Here is a smart sort of philosophy but not a very good one. No point in remaining in the past when the future might provide a better reason for living. But it rhymed; we can say that for it. As for being a bright lush at the Algonquin, it has its limitations. But she has the lure of the devil in her. There are many who would sell their souls for her tongue and reputation. (On a sea voyage: "The weather was so rough, the only thing she could keep on her stomach was the first mate.")
When Dorothy Parker first met the family of her husband, Edwin Pond Parker 11, grandfather Parker, a reverend gentleman of 81, called everyone to the parlour for prayers and she heard him say, "Oh, Lord, grant to the unbeliever in our midst the light to see the error of her ways..." When she married there was no-one from her family, no-one from his, no friends, and the three witnesses were strangers rounded up by the minister. Your normal bride would weep. Your satirist would give a fortune for the experience.
Dorothy Parker lived a life. She did not merely endure it. Her excesses were not limited by any degree of caution. No glowing embers here but the full, erupting volcano, flaming, destroying and creating as it flowed. When she was 70, she said she felt 90. She claimed earlier that she wished to skip her fifties and get to the seventies and eighties: "People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what's the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead."
She pondered that situation long enough before she died at the age of 74 and went to rest in a filing cabinet where, more than 20 years on, she still lay: under J for Joke, one assumes, since everything she is quoted as having said was for effect rather than instruction.
This business of looking to the famous for some sort of guidance in later life is tricky. I assembled a list of those I admired, respected, or knew little about and assiduously ploughed through books about them. I was particularly interested in their thoughts on old age. But in passing, I became fascinated by the way W. H. Auden (1907-73) dissolved before people's very eyes. Not exactly your Barbara Cartland, or monument to the regular use of All Bran, he became, physically, a sort of relief map of Siberia. During February, 1967, the month in which he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, Auden stayed briefly with Christopher Isherwood (1904-86) in California. "His face," said Isherwood, "really belongs to the British Museum."
Auden's friends, as his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, noted, were beginning to compete with each other for ways of describing his face's extraordinary creases and deep wrinkles. The poet James Merrill called it runneled and seamed'. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, a New York friend of Auden, said it was as though 'life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the heart's invisible furies'; and Stephen Spender wrote that it was 'a face upon which experience and thoughts had hammered... a face at once armoured and receptive.' A graphic description came from Auden himself, 'Your cameraman might enjoy himself,' he remarked to a reporter, 'because my face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.'
It was Auden's view that the best age to die (the right age) was 70, but that he would live to be 83. His last poem was:
He still loves life, But O 0 0 O how he wishes
The good Lord would take him.
The Good Lord duly obliged as he always does. Auden was 66, and possibly surprised to find himself in early for a re-tread. Now what can we learn from that? First, I suggest, that it is not a good idea to invite the Almighty to do anything untoward even when your face looks like a tram-track; second, it is a terrible thing to spend your life establishing a reputation as a poet only to be remembered (by me, at least) for lines like that.
And there's another point: the world is full of people attempting to achieve immortality on earth because they have no clear expectation of it elsewhere. I do not suppose Rupert Murdoch goes on his knees every night to ponder a pending meeting with the Almighty. But it might be a better choice than making yet another million.
Money and earthly fame are futile goals. Painters who died in poverty turned out to have the mark of genius. Their work lives centuries after their deaths, which is something. And yet... and yet...
Marcus Aurelius dealt with that subject of fame briskly in his Meditations:-
The man whose heart is palpitating for fame after death does not reflect that out of all those who remember him every one will himself soon be dead also, and in course of time the next generation after that, until in the end, after flaring and sinking by turns, the final spark of memory is quenched. Furthermore, even supposing that those who remember you were never to die at all, nor their memories to die either, yet what is that to you? Clearly, in your grave, nothing; and even in your lifetime, what is the good of praise -unless maybe to subserve some lesser design? Surely, then, you are making an inopportune rejection of what Nature has given you today, if all your mind is set on what men will say of you tomorrow.
The older one becomes, the more one is aware that human nature is perverse. In each person. There is a mixture of good and bad and it emerges in curious ways. Consider Vlad the Impaler. Here was a man who delighted in impaling people on stakes - 20,000 of them on one occasion -but who was solicitous enough, when a guest at dinner complained of the stench of dying people, to have him impaled at a higher level so that his nose would not be offended. Was that an act of merit in the scales of heavenly justice? There is, as the late Eric Morecambe would have observed, no answer to that
Poets and writers, who might be considered best for instruction, are of little use on close examination. Wordsworth (1770-1850) and his friends were a tedious lot, forever walking and admiring scenery -"all in love with each other and all in love with themselves." I find Charles Lamb (1775-1834) to be the only endearing member of the group. He described Wordsworth's shoes as provincial curiosities. An old workman, talking of Wordsworth in later years, said: "He wasn't a man who said a deal to common folk, but he talked a deal to hissen." De Quincey (1785-1859) reckoned that Wordsworth must have traversed vast distances, mumbling and grumbling; but rather more instructive was the context in which he declared it:
"He was upon the whole not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs; not that they were bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice - there was no absolute deformity about them; and undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisitions for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 miles -a mode of exercise which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and other stimulants; to which indeed he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is excellent in his writings.. But, useful as they have proved themselves, Wordsworth's legs were certainly not ornamental; and it was really a pity, as I agreed with a lady in thinking, that he had not another pair for evening dress parties -when no boots lend their friendly aid to mask our imperfections from the eyes of female rigorists."
With all that tramping about, one might have expected Wordsworth to discover something remarkable about life and living; but there is nothing particularly elevating about a daffodil, and if there is, his sister Dorothy discovered it first. And as for the Lake District, an area he would have denied the common folk from outside (as many Lakelanders would today), a reasonable man might conclude that, as with Scotland, it will be all right once it is drained.
We are, in short, not likely to learn much from Wordsworth whose age, when he was 36, was guessed at by a fellow traveller on a coach as 60. He died at 80, making a nonsense of Keats (who died at 26), Shelley (30) and Byron (36).
Nor are we, alas, likely to learn much from W. B. Yeats, though I had high hopes of him, since he produced the lines :
"The best among us have few opinions;
The worst are full of passionate intensity."Here, I would suggest, is genuine insight. But was it original? I suspect not. It has a Buddhist ring to it.
Where does it all leave us? It leaves us inexorably moving into uncharted territory without good guides. Anyway, the hell with it. . We could move on to Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun and Napoleon, but I see little point. If poets can not teach us anything, we have little to learn from tyrants
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
14 June, 2009