Aging is a mystery we can’t solve no matter how much we might desire to do so. We just live it, if we’re lucky. Although it might not always feel so lucky.
But maybe, if we could hear the honest truth of how other people lived their aging, we might live our own more gracefully. Maybe. Or at least we would not feel isolated in ourselves.
So I’m now reading two very different books, Essays After Eighty by the American poet Laureate, Donald Hall, who lived 1928-2018, and The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Expanded and Newly Translated, by David Hinton. Tu Fu lived from 712-770 C. E. and many consider him China’s greatest classical poet.
Hall’s writing feels very personal to me, partly because I took a creative writing class with him when I was in college. The class was engaging, challenging. At times afterward, I contacted him to talk about my own writing or how to get published. And years later, he gave a talk at a nearby college and we reconnected. I was so surprised he remembered me.
We can hold such contradictory and frightening notions. We can both want to know, and yet, not know⎼ what will happen to us next week? Next year? When will we die? We can think of each decade as an actual thing, a door we pass through. “I’m thirty now…seventy, eighty, ninety.” But the door has only the solidity we give it. As Hidy Ochiai⎼ world-renowned master and master teacher of the traditional Japanese martial arts, who is still teaching in his eighties and with whom I have studied for many years⎼ put it: “We’re not old. We’re just getting older.”
Hall says, “However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.” (7) And as we age, we enter and deconstruct that alien universe.
“My problem isn’t death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down…. I sit daydreaming about what I might do next.”
Maybe we don’t worry often about death, but we feel it more and more, somewhere behind us and getting closer. Sometimes, we just stop, lost in thought about what to do next or whether we have already done all we need to do. We wonder how well we will be able to walk, get around. How independent. In the U. S., independence, vulnerability or lack of control is one of our greatest fears.
Yet, so many of us say we don’t feel old. Even in our seventies, we imagine we’re thirty. I notice it is more difficult now to get up after doing floor exercises. One reason I work out daily is to stay as young in body and mind as I can, to stay limber, healthy. The aches I feel afterward are almost pleasurable, a reminder I am here.
But one thing that nourished Hall and is saving me now is relationship, love. Despite the pain of his losses, his memories of family and especially the poet Jane Kenyon, his wife, kept him company. For me, my wife is so much with me. I can’t think of her gone.
And despite being retired for eight years already, unbelievable that it is eight years, I still feel relief each day when all the necessary tasks are done and I can sit, relax, just be here, maybe read or talk with my wife or friends, pet a cat. Maybe soon every moment will feel like that. Why put it off any longer?
In fact, aging teaches us or can teach us⎼ maybe that is one of its purposes⎼ not to put anything off. We take out from hiding words we never spoke to others or ourselves but meant to, and let them loose into the light. We comfort them, comfort ourselves, so there are no more gaps to fall into. As we age, there is too little time left and it is too easy to fall.
Tu Fu is a very different poet than Hall. He lived during the T’ang Dynasty, a time of great cultural achievement and peace, until 755 C. E. when civil war broke out. By the time of Tu’s death, two-thirds of the people of China were displaced or dead. For his last 15 years, he had to live as an impoverished refugee, yet wrote most of his poetry.
For us today, at a time of such divisiveness and anxiety, during a pandemic that is killing thousands each day and is particularly deadly for older people, Tu Fu shows us even in the worst of times, our lives can be dignified by creativity.
As we get older, the struggle to merely live comes closer to the forefront, and we might worry even more than usual about what our quality of life might become. Yet here was Tu Fu creating poems of meditative depth and beauty while displaced from his home, often alone due to having to leave his family behind, suffering so many ailments, with the unknown and the dangerous a constant companion.
No more words from anyone I love. Old,
sick, nothing left now but this lone boat,
And war horses north of those mountain
frontiers: I clutch railing, and tears come.
Yet the words he wrote revealed how the earth itself speaks.
Hair all white, goosefoot cane: what joy
Mind and life gone perfectly transparent!
And facing death:
I fear dusk, but this dazzling
Lake ranges into far heavens, and on this
Wander-Star raft, I’m sailing away there.
Late in the day, when the dark of night mirrors the dark of day and I want to lift that darkness and go to sleep without carrying a burden with me, I turn to one of these poets. Poetry gives me an added set of hands or added muscle. Hall said that as a youth he loved the old. I hope that as I get older, I come to love this older self.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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