Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (55 page)

Many of culture’s traditional pieties are overturned here—no moralizing, no revenge, no heart-to-heart with the wife, no theatrics, no higher vision—as Joyce’s hero pays his homage to life’s plenitude. Here is the wisdom of the comic vision: life itself trumps any and all truisms or judgments that might be said about it. Leopold Bloom remains a man in his thirties, a richly carnal figure, and I have to wonder what he would be had Joyce tapped into him two or three decades later, when he would be more desiccated, more ailing, closer to death. But he stands even now as a wise man, one who understands that what life overtly robs you of—youth, passion—it nonetheless covertly gifts you in the form of endless opportunities for thinking, reflecting, musing, even remembering: all ways of taking your craft right on through.

A final word on Bloom and on
Ulysses:
the calculus I have tried to outline in discussing Bloom’s strategies for getting through life—a calculus that interweaves facts and fictions, loss and substitution, deprivation and fantasy, past and present—seems to me at once radiant in wisdom and altogether invisible to the naked eye. Joyce’s character is a fabulous piece of work, because he never stops responding to the incessant blows and stimuli life presents, and he thereby fashions, just like an artist, his own special song and dance. It is not for nothing that he is Joyce’s candidate for a modern-day Ulysses—a survivor, an artful dodger. Are his skills not the right ones for aging? Even the happiest, healthiest, and most serene among us know that losses, renunciations, and exits are in the wings, that life’s bills are coming due. It’s time for wit and cunning—not only for strategic purposes, for warding off hurt, for being able to stay in the game, but also for positive and invigorating reasons: the sheer vitality of managing, the almost muscular pleasure of avoiding, some of those Scyllas and Charybdises that aging inevitably sets in our path. Is there no Ulysses in each of us?

Growth
is how we want to see our final phase, but shrinkage and dispossession are all too often the hallmarks of aging. From King Lear to Willy Loman and Isak Borg, the apprenticeship with death commands the stage. Passion recedes, entropy is real. Even the good fight must eventually be lost. Even the keenest sense of life’s plenitude and artful dodging are temporary reprieves. Literature’s players perform a service for us here. I am nourished each time I reread
Ulysses
, because Bloom shows me how mercurial and prancing the human mind is, how many bargains and standoffs remain to be made with trouble and even catastrophe. Even tragic outcomes, such as that of Lear or Phèdre, can be luminous with knowledge about the theatrics of power and the landscape of passion. Sometimes the book is cautionary, and we hope to avoid the failed life of a John Marcher, who could not see the love offered him.

Marcher’s experience warrants further reflection. His maniacal focus on the Great Event he felt coming testifies, tragically, to defective vision. If aging is to be a time of growth, not diminution, it seems clear, from the cumulative testimony seen throughout this study, that one key human resource is at the core of things: love. Love is both perspectival and vehicular, for it enables us either to see aright or to transform, indeed transcend, the empirical circumstances of our lives. As far back as Ibsen’s Solness, we saw that love could be a generative force, capable of creating a space for living that is not located on any map. But love gone wrong looms large in this study—democratically poisoning the existences of both the young and the old, operating like Robert Frost’s rendition of fire and ice, quite capable of wrecking human life through heat or cold, abuse or indifference, dooming a Heathcliff or a Goriot—and we realize that love, to be redemptive for old age, must be reoriented, reconceived, made into something generous, something that can outlive flesh itself. This is not easy, and it is especially not easy as one ages.

So much of this study has been about the inroads of time, especially in connection with loss of power and the law of mortality. These matters are often shockingly tangible: think Lear on the heath. But time can be deadly in still other ways, drying us up over time, cooling our affections, atrophying our capacity to love. Heart disease is known to be a killer for the old, and medical science rightly pays attention; but we have neither statistics nor remedies for the numbers of people whose hearts die while they continue to go through their paces.

The undisputed masterpiece of magic realism,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, is remembered as an explosion of folklore, color, fantasy, desire, and freedom. Larded with scenes that sweetly annihilate Western logic—the dead return, rooms explode with yellow butterflies, Rebeca has a voracious hunger for dirt, Remedios the beautiful simply ascends into the air—this book nonetheless recognizes solitude as the inevitable carceral condition of the human subject, no matter how vibrant the spectacle may be. Many of its characters end up being walled off from the world: Rebeca, Fernanda, Amaranta. But the towering figure in this regard is Aureliano, the son who became a colonel and devoted his entire life to unending war, with the result that he increasingly lived out Edgar Allan Poe’s favorite plot of immurement, of being buried alive.

The first sign of this withdrawal is to be found in his radical decision “that no human being, not even Úrsula, could come closer to him than ten feet.” We watch the spate of realpolitik military decisions, entailing the death of feeling and trust, the drying up of the heart. And we recall the novel’s haunting first line—“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” It is a cunning opener, inasmuch as Aureliano does
not
die by firing squad but ice will indeed stand as his permanent element, his fate. No passage conveys the frigidity and solipsism of his life better than the heartbreaking moment when he looks at his aged mother and actually sees the wreckage time has made of her:

This is unflinching. Every reader anticipates that the sequence will end on an uptick, that the final, searching effort to retrieve his love for his mother will succeed, will bear fruit. But it doesn’t. And we are awed, I think, by the physiological and perceptual detail here: he is taking her measure, he is missing nothing of her decrepitude, her nearness to death, what time has done to her. One wants to think that such a clinical, unsparing eye—for we rarely see our loved ones in this naked fashion—will trigger feelings, will be followed by compassion. But García Márquez will not cater to our fond wants. Two deaths seem announced here: hers in the body and his in the soul. Should Aureliano’s hollowing out be ascribed to ice? to continuous war? to the erosions of time? The book leaves it open, but its presentation of characters whispers to us that we are victims of many histories: not merely the depredations of colonialism and Western imperalism but, no less insidiously, the eating up of the heart by time itself, as if that key muscle were not constituted to respond to, even to withstand, the presence of other people over the long haul.

Mortuary vision: Aureliano sizing up his old, old mother; seeing, in virtually clinical fashion, every single incursion inflicted by time and feeling nothing. To forbid anyone to come within ten feet of you is to make yourself into a mausoleum, as well as to construe all other living beings—including those who love you—as death threats. But the sought-after protection comes too late; the invader has already entered and struck his blow. What we cannot fail to see is that Aureliano himself is the dead one, that he has at last fully succumbed to ice, that his apparent use of limbs and brain is illusory because rigor mortis has taken over. García Márquez suggests that a life of waging war is responsible for calcifying the heart, and maybe that is so; but at the end of his legendary career he stands in our minds as entombed alive, as exiled from the pulse of life, as the corpse he will become. How not to see this also as allegory of aging?

Aureliano loses all mobility of feeling. He becomes a mummy, dead to all stimuli. Against this cautionary fate of rigor mortis, I want to present what I take to be its opposite number: someone who remains supple and capable of love right to the end. Helena, the grandmother in Bergman’s final film,
Fanny and Alexander
, exhibits a kind of warmth, power, resilience, and maturity that we find all too rarely in art, even if it must indeed exist in life. One of my favorite scenes comes early as Helena (well into her sixties) and her friend/lover Isak (the old Jew, the man of magic) await the arrival of all the sons and grandchildren for the sumptuous Christmas feast, the
Julbord
. In a very sweet shot, we see the old couple peer out in all directions, making sure that nobody is watching them, and then sneak a nice kiss. A kiss, not a peck. A further installment in this vein occurs late at night, after the grand feast, as the old couple awaits the dawn. Helena then talks of the infirmities of aging, of crying fits, of the problems (financial and emotional and moral) encountered by her grown children, noting that both Gustav and Carl are oversexed, just as their father (her dead husband) was: “He was insatiable. At times I thought it was too much of a good thing, but I never refused.”

Although one might cavil at “I never refused” and see in it a form of patriarchal bullying, I’d rather put the emphasis on “too much of a good thing.” Yes, he wanted it too often, but then this is one of the good things one wants. This leads naturally to reminiscences involving their own long-term love affair, including a memory of the husband surprising them in a moment of intimacy: she with an unbuttoned blouse, he with unbuttoned trousers, and the paterfamilias initially wanting to get his pistol but finally becoming friends for life with old Isak. Helena then turns weepy, fearing that the good life is over—Isak has already concurred, bad times are upon them, upon their world—but the scene does not finish in tears. On the contrary, Helena gets past her cry and begins to ready herself for the Christmas Day activities. Her words speak Bergman’s late wisdom: “No, my dear sir, this won’t do at all. I shall wash, repaint my face, do my hair, and put on my stays and silk dress. A weepy, lovesick woman turns into a self-possessed grandmother. We play our parts. Some play them negligently; others play them with great care. I am one of the latter.”

Perhaps this is what a life in the theater teaches a filmmaker (Bergman’s career spanned both); or perhaps it is what Bergman learned from Shakespeare’s own baroque vision of life as a stage, of life as stages. Later in the story, Helena speaks to her dead son, Oscar (who has returned as resident ghost, who died of a stroke incurred while rehearsing the role of
Hamlet
’s ghost), and she formulates what I take to be the wisest perception of the film, concerning, once again, the roles we play and the responsibilities we bear: “I enjoyed being a mother. I enjoyed being an actress too, but I preferred being a mother. I liked being pregnant and didn’t care tuppence for the theater then. For that matter, everything is acting. Some parts are nice, others not so nice. I played a mother. I played Juliet, Ophelia. Suddenly I am playing the part of a widow. Or a grandmother. One part follows the other. The thing is not to scamp. Not to shirk.”

When we reflect on the negative valence that role-playing has in ordinary parlance, on how we customarily associate it with in-authenticity and deception, we can grasp the power and beauty of this doctrine. We are always playing. To live in time requires this.
One part follows the other
. Shakespearean wisdom: we inhabit a theater world, and unless we die young, we are destined to occupy many positions, to respond to evolving conditions (including those of our own body, which alters over time), to try out many selves. What counts is that we treat each role as genuine while we play it—that we authenticate the roles and parts that life deals out to us by leading with the heart. And even that is too simple, as one role does not fully cancel out another. Here, then, is the plenitude of life. And of heart. Helena’s response to the dance of time is offered without even a whiff of regret or wistfulness: each life phase brings its requirements, opportunities, and rewards. Helena is simultaneously the reminiscing lover of Isak and the self-possessed grandmother who rules over the family’s rites. And it is within this larger spectrum of positions and selves, of a moving stage and a moving “I,” that the role of love—including physical, sexual love—assumes its proper place. It has nothing to do with compartmentalizing, everything to do with a plenary sense of human doing, not all that far from Shakespeare’s “readiness is all” but oriented toward life, not death.

I called Helena the matriarch of the story, and that, too, warrants a final word. We see her throughout the film presiding over the affairs and catastrophes of her family, including the emotional and erotic careers of her three sons. But do not forget: she remains not only the wise one who counsels, who has a special, tender relationship with her grandson Alexander, but she seems as well to have learned the lesson Lear never learned: she holds on to the money. She hosts the great family feast, bankrolls the theater, pays off the loans of her profligate son Carl, and closes the film in business discussions with Oscar’s widow, pondering whether or not to stage Strindberg’s
Dream Play
, perhaps even to return to the stage herself. In a film where men do rather badly—one son is impotent and dies, another is oversexed and a joke, a third is a failure in marriage and work, and the grand villain of the piece is the handsome bishop Edvard, who does what he can to ruin everyone’s life—she is a remarkable success story. Old, yes, but ever vital: she never scamps, she never shirks. Is it too much to say that she is an empowered woman? Perhaps few cultures formally assign roles of power to women, but this old lady lives long enough to rule the roost.