Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  Barthes claimed that everything in Japan is surface, form, or design. There is no Eastern equivalent for what he would call a “transcendental signified”; that is, things have no deeper or greater meanings than themselves. His general point may exaggerate the idea of cultural difference. The idea of “kata,” the form of things, plays a big part in Japanese culture: there is always the correct way of doing something, whether slicing fish or arranging flowers, and it takes years of apprenticeship to master the simplest gestures. This reliance on propriety suggests to a Westerner an almost Platonic idea of form as something eternal and immutable. But Barthes, who could understand Japanese language and culture no better than I, failed to account for the fact that correct form itself signifies an eternal verity. Fascinated by packaging and framing—elegant exteriors that might conceal the most trivial of gifts—Barthes also enthusiastically took the haiku as the representative symbol for everything that happens in Japan. A modest poetic genre, haiku neither defines nor describes (these being characteristic functions of Western poetry or of Western philosophy): it simply is. “The West moistens everything with meaning,” he famously observed, but in his eagerness to find in Japanese culture an “exemption from meaning,” Barthes was clearly just as guilty of what we now might term “essentializing the other” as any other traveler intent upon understanding both difference and resemblance.

  Even more than looking at, and trying to understand, the signs of fashion, I found that the actual language provoked my curiosity. The most enticing, because frustrating, part of the written language is its tripartite systems: the kanji, old Chinese ideograms taken over by the Japanese but pronounced differently; and the hiragana and katakana, both phonetically based and used especially for foreign and new words. Not to mention romaji, the Western alphabet freely used. I began to feel modestly proud when one of my hosts showed me the kanji figure for “man,” which becomes—with the inclusion of a single horizontal stroke—the figure for “big,” and then, with the inclusion of yet a second horizontal stroke, the figure for “heaven.” I mastered four or five others as well. These would never suffice to move me beyond nursery school.

  Considering that Japanese schoolchildren live on a tightly regulated schedule—so many hundred characters per year throughout school—and that basic newspaper literacy requires the knowledge of several thousand characters, I realized that I would never make the grade. The late Donald Richie, an American writer who lived in Tokyo for almost sixty years, dying there in 2013, and who wrote novels, journalism, books about Japanese culture and especially film, told me at dinner that although he was a fluent speaker, he was also an illiterate and needed people to read the newspaper to him every day. Other Americans have had different and more successful experiences in acquiring reading skills.

  However lost I felt—being unable to read, speak, or understand the language—I never sank as low as the sad and lonely Bob Harris, Bill Murray’s character in the film Lost in Translation. He had virtually no interest in anything around him; I was fascinated by everything. Coming abroad, floating unmoored and loosed from daily habit, only reinforced the deeper alienation and inner unrest his character bore with him everywhere. For him and for Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), it took an experience of the foreign to reveal the pathos of the everyday, the emptiness within themselves. But a good traveler returns exhilarated, restored, and confirmed by the jolt of strangeness. Not “lost in translation,” Robert Frost’s famous definition of poetry, but having gained something. Everything comes down to sameness and difference, in life as in language and literature. The literary technique that goes by the name of metaphor is a “carrying-across.” The Latin equivalent for this Greek term is, wonderfully, “translation.” A thing resembles, or is like, another thing only by virtue of the fact that the two are not identical. Sameness and difference: twin sides of one coin. One culture resembles another as one person resembles another, but each has a unique imprint, DNA, or fingerprint. In art, this uniqueness goes by the name of style, the mark of the maker.

  When traveling, one tries to read everything and, as I have said, even the banal gets infused with the exotic just by virtue of existing elsewhere or in a different context. Every tourist comes home impressed by Japanese politeness, cleanliness, punctuality, and deference; trains that run on time and are as tidy as drawing rooms; bathrooms in public places so clean that even the fussiest Western lady will not complain. One giggles at the earnest, often comic attempts to introduce Western foods: bagels, sometimes spelled “bagles,” are a staple, but I passed on the soy milk and edamame combo, and the green tea and white chocolate one, that I found at Bagels and Bagels in the food exposition of one major department store.

  The eyes are always open abroad. So are the ears. Japanese, to someone who doesn’t understand it, is just music, meaningless sounds. Sound in Japan is important, among other reasons, for what it is not. It is seldom loud. The uniformed junior high school students whom I saw marching through national shrines in Kyoto were not only more orderly than their American counterparts; they were also quieter. People do not holler. Voices are not raised. You don’t hear cell phones, or people speaking on them, on the subway. This would inconvenience other passengers. It is impolite. (On the street, it’s another story; the cell phone has become ubiquitous.) As I wandered through the Kyoto shrine called Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, one May morning, I was impressed by these kids, who had both the normal hormone-induced high spirits of thirteen-year-olds on holiday and an adult sense of earnestness in their mission. I was approached twice with requests for information and a photo op. (What kind of assignments do the teachers give their students, and why?)

  One shy girl stepped forward and read from a prepared script: “Hello, my name is Yoko. I have been asked to take a picture of a foreigner. What is your name? Where are you from?” Answers duly given, request honored. After a solo shot, I suggested one of Yoko and me, along with some of her chums. The girls giggled, surrounded me, made donkey ears with their fingers, and smiled. Ten minutes later, I repeated the experience, this time with a bunch of boys. Same questions, same photographs. One boy asked me how old I was. When I said sixty-four, they gasped, they bowed, they applauded. How wonderful to be respected for one’s height (in my case, a mere five feet eight) and one’s age. Never has being a gaijin (foreigner) made me feel so dignified rather than, or in addition to, out of place.

  * * *

  Language often makes us lose our balance. It also, more wonderfully, helps us to regain it. What we hear, what we read, what it all means: it’s all words. “What are words?” asked Amy Clampitt as she managed to flirt and communicate on her train ride from the South of France into northern Italy. Everyone can do something similar, at least where the language offers cognates. Not everyone knows a sonnet of Petrarch, let alone Sappho’s poetry. Watching television in Assisi once at a hotel, I saw First Lady Nancy Reagan come onto the screen. The hotel landlady made a disparaging remark and then apologized to her American guest. I brushed off her remark. “Signora Reagan è una strega,” I muttered. My landlady became my new best friend. As with Clampitt, words themselves give way, like leaves, but we manage to catch something and make it stick between us. Everything changes and everything remains the same. The music, rather than the words, unites the communicating and semi-understanding fellow travelers. By “losing track of language,” we can become like Clampitt. The poet gains an even greater sense of herself and her relations with other human beings.

  However little my Japanese students could understand of me, in lecture or in casual conversation, I could understand still less—that is, nothing—of them, or of any human sounds I heard in Japan. I was paradoxically deaf, or at least uncomprehending; I saw mouths moving but grasped not a thing. I was liberated, relieved of language and consequently of meaning. In the language of literary theorists and structuralists like Barthes, there were no “signifieds,” because there was nothing that might, to my ears, signify anything. Such absence had its own
charms.

  One afternoon in Kyoto, I scheduled an appointment for a shiatsu massage with a Japanese woman, a friend of a friend, married to an American yoga instructor. On the telephone, she tried to give me directions to her house, which I could not quite follow. We started over and opted instead to meet at a French bakery at the foot of a nearby hill on a convenient bus route. We walked up the hill into one of those quiet, private neighborhoods one finds throughout Japan—minutes off the busy thoroughfares and yet a world away. The street looked like something from Palo Alto or the Hollywood Hills, although the residences were smaller. Japan is not a big country, about the size of California, with 130 million people living tightly packed. Because much of the landscape is mountainous, the populace is contained even more closely and vertically into dense urban areas. My masseuse and her husband lived in a narrow three-story apartment in a duplex building. The massage room was at the top of the house. We went up. I lay down. The windows were open; the day was warm and close. I heard ambient noise. Japanese are trained from childhood not to make loud sounds. I said to the woman that if we were in America or the Mediterranean, we’d be hearing the radios and televisions of our neighbors, not to mention their voices discussing the affairs of the day and other mundane matters. We would hear shouting, screaming, expressions of passion. Think of an Italian village in summer. We would know that all the energies and despairs of human life, the comic and the tragic, surrounded us. According to my local contacts, the Japanese allow only dogs to make noises—these they regard as natural—not people, not machines. From two stories above, I could hear the faint, barely audible sounds of three men talking. I couldn’t determine the language, English or Japanese or some combination. Their voices blended with the wind, the wind chimes, and the twitter of the birds. The masseuse asked me whether the human sounds were distracting or annoying; if so, she would ask the men to step outside. No, I said. I heard no words, only murmurs and whispers. I could neither understand nor even really hear what they were saying. It was all foreign, because all sotto voce. It was music to my ears. Not a signifier anywhere, just the magic of sound.

  From Dallas, my sometime home, to Japan, it was a long but easy nonstop flight. I had traveled halfway around the world and then returned dazed and refreshed to the former Republic of Texas. I came back to what had been my station for four decades. Dallas felt, as it always does on such a return, familiar if not entirely pleasing. Habit has a great deal to recommend it. So does, even more, breaking habits.

  I decided to move to Manhattan.

  MANHATTAN

  In the most famous essay about New York, E. B. White distinguished among three cities and among three types of New Yorkers. The first two—the city belonging to people born here and that of commuters who work here by day and leave by night—were, he said, less compelling than the third, “the city of final destination” for those who come here in hope and nervousness. Much has changed since 1949, when “Here Is New York” appeared. But much has remained the same. The city still draws its influx of eager young people fresh from the farm, the small town, and the university, in search of employment, money and fame, love and mates, publicity and anonymity. Today this population is more international, or at least differently international, than it was in the immediate postwar years.

  “East Side, West Side, all around the town”: the songs have changed, the city itself has altered, but the sidewalks of New York have retained their beauty and ugliness, appeal and frightfulness, for two centuries. Cynthia Ozick has called the city “faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural.” She hit brilliantly on a two-word label: the “synthetic sublime.” Like all cities, but with greater speed and force, Manhattan disappears and reappears, constantly remaking itself architecturally and demographically.

  In the nineteenth century, English visitors like Dickens and Fanny and Anthony Trollope came to see for themselves what this New York was all about. Their task was never easy. Manhattan has been, until recently, notoriously dangerous, putrid, dirty, and noisy. In 1851, the American diarist George Templeton Strong called it a “whorearchy,” with mud and excrement everywhere. Two and a half million pounds of horse manure were deposited every day until the electric trolley, the subway, and finally the automobile gradually put the quadrupeds out of business.

  In 1990, Elizabeth Hardwick lamented the status of “our hysterical, battered and battering, pot-holed bankrupt metropolis.” Her contemporary Alfred Kazin, who walked the streets in search of inspiration from the writers of the previous century whom he read and loved, found the Upper West Side in the 1970s and 1980s a repository of “every possible color of skin, decrepitude, eccentricity.” He did not intend this as praise. To a young person in Manhattan in the new millennium, several decades after Rudolph Giuliani turned Times Square into the family-friendly, semi-Disneyfied entertainment crossroads of the world, it must be hard to envision the graffiti-covered, garbage-strewn, grittier Manhattan that Kazin and Hardwick bemoaned, torched by arson, blighted by disease. Today’s aging hipsters look back nostalgically to that New York as a cauldron of creativity where artists could live in cheap bohemian squalor in downtown buildings that have almost all been improved or victimized by condominiumized gentrification. Between 1990 and 2013, crime in Manhattan dropped by an astonishing 90 percent.

  White’s generalization still holds true, as does the inevitable nostalgia for older times. Manhattan is the magnet. James Weldon Johnson, the African-American writer from Jacksonville, Florida, felt he “was born to be a New Yorker.” Harlem gave him nurture. To him, and countless others, the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, narrator of The Great Gatsby, rang and will always ring true. Carraway saw Manhattan from the Queensboro Bridge. Other people have their vantage point on other bridges, a ferry, Hoboken, the Palisades, a car heading south along the Henry Hudson Parkway, or a plane flying into La Guardia with a long view of the city on one side. Or there is the hope or assurance you experience upon entering the inspiring great hall at Grand Central Terminal, with its majestic vaulted ceiling through which light passes. Looking up at the teal blue (or seafoam?) starry astrological dome in the main concourse (thank you, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), you feel, like each new arrival, that Manhattan, on the other side of the doors, has become the repository and symbol “in its wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world.”

  What White did not think of was the appeal of the city as the final destination for people at the other end of the age spectrum. It can be the final destination—“final” in two ways—for the old as well as the young, although probably not all that many of them. Of us, I should say, because I count myself among the senior eccentrics. Most Americans with the urge to leave home and to retire elsewhere tend to go where children and grandchildren live, or to flee from the North to the South in search of warmth, easier living conditions, less expensive housing costs, lower taxes. They get rid of their snow shovels. They will never sand their driveways again. Some of us, perhaps throwing fiscal caution to the winds, do the opposite. Moving to New York might mean what Samuel Johnson said about second marriages: it represents the triumph of hope over experience. But if he can afford it, and can tolerate serious downsizing, what could be more hospitable to an ambulatory senior citizen than Gotham?

  Retiring to Manhattan is an act of bravery. It also prepares a person for the end. The anonymity of metropolitan life gets you ready for the anonymity of the grave. I find this assessment comforting rather than macabre.

  According to the New York Department for the Aging, the population of people over sixty increased by more than 12 percent between 2000 and 2010 and is projected to grow by more than 35 percent by 2030 to 1.84 million people. We can attribute much of the growth to longevity and some to people’s reluctance to give up on old ways, habits, and locales. Certain Manhattan neighborhoods have already achieved NORC (naturally occurring retirement community) status.

  There is less information about people like me who have come here be
latedly, willingly, even enthusiastically.

  “Manhattan”: when I was a kid I had the sheet music for Rodgers and Hart’s song at home in the Philadelphia suburbs. I played it on our piano when I was twelve. I memorized the tune and the words. The Bronx and Staten Island came later. First as a student and then as an adult, I took to Manhattan, not only for what White called “the gift of loneliness, the gift of privacy,” but also for their opposites, the gifts of public life, of crowds, the paradox of anonymous company, and the serendipity of street conversations with strangers. The city remains completely indifferent to me, as it is to everyone. It exists, as nature does, without me even when I am part of it. Without doing anything or talking to anyone, a walker on the street participates in the general excitement. Sitting at a Starbucks or an ordinary diner and looking out, you see life itself on the other side of the window. Whatever your opinion of humanity, you have people to bewilder or console you. Years ago The New York Times had a feature about a middle-aged man who had lived, a bachelor, in a mountain cabin. He seldom socialized. Finally, he married. After a modest city ceremony, he returned with his new bride to his rural home. Chivalrous, he lifted her up and carried her across the threshold. “Alone at last,” he said. “Except for you, of course.” In Manhattan, one is always alone, except for everyone else.