Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  There is not a single sentence of Shirley Hazzard’s—regardless of her subjects—that has not afforded me pleasure. Whether writing about meeting Graham Greene on Capri or her early days working at the United Nations, she has an arresting way of making you pause and moving you forward. Here is the opening paragraph of The Great Fire, her splendid novel about the aftermath of World War II:

  Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain.

  What is the appeal? First of all, the verbs, none of which is transitive and some of which are passive, or mere verbs of being. This is the kind of writing Strunk and White and other master teachers and editors always caution against. Hazzard is holding us back but also priming us for action. Second, the wonderful combination, almost a paradox, of “starting” and “finality” in the first two sentences. Something is coming to an end, right here at the beginning. Next, instead of “English,” the unexpected “American,” to remind us of the war just finished and the political-military stakes. (The novel begins in Japan. The year is 1947.) It identifies the conquerors. Last, most surprising but technically correct, the single present-tense verb at the end of the paragraph: “those who remain.” The people on the platform—rather, their faces, like “the apparition of these faces in a crowd” memorably caught by Pound in his famous imagist poem—have been transformed into an abstract, allegorical, universal group. No longer the people at this particular station, they have become any group being left behind. Hazzard has started with a specific time and place; she has also opened us up to another world, of almost mythic, universal dimensions.

  By instinct and profession, I am a reader and critic of poetry. I am always looking for new poets or rereading the works of the great ones who inspired me when I was young. Everyone’s tastes, in literature, music, art, and food, change with age. Some preferences remain, while others drop away. Those perennial favorites of adolescents—Dylan Thomas and E. E. Cummings—don’t do much for me anymore, other than remind me of my earlier self. But anyone who wants to introduce junior high school students to the power and intricacies of poetry could not go wrong with their poems. In college, enthralled by the opacities of modernism, I was deaf to the beauty of Whitman. Now, at the other end of my life, I can see and hear why he is—bloviation and repetition aside—the great American genius, as capable of tenderness, sadness, and delicacy as his contemporary Emily Dickinson is capable of tough vigor and hardheaded composure.

  A great twentieth-century intellectual once said, “I read poetry because it saves time.” That was Marilyn Monroe. Poetry makes its mark and engages its readers in two complementary ways: through condensation and expansive suggestiveness. It packs its power, meanings, and effects into the fewest number of words, but it encourages each reader to respond to, and thereby to interpret, the evidence individually, even idiosyncratically. A phrase, figure of speech, syntactic arrangement, musical gesture, will affect each reader differently. Reading a poem takes less time than reading prose, but with a poem, as with a picture or a song, you have the advantage, even the obligation, of repeating the experience. Eye and ear take in the same data more than once. The work seeps in: you can memorize poems, long as well as short ones, without even trying to. The clever people who devised the Poetry in Motion series for subways and buses knew that a haiku, a sonnet, anything contained in a poster at or above eye level, can both stimulate and sedate the mind of a passenger who is hypnotically looking.

  Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost that no one ever wished it longer. One definition of a classic is a book that everyone wants to have read, not necessarily wants to reread. But I can pick up Milton or Virgil, open at random, begin reading, and stop whenever I wish. The classics renew themselves with repetition. A part can count for almost as much as the whole.

  As a reader, I have had good luck. First of all, I still read. This is the activity to which I am most addicted. Not doing it—like not exercising—for even a short time provokes twitchiness and withdrawal. Next, now that I am reading fewer and shorter novels, and reading fiction of any sort less frequently than I do nonfictional prose and poetry, I can happily match my tastes to my capacity.

  The brevity of poetry is only part of its appeal. If I sought brevity alone, I would fit right into the twenty-first century, but of course I do not. I have never written, and only rarely read, a tweet. I have never looked at, let alone appeared on, Facebook. I seldom read anyone’s blog. I have too many books I need to read, and to read again. I’ll leave tweeting to the young. I asked a class of students last year, “How much time do you spend each day on social media?” Two of them said virtually simultaneously, “About forty-five minutes.”

  “You’re lying,” I shot back. They admitted I was right. When class ended and they all immediately turned their cell phones on, I asked one young woman how many messages she’d received during the previous eighty minutes. “Twenty-two,” she said.

  “How many require immediate attention, or attention at all?”

  “Only one, not immediate but by the end of the day: from my mother.”

  I asked a group of high school students last spring how many of them spent time doing “free” reading, reading not assigned for class. They all raised their hands. I was impressed. Queried further, they said that the bulk of such reading was stuff written by their friends: they meant text messages, tweets, and blogs. Whether this ought to be cause for celebration or regret remains to be learned. Better to read something than nothing at all, I suppose, but I have books.

  “By their books ye shall know them”: I take this motto seriously. On a recent three-and-a-half-hour plane trip, I walked through what the pilot always helpfully refers to as the “aircraft” twice: once, forty minutes after takeoff, and once forty minutes before landing. One hundred and forty-four people filled the main cabin. Fifteen were reading books or something on their e-readers and Kindles. An equal number were reading magazines, and not of the New York Review sort. Others were playing video games, looking at movies on their personal computers, watching the in-flight entertainment, or just sleeping. The percentages seemed about right, what I probably would have guessed beforehand.

  I was certainly the only person on board who was reading Wordsworth’s Prelude. Perhaps I am the only person ever to read it on an American Airlines flight. Sitting cramped in my seat, I contemplated Wordsworth’s account of his first year at university. From his undergraduate rooms, the young poet, a mediocre student at Cambridge, saw at Trinity College the statue of Newton “with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” Flying through the air, I was, like all readers, also moving through my own seas of thought, alone among strangers, and grateful for my solitude.

  ART

  One can read a book anywhere, in virtually any conditions, in a crowd or alone in a quiet room. Even in a crowd—unless reading aloud to an audience, sharing an experience with others—every reader is a solitary. This is not the case, for the most part, with the other arts. One can listen to music alone, at home, with eyes shut and ears open. Seldom is one alone with a picture. To look at paintings, unless one is a wealthy collector, means sharing space with other people in public spaces. The pleasures of museums, as everyone knows, are balanced by the inevitable irritations we endure when we walk through the door. One virtue any senior citizen ought to possess is patience, and that patience will be sorely tested in almost any picture gallery.

  Everyone knows the feeling: discomfort, annoyance, rage, an entire range of emotions provoked by other people when one might wish to have total solitude, or at least relative peace and quiet. Welcome to the modern museum experience.

  What do we want when confronting great art? Books are easy, ready companions, and
it’s always possible to block out other distractions by resorting to noise-reducing devices that insulate us with auditory privacy. With film, live music, and especially theater, the audience and its collective responses contribute to the greater pleasure of attending, even though there are plenty of times when one wants to smack the people sitting behind, talking as though they were in their living room; or glare angrily at the woman with dangling jewelry and poisonous perfume in the next seat; or strangle the coughing man on the other side who is noisily unwrapping his lozenges. Rock concerts depend on mass participation; classical ones, formerly the closest thing to silent worship you could find outside a church, are starting to resemble them as they become more like pop events. Not wanting to intimidate younger audiences, classical music producers now aim for more nonthreatening, interactive experiences. The concert event is more like a warm bath than a challenge. In some venues, the players now chat with the audience, and the audience is encouraged to applaud when it wants, not just at the end of a piece or even at the end of a movement. This allows people to express themselves, to show their appreciation.

  The fact that one person’s applause or cheer might interfere with his neighbor’s listening seems of little importance. In most cities, like Dallas, where I live, everything warrants a standing ovation with whoops and barks and hollers. Someone will leap to his feet and make enthusiastic noise. Why? Presumably to show appreciation; or is it to feel good about his expenditure of big money for a ticket and to let his neighbors see that he is among the cognoscenti? If someone in front of you stands up, then you are required to stand as well if you want to see the stage. In Europe, polite applause is still standard practice. I doubt this will last much longer. The greatest testimony to the power of a musical performance is silence. At the opera, why can people not wait at least for the last note to resonate, for the curtain to descend, before breaking into their self-congratulatory applause?

  We can no longer depend on the old-fashioned traditions of the concert hall for moments of transcendent silence. This leaves the visual arts. The aim, at least my highest aim, is a private, solitary contemplation of a single work, in silence and through time. Studies have confirmed my unscientific sense that the average looker spends no more than fifteen seconds in front of any painting. People wander through museums, aimlessly, listlessly: watch them looking and you can see for yourself. What I call the “act of looking”—it is, after all, an action—means not a passive glance by a fast-moving tourist equipped with an audio guide and a camera but an extended act of reciprocal absorption. This is what I always hope for. Sometimes my hopes are dashed by my own inadequacies or temperament—the mind wanders, the tedious details of life interrupt my attention—but more often than not it is the sheer unpleasantness of the museum experience that inhibits, indeed prohibits, active looking. Art is of the body, and if you are too hot or cold, if you have a headache or hangover, you’re certainly not going to think or feel at your highest level. And when other people get in the way, as they always do, so much the worse.

  The goal of the real aesthete is not necessarily ownership but intimacy, to which ownership is often the surest course. I wonder, however, what percentage of collectors in today’s price-driven market actually sit in quiet before their Picasso, Rothko, or Jeff Koons. They may be calculating its resale value next year. But I also think of the Duke of Ferrara in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” who pulls aside the curtain on the portrait of his dead wife for his visitor, thereby ensuring control over the young woman who was too easily pleased, too kind to everyone else, too non-discriminating, and too unappreciative of his family’s name and status when she was alive. Now he owns her two-dimensional substitute, which he need not share if he does not choose to. A student who tacks onto a dormitory wall the most clichéd of Modigliani or Klimt posters knows the pleasures of private looking. And even the least successful reproduction retains something of what Walter Benjamin called the “aura” of an original artwork. For the purpose of contemplation, authenticity and originality do not count for much. In the quiet of that cell-block dormitory room, a ten-dollar print can inspire intimacies with art unavailable in most museum galleries. You may not be able to gauge the delicacies of the original work—brushstrokes, impasto, color, other nuances—but an ersatz reproduction can generate an authentic response even in a student who lacks the skills or opportunities of a connoisseur. You do not need to see close-up the evidence of the artist’s hand to have something like a spiritual experience. You get to think about your picture. It becomes a part of you. In your effort to decorate, to beautify your room, to make it your own, you have defined yourself by a single choice. We can call this an act of self-determination. We can call it style.

  In the museum, noise is always the biggest deterrent to such intimacies. But the overheard conversations of people who have forgotten to use what our mothers helpfully referred to as “indoor voices” sometimes attest amusingly to the democracy of wandering and of sharing space and time with fellow citizens. Many years ago, I went to a show of Chinese bronzes from the People’s Republic at the Metropolitan Museum. Flanking the grand entrance to the galleries was a pair of Ming dynasty vases, perched on ornate rosewood stands and embossed with dragons and delicately rich floral patterns. They stood four and a half feet high. Before me, two earnest Manhattan ladies of a recognizable sort—well coiffed, wearing good jewelry—strolled in. They eyeballed the urns.

  “Gorgeous,” said the first.

  “But where would I put them?” asked the second. This was the entirety of their exchange.

  This pair was not Joseph Duveen and J. P. Morgan, but they were the bourgeois, domesticated descendants of buyers and collectors from the Gilded Age. For these ladies and their like, all art aspires to the condition of the living room. Ownership, or the thought, the possibility, of ownership, occupies their engagement with the things they see. Art is part of decor. There is nothing wrong, or even embarrassing, with thinking this way. When my mother decided that it was time to buy an oil picture for our modest living room, she consulted a more sophisticated friend—another suburban yenta but one with airs—who worked part-time in the art business. Estelle claimed familiarity with real painters; she had brushed up against local greatness. She took my mother to a Philadelphia gallery where they surveyed the merchandise. My mother opted for a perfectly ordinary seascape—waves and clouds, water and air, a sunset peering through, and some seagulls to suggest movement—and told Estelle how much she liked the picture. “And the colors will match my sofa,” she said, triumphantly making her point. Shades of blue and green and white: the picture was perfect for a brick colonial home of a half century ago.

  “Oh, no,” said Estelle, “you should never buy a painting because it will complement the decor.” I realized only years later that my mother was as right in her opinion as her more hoity-toity consultant was in hers. Why not think of the living room as a Gesamtkunstwerk, an entire, organically conceived work of art? If people as diverse as Goethe, Kandinsky, and Josef Albers can consider and write seriously about theories of color, why should an untaught middle-class lady not be allowed to respond to art through this most basic of criteria, this most central of pleasures? We respond to colors in ways that are elementary and therefore deep. This large, unimpressive oil followed my parents from our house to successive apartments in their retirement. It gave them happiness. What else should a picture do? I think it may still live, along with some still lifes by a couple of our Sunday-painting great-aunts, in my brother’s basement, a buried legacy from parents to children who will neither dispose of it nor enjoy it.

  I have gone to museums with a pair of married friends, she a sociologist, he a literary man. They insist on playing this little game: You walk into a room at the museum, and you ask yourself which picture you want to bring home with you. Then you debate the issue with one another. Why this one, and not that one? Please discuss. A whole world of tastes and ideas opens up.

  For sheer scholarly sob
riety, a different kind of looker is a serious art writer I have met, who also, owing to family wealth, owns important twentieth-century paintings. She can afford to think of both the works themselves and the spaces they will occupy in her Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River. She was preparing a book on contemporary museum architecture and design, a study of new American art buildings and collections. A mutual friend asked whether she was going to consider the issue of traffic patterns, the flow and movement of visitors, in museum spaces, and she looked at him quizzically, as if hearing of a bizarre, or at least novel, issue. “Traffic patterns?” she asked.

  And then he realized: she had seldom if ever gone to museums when other people, or at least too many other people, shared her space. The doors open for her at special, private hours; her guides are not the helpful, solicitous docents, some better trained than others, who instruct schoolchildren and members of hoi polloi, but the chief curators of the collections. Neither traffic nor human noise will stay the slow completion of her appointed rounds, nor otherwise interrupt her private experience of the art.

  Everyone who looks at art seriously can count the times he or she has had the accidental good fortune of privacy. In an encyclopedic museum—the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Prado, the National Galleries in London and Washington—all you usually need is a stroll out of the clogged thoroughfares, the space in front of, say, the Mona Lisa, herself triply protected by museum guards, her position behind a bulletproof frame, and the rail that cordons her off from the hundreds of cell-phone-photograph-snapping tourists. These eager aficionados are the equivalent of the madly applauding concertgoers leaping to their feet at the end of a performance. They are congratulating themselves. These days, instead of photographing the paintings, they are making selfies, pictures of themselves with masterpieces behind them. They have turned their backs on the very art other people wish to confront head-on. Why are they doing this? Certainly not to remind themselves of what the Mona Lisa looks like. Postcards used to be aides-mémoire. The selfie now gets posted to one’s Facebook friends. “Here I am,” it says, “with her!” Who is the main subject here? The touring viewer herself has not seen Leonardo’s picture at all. She has held her camera at arm’s length, and the painting is, consequently, still farther away. And her intended audience: Does anyone really care about someone else’s vacation?