Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  Our class reunion party was not aristocratic, not even grand. It was democratic and claustrophobic. No one could make an entrance: this was suburban Philadelphia, not a Paris salon. People just floated in at the cocktail hour, milled about, had dinner, stayed for dancing, or left after dessert. Hierarchy did not exist. After all, this was America. Casualness, not precision, prevailed. Did I achieve anything like an epiphany at the country club on that brisk, calm autumn evening? Did I learn anything? Was I struck dumb? Alas, no: I had no revelations, heard no confessions, no admissions of former passion, and no apologies for slights or wrongs from the past. The event was as modestly pleasurable, even banal, as it could have been. That I probably won’t see most of these people ever again—despite several lame jokes about our seventy-fifth reunion—neither saddened me nor made the shared pleasantries any sharper. Had I missed the event to begin with, I would have lost out on nothing except cordiality and some fine dancing to the music we grew up with: swing, cha-cha, a little Chubby Checker twisting for the really risqué. Anticipation of the event led to a subsequent letdown.

  One friend flew up from Florida with some curiosity but few expectations. She had a lovely time, she told me afterward, because she had no previous ideas or hopes. I realized that this is a good way to go through life: expect nothing and you will never be disenchanted, only agreeably surprised. I had so resolutely planned on an outpouring of fine feeling that I had set myself up for disappointment. Instead of the longed-for inundation came a modest wash of sentiments and the sweet frustration of conversations nipped in the bud, which are always preferable to ones that go on too long. Thank goodness for the easy out—“I think I’ll have another drink,” “I must say hello to my former next-door neighbor,” or “Oh, look, there’s Diane”—to keep alive what Wallace Stevens called the pleasures of merely circulating.

  Most of the old differences among us had melted away, in favor of an acknowledgment of our commonalities. We have led—everyone does—generic lives. Everyone had work and love, Freud’s two great conditions, to talk about, although successes and failures alike both took a backseat to more mundane topics (“What is the weather like in Florida?” “How is your golf game?” “You have how many grandchildren?”) and, only fleetingly, more prodding or spiritual ones. Deep conversation, analysis, and intimacy were in short supply; fellow feeling and high spirits prevailed. These offered disappointments as well as pleasure. But what was I thinking? Did I really expect that old obsessions would reappear, old flames burst out? Did I expect confessions, revelations, and admissions? The people I had crushes on fifty years past did not show up. What would I have done had they appeared? I wanted to have experiences at the country club that would have been worth replaying and reviewing, just as I wanted to replay and review experiences from half a century before with the cast of characters from the play called “My Life.” It is probably just as well that nothing memorable occurred.

  D. H. Lawrence begins his poem “Beautiful Old Age” with a conditional verb: “It ought to be lovely to be old / to be full of the peace that comes of experience / and wrinkled ripe fulfilment.” Lawrence died at forty-four, well before he could experience the final ripening and rotting. He might have known an 1827 poem by Wordsworth that begins, “Such age how beautiful!” (“To ——, in Her Seventieth Year”). Only a special person would say this. By “special,” I do not mean merely “a poet,” but a poet of a certain age, one who, like Wordsworth, born in 1770, is approaching, but not entirely close to, the age of his addressee. This is what the future holds, if luck, genetics, and healthy living can keep body and spirit together and sustain us. Wordsworth must have projected himself into the Countess of X, looking at his future state in her present one. Anyone over fifty knows the feeling. We see ourselves in others, and especially in the old we find our mirrored selves. Even the gods become ghosts.

  As you get older, you become more sensitive to the ravages of age and more grateful for the occasional evidence that not everyone deteriorates terribly. Some people look much better. Others at least change interestingly. A while ago, I ran into a man I know slightly. He’s six years younger than I, gray-haired, straight spined, handsomely preserved. When I met him for the first time at a dinner party several years earlier, I blurted out, “Have you ever been a model?” To which the answer was yes. Now, at sixty-one, the bone structure is still there; the body is intact. Whatever indignities age has visited upon him—arthritis, knee replacement—do not show immediately. Instead, you find the traces of youthful beauty, the past recaptured or still in evidence, and also a deepening of that beauty. I think of Wordsworth, in “Tintern Abbey”: “for such loss, I would believe, / Abundant recompense.” Wordsworth was twenty-eight when he wrote this. What form exactly does that recompense take? Does wisdom come out of bodily decrepitude? Perhaps, but everyone remains excited by bodily beauty, especially when his own body has lost strength and resiliency. We remain nostalgic for our former, sexually charged selves. What can you do to work with the hand nature has dealt you?

  * * *

  My less than overwhelming experience—Proust goes to the country club—came several months ahead of another trip, this one to Mexico to visit friends for a long weekend. The place and the company were congenial, the weather perfect. The visit was filled with chat in several languages, music and museums, dancing on the plaza. On a Monday, I prepared for my return to Dallas.

  Maybe because I was born two weeks premature, I have an almost constitutional capacity and instinct for earliness. I always get to airports well before I need to, eager for what will follow. I like airports almost as much as I like travel. Many friends call my taste for both the terminal and the plane inexplicable if not bizarre, although discomfort is the price one pays for whatever pleasures await at the destination, the next place. To go somewhere, you must endure the voyage. I have never minded it. T. S. Eliot was again right: “The journey not the arrival matters.”

  And then I realized: I like to look forward as much as backward. I am like those friends who didn’t come to the reunion because they prefer not to look back. Something ahead always invites us. Which has greater vividness, the past or the future? I sit in an airport waiting room, impatient. I sit on the plane itself in heightened anticipation, perhaps more than a little tense. My antennae are on the alert. My body and mind are primed: Something is going to happen! In that waiting room and on that plane, we passengers are all pilgrims together. There is no disappointment. Once in the air, we are literally suspended, going between. And the community of travelers, however temporary, is one of equals. There’s no us, no them, no natives, no foreigners. No one belongs and everyone does. No hierarchy. Even first-class passengers do not reach the goal any faster. They may have better seats and more legroom; they may enjoy free warm nuts and champagne, but midair turbulence does not spare them. And if there’s a delay, we are all delayed. Blandness and banality confer their own comfort. In a foreign country, you tend to be ill at ease in the unfamiliar. In the waiting room, you inhabit a state of betweenness, as you do in midair. In the waiting room, you’re not even traveling, you are just sitting or pacing, recovering from where you have been, anticipating where you are heading, whether home or away from it. You are powerfully aware of your status, actual and symbolic, in present time. And you are looking ahead. Lacking the normal ballast of familiar circumstances—all the aspects of our daily life that make us forget we have little control over our destiny—you may also feel the shock of any journey, knowing all too well where all journeys take us.

  This time, I—we—waited for the arrival of the little plane that would return us to the States. The plane kept not coming. The first announcement said, simply, “Weather.” Then another announcement said, “Mechanical malfunction.” We kept waiting. Finally, we were all asked to spend the night at the local Holiday Inn and to get ready for a return flight at five the next morning. Fellow passengers grabbed their phones to contact friends and relatives on the other side. Grumbles, groans,
modest gnashing of teeth, some cursing, were heard. There was nothing to be done.

  We gathered in the hotel bar and restaurant, thirty-five of us, all going nowhere, and settled in for an evening of modest, obligatory solidarity, the sharing of personal details, and having another drink. We smiled and laughed. We got to know one another. We became a community of circumstance and convenience. We went to bed, awoke in the middle of the night, returned to the little airport, and came home. The intimacies of the previous night had vanished like a dream. Now each of us was grimly set on a return to the practicalities of ordinary civilian life. We looked forward.

  I thought of another man getting ready to set out. Herodotus tells the story of Xerxes, surveying his troops, thousands of men, the pride of the Persian Empire, as they prepared to cross the Hellespont to invade Greece, ca. 480 B.C.E. The emperor overlooked his vast expeditionary force—plumes flying, armor glinting, beautiful men eager for warfare and glory—and he remarked with sadness, “Look at all these people—but not one of them will be alive in a hundred years.” His estimate was too generous, of course. Surely most of the men had died within half the allotted, predicted time.

  My big high school reunion flew by quickly: four hours of socializing. It was as cheerful as it was brief, if nothing special. It offered little by way of lightning flashes or thunder rolls. And then it came to me: it was like life itself, miniaturized. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who knew about the speed at which, say, a candle burns, knew both the truth of our inevitable disappearance and the opposing urge not to give in:

  Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

  Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

  Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

  I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

  (“Dirge Without Music”)

  It all went by, and it continues to go by, so fast. Proust has it right in the last sentence of his novel: time itself is a place, “extending boundlessly … giant-like, reaching back into the years,” in which we can “touch simultaneously epochs of [our] lives—with countless intervening days between—so widely separated from another in Time.”

  Life eventually becomes for everyone “drear and deadly” as Updike put it, but for some—most? the lucky few?—it offers gratification as well. Looking back becomes itself a source of such pleasure. Looking forward tests one’s strength and hope. Wordsworth said, famously, in his Intimations Ode that a mature person finds “strength in what remains behind.” The phrasing suggests, ambiguously, that we are grateful for what strength remains within us after much has been taken and also that we continue, unavoidably, to look back, “behind” us, to identify and relish the source of that strength.

  QUIET

  Many writers have been making a lot of noise about silence during the past few years, all of them “listening” in order to hear something, or “confronting” and “pursuing” in an effort to achieve some kind of escape. The virtually interchangeable titles of their books ring changes on one common theme. This is literature by people on an impossible mission, a quest unlikely to be fulfilled.

  I have read many of these articulations of the last decade. More will come forth as more people feel the need to weigh in with their opinions and experiences. Stuart Sim has written a Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise (2007). Anne D. LeClaire, in Listening Below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence (2009), describes her decision—and its consequences—not to speak for an entire Monday. One day of silence turned into two Mondays every month for seventeen years; her experiment included a week on Cape Cod with no speech and no electronic sounds whatsoever. In 2010, George Prochnik (In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise) ventured into, among other subjects, the sociology of noise in shopping malls; the creation of antinoise societies in England and America starting in the early twentieth century; “deaf architecture” at Gallaudet University and elsewhere; the physiology of sound; and the history of soundproofing. In Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010), Salomé Voegelin makes a more abstract philosophical effort “to consider listening as an actual practice and as a conceptual sensibility.” Most interesting, Sara Maitland, in A Book of Silence (2008), a book succinctly titled and lacking the requisite academic colon, writes autobiographically about her gradual moving away from a noisy, intellectual, upper-class but bohemian British family, through the early days of feminism, to falling in love with silence and solitude. She hung out with Bill Clinton in the heady, turbulent Oxford of the late 1960s and then abandoned the clamor of public political and philosophical debate for marriage and child rearing and finally for the solace of private spirituality.

  The same obsession has haunted the newspapers as well. People are looking for old-fashioned peace and quiet, and they find it in both old and new ways. Some people, like LeClaire, just stop talking. Others simply turn off phones, computers, and the other antennae that connect them to the noisy world outside. I have kept clippings of articles from The New York Times about this obsession in an ever-expanding folder. They include pieces by, for example, Susan Gregory Thomas, writing in the travel section (2012), looking for “a quick shot of peace, on a budget,” and recommending various inexpensive spiritual venues where one might find “no-frills spiritual solitude.” She found hers at a Jesuit center in Pennsylvania. In the Book Review, John Plotz wrote an essay on the “noonday demons” that afflicted medieval monks and the modern incarnations of such demons. Plotz visited a Benedictine monastery in central Massachusetts in his quest for communal solitude and quiet. Maureen Dowd, in an Op-Ed piece from 2011, quotes the twentieth-century Swiss philosopher Max Picard: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence.” Susan Cain, author of the bestselling 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, wrote a Times piece before her book came out. It begins, “Solitude is out of fashion.”

  Most moving was a 2012 piece by Pico Iyer called “The Joy of Quiet,” which reminds us that the average American spends eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen; that the average office worker has no more than three minutes at a time without interruption; that you can now spend lots of money at “black-hole resorts,” where you pay for the privilege of not having a television in your room. This is the equivalent of spending lots of money for a week at a spa where you get healthful but very minimal food. The more you pay, the less you eat. Today, several years after Iyer’s article, the data must be even more staggering. Like other writers, Iyer has been going on retreat for decades. His preferred destination is a Benedictine hermitage in California. While in residence, he does not attend services; he does not meditate. He merely walks and reads. You do not need to go to a monastery to do these things. You could just as easily stay home, but perhaps the temptations to succumb to worldly distractions are too great. Iyer quotes the fashionable designer Philippe Starck, who claims, “I never read any magazines or watch TV. Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners, or anything like that.” Anyone can live like this.

  But it has always been thus. Some people work best alone and in quiet. Many people, especially writers, seek out the condition of solitude and its mate, tranquillity. The immediate precursors of the current generation of mindful silence seekers include Annie Dillard, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Francis, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, and Picard and, before them, generations of secular as well as religious men and women who wanted calm instead of fury. People have always put their fingers in their ears or walked out of a room in their search for quiet. Google “noise” and you find—by my latest count—forty-one million entries. Google “silence” and you turn up only twenty-eight million. And writers talk—that is, write—about silence endlessly. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes recommended silence as a cure “for the blows of sound.” Aldous Huxley called noise “an assault against silence.” George Bernard Shaw said with tongu
e in cheek, “I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.” Probably a minute after God created the world with language (“Let there be light”; and “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”), someone said “Shhhh” or “Can you please turn it down?” Someone has always complained to someone else about the noise, either unwanted human speech or harsh, loud nonhuman sounds coming from elsewhere.

  Everything is relative. I think of Ernest Thesiger’s campy reply to someone asking about his experience at the Battle of the Somme in World War I: “Oh, my dear. The noise! And the people!” Or W. C. Fields, having been offered a Bromo-Seltzer for a hangover by a solicitous waiter: “Ye Gods, no! I couldn’t stand the noise.”

  There is, of course, no such thing as “noise,” just as—in the famous words of John Cage recalling the 1952 premiere of 4′33″,—“there’s no such thing as silence.” A noise is merely a sound that you happen not to like or a decibel level that you find oppressive. Just as a weed is not a thing in nature but only a plant rooted where someone doesn’t want it, so one man’s noise can be another man’s music. When Julia Barnett Rice, a New York grande dame whom the Parisian press dubbed “the Queen of Silence,” founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise in 1906, her particular bête noire was Hudson River tugboats that disturbed her sleep. Today many people might find the call of the river tugboat, like a train whistle in the night, a source of comfortably soporific nostalgic pleasure.

  On her visits downtown, Mrs. Rice turned up her nose and plugged her ears, calling the Lower East Side “the saddest place,” with the “unnecessary rackets” of its pushcarts, the same carts that Lorenz Hart heard as “gliding by” sweetly on Mott Street (“Manhattan”). This was not the charming shtetl depicted in Funny Girl, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s musical about plucky Fanny Brice rising from poverty to stardom, or the dense, teeming neighborhood remembered more realistically but appreciatively in Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers. Slums, ghettos, shtetls, have always been subjects for analysis and nostalgia equally, and fond backward glances compete with hardheaded evaluations of the realities of life. John Connell, a British civil servant, started the Noise Abatement Society in the United Kingdom, which led to the 1960 Noise Abatement Act that tried to regulate noise from burglar alarms. Today we also have car alarms. Whatever measures we take to lower the din, nothing seems to help. And what offends one person, or an entire generation, another person or generation may simply ignore. There is no getting away from the perils of noise.