Looking back

When you get to 90 you are in overtime and a penalty shoot-out looms which you know you cannot win. The Socratic injunction, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” should never be ignored but, certainly now, time must be found to review how you have played the game.

Towards the end of his life the writer Somerset Maugham wrote a short book entitled Summing- Up. Everyone should seek to make an honest summing-up of how he or she has used the astonishing privilege of life. There may even be time to draw a few conclusions and make a few last-minute adjustments.

Everyone should have a checklist. Let us go through a shortened version.

Commitment to family. How well have you done in your generation’s turn? How good a son, brother, husband, father have you been? It is not just a question of how efficiently you have contributed materially to the family’s care, well-being and progress. It is the time and love and understanding you have found to devote to family concerns without measuring return.

How have you treated all people? If you have made a great distinction between those from whom you might expect benefit or reward and those from whom there is absolutely nothing to expect you may have improved your gross personal product but you have failed utterly as a human being. You behave according to the merits of the case. On the whole you favour the unfavoured, lift up as high as you can those whom life has horribly let down. That is the law you should have written down early and followed as best you can. I suppose it simply embodies the third and greatest of St. Paul’s formulation – faith, hope and caritas – caritas which is love in the sense of concern for the well-being of others in all respects.

What work have you done and how have you done it? Career, the workplace, take up a monumental amount of time. It will always be disillusioning to ask yourself if it has been worth it. So better just try to add up the adventures and survived mishaps that constantly lie in wait in any career, the astonishing people you have met along the way, the amusements, the ironies and surprises of human character and group behaviour, the challenges you have encountered and stretched yourself to the point of happiness overcoming, the constantly renewed satisfaction of doing the immediate job at hand well. And perhaps you will be left with the slight hope that you may have made a small impact for the better all in all – though please see Leonard Woolf’s salutary words later in this column as an antidote to even this slight hope.

How fulfilled a life? It lends zest and meaning to keep ambition in your life from first to last. Of course, the ambitions of youth soon tatter. We begin with dreams, we end with responsibilities. But the urge to achieve wonders, turn lead into gold, should never be allowed to disappear. But what ambition? Yeats tells us we have to make a hard choice:

“The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark,” Maintenance of the soul. You live life in all the measurable dimensions and do the best you can and if you score a little more than 50% you can feel or think you have done well enough. But something beyond dimension, unplaceable in the world of hours, intrudes to which attention must be paid. This hasn’t ever been argued well enough to give even a glimmer of satisfaction to the hardened doubter of the divine and it likely never will be. But God, immortality, purpose in infinity and universe, sense beyond sensation, reasonless reason exit conceptually and nothing that exists can be completely ignored. Consider the very deepest mystery of why there is something and not nothing and join Pascal, as I do, and maintain the soul which ignites the fire in all we do as if we are subject to an eternal judgement.

Reviewing what you have done in your life, the real impact the work part has had, apart from the money it has earned you, can be a very unsatisfying and diminishing experience. Leonard Woolf, political activist, writer, publisher and husband of the great novelist Virginia Woolf, expressed himself on this subject in the following bleak words: “Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing. I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.”

Sometimes when feeling a little low I look back on my career in the sugar industry of Guyana and the Caribbean over 52 years and I give a resigned gesture of acknowledgement to Mr. Woolf.

But at the very end of his five-volume autobiography, when he is trying to sum up the sense of modest contentment which has settled in him after the battles royal of a very long and laborious life, Leonard Woolf stoically observes: “There are other assets of old age. The storms and stresses of life, the ambitions and competitiveness, are over. The futile and unnecessary and false responsibilities have fallen from one’s shoulders and one’s conscience.”

So there may be that to be said in the end. Life gradually simplifies itself, awaiting the greatest simplification of all – and, perhaps, some answers.