On the sad height
The future is on schedule. It’s coming for us. It will devour us. Sooner or later we will all lay down in the dust.
I’ve been thinking about the future these past couple of weeks. I ran into an old friend on the street the other day; he looked 10 years younger than the last time I’d seen him. Taller, straighter, clearer of eye. He’s retired and has a new gig, one he obviously likes. He says the important thing for him is to be “of help.”
I can be pretty cynical, but I believe him. People want money and the things it accesses, but more than that I think they want to feel they matter, that they have a place in the world.
When you climb up a couple of rungs on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you think less about what’s for supper and more about what kind of world you want to leave behind, how you might want to be remembered, and where you might fit into some grand cosmic scheme.
As you get older, you have more time and wherewithal. Certain options foreclose; you realize you’re never going to play third base for the Red Sox or give a piano recital at Carnegie Hall. If you’re lucky, one day you look up and realize that you don’t have to worry much about the things you have spent your whole life worrying about. One day, you realize no one is going to come along and take it all away from you.
There was a Swedish sociology professor named Lars Tornstam who, in the 1980s, developed what he called his theory of “gerotranscendence.” What Tornstam concluded was that human development is not something that stops when we reach maturity—that after the age of 45 or so we don’t start gliding slowly downward toward the grave, but that human development is a life-long process.
The core of Tornstam’s theory is that normal human aging consists of a range of emotions and feelings, chief among these an increased sense of affinity with past generations and an awakening of cosmic awareness that brings with it redefined notions of time, space and existence.
People naturally become less interested in superfluous social interaction and better able to withstand solitude. People become less self-occupied and more selective in how they spend their time. They might care less about material things.
By Tornstam’s lights, this is how healthy people grow old. They don’t stagnate, they don’t lose interest in life, they become more philosophical.
I see this in myself, and a lot in some of the people I engage in my weekly LifeQuest discussion. This term we are watching the first season of the HBO series “The White Lotus,” which is a sometimes disconcerting watch in a church basement.
It is, I had almost forgotten, a sexy show, centered around a group of VIP guests and a few members of the staff that attend them at a luxury resort on a Hawaiian island. (“The White Lotus” was shot on the grounds of the Four Seasons Resort at Wailea on Maui, which Mike White and his crew took over while it was shut down during the covid-19 pandemic.)
White, a known quantity since he wrote and starred in the classic indie cringe comedy “Chuck & Buck” more than 20 years ago, is a humanist who locates comedy in social anxiety; he likes to make his audience squirm as they recognize the foibles
of his characters as manifestations of their own doubts and wishes.
We take it that we are supposed to be appalled by the grasping of the uber-rich, with our loyalties residing with the less-privileged members of the service industry in a Xanadu built from the colonial imperative.
But White subtly, and then not so subtly, subverts our expectations as we recognize ourselves both in the guests and the interchangeable hotel and spa workers. It seems, as one of the guests observes, that “… we’re all just monkeys, we’re just … monkeys … driven by base instincts to create these hierarchies and hump each other.”
None of these people are self-actualized; only one of them— the youngest one—achieves a measure of redemption. They are all fighting for scraps. Expensive scraps, but scraps.
I relate to them more than I do to Tornstam’s idealized elderly.
The Swede studied privileged people, just as White does, and perhaps he should have noticed a great many of us—no matter what level of creature comfort we’ve achieved—struggle to the bitter end. I am drawn to the fierceness of Dylan Thomas’ villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
It’s generally accepted that the poem is about the struggles of Thomas’ father David John (DJ) Thomas, the senior English master at Swansea Grammar School in Wales, who was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1933.
DJ received radium treatments that eventually allowed him to return to work, but his health slowly spiraled until his death in 1952, 11 months before his son. Dylan most likely started the poem in 1945, wrote most of it in 1947, and finished and published in 1951. While it’s often said that the poem was written in the wake of his father’s death, in fact Dylan recorded his most famous reading of it before his father’s death.
Which makes sense if you think about it, seeing how the poem is obviously about being on the threshold of non-existence, and resisting the pull into the unknown. It’s addressed to a dying man, not a dead one. And I’m not the first to observe that all of us are in a sense dying. So it is for us not to capitulate to the darkness. Hang on, Sloopy.
It’s a great poem. Iggy Pop covered it on his 2019 ambient jazz album “Free.”
What gets me about it is the rhythm, the way the stanzas turn around themselves, ratcheting the tension between the acceptance to the inevitable and the normal human impulse to hang on, as they say, “for dear life.”
I hold hard to things, sometimes even when I know they are lost. I more relate to Dylan Thomas than Lars Tornstam, even as I understand that learning to surrender is essential to growing up. We all compromise. We all eventually lose our grip.
But I am heartened by my friend, who only means to be of help, who has genuinely achieved a state beyond craving. He is not a monkey. He has let go before he had to and become help to us all.