Mid-Life

After an exchange with my agent, who mentioned that I do not show 1/1000th the empathy for myself as I do for the other people I write about, I picked from our email exchanges a book called Mid-Life, Notes from the Halfway Mark, by Elizabeth Kaye, as an example of how these things might better go down. I did this not because it was recommended to me (it wasn't), but because the agent's opinion is one I have now heard three times in as many months; why am I so doctrinaire, so moralistic, about what I have done in the past? My answer to which is, um...

I am younger than Kaye was when she wrote Mid-Life, if not by much. I am firmly in my 40s, even if I don't look it. That last is pretty much the luck of the draw, combined, maybe, with a near-daily constitutional of exercise and Kiehl's face cream. Years ago, I had a conversation with Henry Rollins (a gal I was working with at the time was his business partner). We were both maybe 32, and he said, "People are always saying, 'I look better now than I did when I was twenty,' to which I say, bullshit." I don't look better now than I did fifteen years ago, but I do look the same, which is weird, because it is my most ardent wish to not be the same. Looking the same is fine, but please dear god do not let my brain remain sitting at the same bus bench for all eternity.

Or maybe I don't look the same. I was rubbing lotion on my legs yesterday and saw some busted up tiny veins near my knee; when did those get there? But here's the thing: I don't really care, whereas I vividly recall at 33 putting on a pair of tiny shorts, to get ready to play softball with a bunch of guys, and taking a moment to dab a little concealer on the pea-size varicosity that had bloomed behind my left knee during pregnancy. I haven't thought about that vein, or noticed it, in many years.

When my daughter was still an infant, I would sometimes wake in the night near-paralyzed by the information that I had, at age 29 and by dint of giving birth, been situated in an endless cosmos, a great black out-there of meaning, and the fullness of this, the certitude, would make me weep. Last night, lying next to my sleeping husband, I realized this information is imprinted on me, always there for the looking, the temporal nature of who and what we love, swimming up and into us, staying, then passing, and that we are passing, too.

Kaye's book did a few things for me, and while I am somewhat shocked to realize I am about to here copy down her last graphs -- I was as moved by the last pages of Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year and would never, ever think to present them cold like this -- I think they stand on their own, and speak pretty plainly, and deeply, at least they do to me:

And while I have always assumed that when I reached mid-life, I would not want to think about my own mortality, I find I want to think about it now. I want to because I'm one more person who elevated procrastination and sloth into an art through sheer dint of practice. Yet these days I have no patience with sloth, and I don't procrastinate much, and I try not to waste time. My life has approved accordingly. I'm not surprised. I've always been one of those people who does better on a deadline.

    And though I still make mistakes, I am less inclined to delude myself about their cost. I no longer expect things to make sense. But that does not mean there is no magic. It does not mean there is no hope.

    It simply means that each of us has reason to be wishful and frightened, aspiring and flawed.

    And it means that to the degree that we are lost, it is on the same ocean, in the same night.

Comments

[Loren]

Speaking from the ripe old age of 62, I can definitely say that at some point you ease up on yourself as you FEEL the fact that the bulk of life is behind you. For us disciplined type A's, it's freeing in that you can finally let go of the (necessary, no doubt) drive and desire to make sense of things and perfect the groundwork for the future. As your body slows down and you gain new interests you are forced ever more into the present, which is wonderful. You find yoursefl helping younger people, giving things away, becoming slow to anger or to mindlessly compete. I find that I have naturally stopped watching much TV and going to as many movies. It's just so much more fun to "hang out" wherever I find myself. (Advertisers certainly know this -- my cohort and I are decidedly NOT in the prime ad demographic... except maybe for Cialis or Depends. I still can't take too much of Vin Scully, however.)
It makes sense to stop trying to "totalize" past and present experience (Google the philosopher Todorov: "Empire must totalize without apology..."). A more present sense of mortality humbles our personal empire and frees us from interpreting our past in a limited or harsh way. Maybe that's partially what your publisher is talking about.

Anyway, far from having anything figured out, I know FER SURE that I really don't have a clue. Buddha said that we all know we're going to die, but none of really FEEL that we are. It's tough and maybe inpossible to completely fathom the end of our consciousness, but to do so would be to "wake up" in Buddhist terms. Imagine what that level of wakefulness would feel like. Far from being morbid, I think it would be simply amazing.
I read a blog post by a woman who ditched her tour of Rome to spend a lunch hour eating her sandwich in the Coliseum. When she finished and was just gawking around, she was suddenly overwhelmed by the historic immensity of what she was looking at... "Oh, my God, I thought." .. she wrote. On an especially cogent day at 62, it's like that. You look around and think, "Wow, what the hell is all this... what a vast production and what a privilege it is to witness and participate in it all, even if I don't have the slightest chance of understanding it."

[Nancy Rommelmann]

Loren, I just love your comments. Thank you.

[savtadotty]

I agree with Loren, from the vantage point of 71. Life only gets better, but not the way I could imagine in my 40's: deeper, more meaningful, and yes, sadder in an OK way.

[Eric]

To add to something Loren said: the Colliseum is one of the most spiritual places I have ever been. I mean really spooky, like the remnants of all that suffering and spectacle still vibrate in the air. We stayed in a hotel a cuple blocks away, so I went and explored daily for a week. The only other time I felt that was passing by Auschwitz.

[Alice Bachini-Smith]

Been thinking about this a lot lately, after noticing repeatedly that I really was saying & doing all sorts of things that "older people" say & do, and that I really did actually believe them, once the exception-based excuses were peeled off.

"And it means that to the degree that we are lost, it is on the same ocean, in the same night."

Yes. Dammit, though.

More to say about this when I'm less urgently occupied/ more ready to handle it :)

[mb]

Nancy, i just used the same (almost) quote by Kaye in a blog post except that I thought her name was Kayle. Thank you for clarifying, as I found her words scribbled in chalk on a rainy day. The "Y "must have bled and created something that looked like an L.

You are an incredibly interesting writer. So glad one of my readers linked me to you.

MB.