It is wise also to learn from exemplars of the past. We study history, wrote Sir William Osler, the first professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, “for the silent influence of character on character.” But it is in the ordinary course of our daily lives that the wise are most usefully encountered, sometimes in the most unlikely places and among the most unlikely kinds of people. We should be constantly on watch for them, and pay attention. “Wisdom is the reward you get,” Mark Twain is reputed to have said, for once without tongue in cheek, “for a lifetime of listening when you would rather have talked.” Though the unassailably perfect wise man does not exist, the continuum of wisdom is everywhere around us.
The getting of wisdom is, of course, a process, and it has no end point. There is no recognizable peak on which the seeker may finally stand and say, “Now I am wise.” The process is incomplete at any stage, and the outcome, like all good, is relative.
The wisdom that we seek with age is not something that comes without effort, nor is it unearned consolation for the passage of years. Rather, it is the result of reflecting. As we grow older, an appreciation for the value of unhurried judgment and the careful weighing of long-term consequences expands. If the aging brain is well used, knowledge grows as does the inclination and the opportunity to integrate knowledge into reflective thought.
We tend to call someone wise if he or she consistently makes good decisions and knows how to help others do the same. But these are only manifestations of wisdom, its outward evidence. They tell nothing of its components and the basis upon which wise people incorporate those components into their own character and behavior. Everything that follows here is based on a single proposition: The wise man or woman strives to know how the moral, useful, and rewarding life should be lived—and lives it. To know it without living it is to be a head without a body.
Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom involves the management of knowledge, which in turn involves comprehension of the significance of the knowledge possessed. Wisdom is knowledge put to use by judgment. T. S. Eliot expressed his understanding of this in his pageant play, The Rock:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Of the many kinds of knowledge upon which wisdom is based, the foremost must surely be self-knowledge, hard-won and often difficult to face. As more than one wag has put it, “The trouble with self-knowledge is that it’s so often bad news.” Bad news or not, it must be dealt with. Like no other characteristic of wisdom, this one is elusive, and too often the very thing we try so hard to avoid. The self-knowledge we believe ourselves to possess may actually be the self-delusion behind which we hide. But we fool ourselves at our own peril, and the peril only increases as we age. The slightest admission to one’s conscience of such a truth is the beginning of self-knowledge and well worth the pursuing, difficult though it may be.
In the Dialogues of Plato, we read, “For self-knowledge would certainly be maintained by me to be the very essence of knowledge, and in this I agree with him who dedicated the inscription, ‘Know thyself!’ at Delphi.” To know oneself is to recognize and acknowledge insecurities, fears, biases, ambition, competitiveness—and hopes, too. For these are the influences that have the potential to distort the clarity of mind, purpose, and motivation so urgently needed if proper judgments are to be reached.
Motive lies behind every decision we make, and it is never pure. In the interest of judicious precision of thought, the nature and content of mixed motive must be known so well and confronted so honestly that it is not allowed to distract from the calculus of reasoning. Accustomed as we are to scrutinizing the motives of others, it is incumbent on us—more than incumbent, it is an urgent necessity—that we scrutinize our own. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “Accustom yourself in the case of whatever is done by anyone, so far as possible to inquire within yourself: ‘To what end does this man do this?’ And begin with yourself and first examine yourself.” When we are sufficiently familiar with the world within us, we perceive why we are inclined to respond as we do to the world around us, and are in this way equipped to make choices about our appropriateness of response in any given situation.
To know oneself is also to know the limits of one’s knowledge, to accept them if they cannot be changed, and to take that into consideration in the same way that motive is taken into consideration. How many of us are willing to look at the limits of our knowledge and take account of them? Here follows the narrative of a man whose career’s greatest contribution was based on the enviable characteristic of having that particular component of wisdom, though he may have had no other. Not only was he wise in this one thing, but his example taught others, in accordance with the general principle that we must seek wisdom anywhere it can be found, even at the unlikeliest of sources. In the “Pirke Avoth”—Ethics of the Fathers—in the Talmud, Rabbi Ben Zoma asks, “Who is wise?” And then answers his own question by saying, “He who learns from all men.”
At the hospital then called Grace–New Haven, he was listed in the directory of physicians as James P. Mignone, Jr., M.D. But I never heard him referred to as Dr. Mignone unless he was right there to hear it, and even his colleagues did not call him Jim except when speaking directly to him. Out of his immediate earshot, he was invariably called Jimmymignone—not Jimmy, not Mignone, and certainly not Dr., but always the whole thing pronounced quickly without pause as if it were one word—and it seemed to fit his hurried ways perfectly. Our senior professors used that sobriquet when speaking of him, whether to medical students or to the hospital barber. Even to some of our barely literate cafeteria workers back then in the 1950s, he was Jimmymignone. From the loftiest to the lowliest, he was what he was.
What he was was the family physician to the Family. Jimmymignone was New Haven’s Mafia doctor. Rumor had it that the New England mob was then run by a godfather in Providence, and our small city of about 150,000 was the second most important crime town in the entire region. Not Boston, not Bangor, and not even Bridgeport, but New Haven, Connecticut. It was an honor of sorts, I suppose, and we medical students treated Jimmymignone with a certain modicum of what I can only call awe. We were more impressed than amused by his ability to, while in the middle of one of his typical rapid-fire sentences, turn suddenly on his heel in such a swift flash of movement that we more often than not found ourselves cut off without being able to respond. We would then be left staring at the receding sight of the pinstriped back of his expensive double-breasted suit as he raced up the corridor.
All of Jimmymignone’s movements were quick. He made rounds on his many hospitalized patients each morning with the alacrity of a terrier trying to outrun the dog warden. Looking down on the doctors’ parking lot from a height of seven stories, we would sometimes see him scurry across the pavement to his shiny Cadillac and then roar off to the other hospital in the city, or—in our imaginations—to a don’s behind-the-pizzeria office, to scribble one of the narcotic prescriptions because of which he was so often in trouble with the New Haven police, or at least those few cops who were not part of his circle. In reality, the reason for his haste was simply that he had to get back across town to see the office full of patients always waiting for him there. Jimmymignone had the largest medical practice in New Haven.
Jimmymignone was a nice guy. His natural affability and New Haven’s then-large population of Italian-born immigrants made him a much sought-after physician, and he refused his services to no one, even though they might be unable to pay. He was not the Mafia doctor for any nefarious reason, but simply because the mobsters liked him and he was never unavailable to them or anyone else in medical need. I always suspected that his excessive narcotic-prescribing was due more to his inability to refuse anyone—including mafiosi—than to a thirst for ill-gotten gain. In return, the mobsters used their connections to help him avoid prosecution, and the cops were reluctant to punish a man they admired.
Jimmymignone was always smiling
. I never saw him without a wide grin on his olive-complected, hawk-nosed visage. No single slick of his thinning black hair was anything but flatly combed directly backward on his long narrow head. He looked like a happy blackjack dealer. Jimmymignone grinned so much not only because of his basically sunny nature but also because he wanted to be sure of the good will of the interns and residents. When I knew him, he was in his late fifties, having obtained his medical degree three decades earlier as one of the many American students then enrolled at the University of Bologna, a once-distinguished institution then in a long period of decline from which it has since brilliantly recovered. To no one’s recollection had he ever written an order in a chart.
Though Jimmymignone had plenty of patients in the hospital at any given time, he didn’t actually take care of them, because he did not know how. Any medical problem not of a magnitude to be handled quickly in an office setting was beyond him, and he made no pretensions otherwise. The result was that his inpatients were very carefully watched over by the interns, residents, and attending physicians on the medical school faculty. Because everyone liked Jimmymignone and everyone knew how clinically inept he was, a kindly conspiracy of nurture existed around him and around each of his patients. The result was excellent medical care.
Among wisdom’s various components, none are thought by most people to be more important than length of time on this earth and the experiences through which one has lived. Jimmymignone had more medical experience than any doctor I knew in those days, and yet he was one of the least able. Though he treated so many men and women in his office, and saw how they were cared for in the hospital, he was unable to reflect on any of that, or to gain from it in a way that approximated, at least to us students, medical wisdom. His original base of knowledge was poor. That and his nonreflective turn of mind prevented him from utilizing what passed before his eyes every day; he was immune to improving himself. As one of my teachers once said, “If time and experience were what counted most, Jimmymignone would be the best clinical physician in the state, but he’s probably one of the worst, at least from the standpoint of diagnosis and therapy.”
But Jimmymignone was blessed with that quality too often disregarded when wisdom is considered. Though he knew so little of clinical medicine, his great strength was self-knowledge. He knew his limits and he used that awareness to do well by the people who entrusted themselves to him. He did only what he was qualified to do, and saw to it that others more skilled took over where his abilities left off. In this he was wise, because his patients always got the best possible care. And so in the end, who is to say that Jimmymignone was not a good doctor? And who is to say he was not a wise man? And who is to say that he was not someone from whom the rest of us could learn something important?
I have been writing here of self-knowledge as though it is attainable in all of its dimensions. But the truth is somewhat different. Like wisdom itself, self-knowledge can only be approached but never fully achieved. By introspection, brutal honesty, and the capacity to acknowledge any questionable inclinations, it is possible to come closer to the desired goal.
Though wisdom involves the search for ultimate truth, it must be pursued with the realization that ultimately there is no absolute truth, only perception. Ambiguity, contradiction, uncertainty, even error: To be comfortable with them is the beginning of wisdom. To function and make good decisions in the face of uncertainty, unpredictability, and necessarily limited information is to acknowledge that these are intrinsic to the human condition, the conditions of our lives. To deal with them requires flexibility, and this too is a component of wisdom. To step back, constantly reevaluate, modify judgments, and be willing to admit inaccuracy and error—these test wisdom’s resolve.
Wisdom has a purpose; that purpose is action. This means that action must sometimes be taken with the full understanding that decisions may possibly result in less than perfect consequences. Because taking action in the face of incomplete information is the usual condition in which wisdom needs to be applied, each choice, no matter how wise and with what good outcome, is a choice likely to have some drawbacks of its own, just as even wonder drugs have side effects of which account must be taken in their use. It is in weighing what might be called the cost-benefit ratio of each decision that wisdom faces one of its most difficult tests. Knowing that unwelcome imperfections are the inevitable accompaniments of even the wisest decisions should never paralyze decision-making, or cause hesitancy in a decision’s implementation. The wise take action in the face of imperfect knowledge, and even given the probability of imperfect solutions.
It is for such reasons that the wise are characterized by their ability to anticipate the consequences of the choices they make. While such foresight requires a richness and variety of life’s previous experience, even more important is the ability to interpret that experience, to mine it for meaning. Those who have delved deeply are equipped to recognize patterns that will likely play themselves out when certain courses of action are taken. This connecting of the past with the present and future—for which older men and women are well suited—may not guarantee unfailingly accurate prediction in all cases, but it does allow the envisioning of a trajectory on which any given decision most probably will project itself.
This enables what is called “intuition,” which is nothing more than the harvest of that constant processing of information going on within the mind, often below the level of knowing thought. The so-called intuition of the wise is hard-bought, and it comes from the synthesis of a long experience of experiences, and the capacity to organize these experiences into a coherent system of patterns and priorities that is stored in the brain’s memory banks, ever ready to be called on as circumstances demand. We are made of memories; the structure and condition of our lives at any moment is in large part the consequence of every decision we have made until that time. An ethic of personal responsibility for those decisions and the actions that have followed from them is the province of the wise.
The wise learn equally from the good and bad, success and failure; they live through hard times and tragedy, and use them for the lessons such times can teach. In tragedy, the unwise see only loss; the wise find meaning. Many of us, in fact, are far better at learning from tragedy than from great good fortune, which we somehow regard as mere luck, without stopping to consider the elements of it in which we may have had a hand or which may be useful for future decision-making. Think here of the philosophy of Miriam Gabler, as expressed in the epigraph of chapter 4.
In all of these considerations, the wise deal with the world as it really is; they do not create scenarios to serve some desired purpose. To be wise is to abjure self-delusion—to see things, including ourselves, as they are, while retaining the optimism to see them as we hope they can be. The wise man or woman is both a dreamer and a person of action, at once an idealist and a realist, a visionary with feet sturdily planted in the terra firma of here and now.
To see the world as it really is demands a certain degree of objectivity, even detachment—but never aloofness. One’s own needs, feelings, or emotions must be taken into consideration, but they should not be allowed to color judgment insofar as such a thing is humanly possible. In other words, the approach to judgment and knowledge should be so reflective that it transcends one’s personal concerns and self, aiming instead for the humanistic, even the universal. It is the human condition that motivates the wise, rather than their place in it.
The notion of the human condition refers to individuals more than to a general state of the mass of mankind. Accordingly, the ultimate concern of the wise should first be for the welfare of individuals, and only then extending on a gradual continuum to the families, groups, and societies of which they are a part.
Obligation to distinct people would seem to be at odds with an attitude of detachment, especially when this obligation includes allowing oneself to take an interest in those people, even feeling a closeness toward them. We cannot take responsibility for one or s
everal others without having personal feelings for them. Responsibility involves dedication, a mere step from devotion.
The single word that best incorporates what I am trying to communicate here is “caring.” Caring arises from an inner sense of relatedness to one or more individuals and to all humankind, and the recognition that humankind’s ultimate good is bound up with one’s own. Caring has about it something of the nature of wonder, that one’s own strivings can be transcended in the name of a greater principle, one that ultimately benefits everyone.
This is precisely what Saint Paul must have meant by the ringing words of chapter 13 in I Corinthians, when he said that agapé, in the original Greek, is greater even than faith and hope. Agapé refers to a kind of wondrous love, which the authors of the Vulgate properly translated into the Latin caritas, best defined as a “caring love” that puts aside petty self-interest. Saint Paul’s magnificent words epitomize much of what has already appeared in the present and earlier chapters of this book: “And now abideth faith, hope and caritas, these three; but the greatest of these is caritas.” Where there is no caritas, there can be no wisdom.
If there is no caritas for others as individuals and in the aggregate, wisdom cannot survive. But few of us have been endowed with enough of it by nature or nurture, and fewer still have been able to retain what we have of it through a lifetime of the realities in daily experience and the cynicism these realities often engender. Concern for others is viewed by some as a theoretical virtue toward which there is no easy or even discernible path. But plenty of men and women before us have tried to point the way. Percy Shelley, one of those precociously wise young people—those exceptions—of whom note was taken at the beginning of this chapter, mused at the age of twenty-seven on a quality that might be called “moral imagination,” and in his essay “A Defence of Poetry” he told how it could be achieved.
The Art of Aging Page 23