Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  Manhattan is a small village, or an accumulation of many small villages. An apartment building is a community. A block is a federation of constituent communities. The city replicates itself every five blocks or so. The neighborhood market, barbershop, shoe repair shops, dry cleaners, liquor store, all become part of one’s daily or weekly drill. You make friends in the shops. There’s a famous urban fable, to which Italians would put the label “Se non è vero, è ben trovato” (If it’s not true, it ought to be). This is the kind of thing you see written up in the columns of The New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary and The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. One fall afternoon, at Manhattan’s redoubtable Fairway Market on Broadway at Seventy-Fourth Street, filled with dangerous, cart-pushing ladies of a certain age, all of whom are in hard-edged pursuit of a mission, the reporter sees and overhears a woman examining the string beans. Speaking perhaps only to herself, she is entranced by the quality of the produce: “Such beans, I’ve never seen such gorgeous beans.” Picking over them individually, she then turns to him and repeats her excitement: “Have you ever seen such beans? You can’t get green beans like these where I live.”

  Thinking that perhaps she has come from the Bronx, New Jersey, or even farther away, he politely asks, “Where are you from, madam?”

  “I’m from Eighty-Fifth Street.”

  Even at the enormous Williams-Sonoma at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle that looks more like a Dallas mall, vertical rather than horizontal, than a uniquely New York habitat, I spent thirty minutes chatting with a salesperson who turned out to be an opera singer just back from her summer at a singing institute in Verona. “So what’s your Fach?” I asked. That stopped her. She was impressed that I knew the German word for a singer’s temperament as well as her range. (She is a soubrette, as it turned out.) And then the conversation went further: she had majored in chemistry in college before changing tracks and pursuing a musical career. I totally ignored the place mats I was supposed to be buying. I’m sure I’ll never see this woman again. I don’t remember her face, but I won’t forget our conversation. Chance encounters like this can brighten the day: offering travel instructions in German to a pair of older tourists looking for Jazz at Lincoln Center, or talking in Italian to sweat-drenched Romans in town for the New York City Marathon who wondered where they might find the subway to get them back downtown. A whole series of these meetings is like the grace notes in a musical score: inessential but sweeter for their uselessness.

  Or, to change the metaphor, these trivial moments are like pieces of punctuation in a writer’s paragraphs: they create pauses, continuities, hesitations, and momentary stopping points. Through them we ask questions or get answers to earlier questions. They provoke exclamations of wonder and good humor. A semicolon joins two independent clauses; a chat brings together two independent people who would otherwise have remained separate. Such punctuation stabilizes the rhythm of each day’s syntax.

  Random meetings are, like four-minute twirls around a dance floor with different partners, little love affairs without consequences. In a review of books about walking, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik recently reminisced about the long Sunday walks he took in the 1980s. He was new to the city, just out of graduate school. He would tramp through lower Manhattan, before Tribeca became arrogantly gentrified. He felt the same liberation experienced half a century earlier by Alfred Kazin. Gopnik deliciously calls it “the vague excitement of unearned ease.” Thirty years later, SoHo and the rest of Manhattan are different. But so is Adam Gopnik. He makes the easily refutable claim “Walking for pleasure is an occupation of the young. Only a few older people of great vitality walk long in cities.”

  I could not disagree more. How wrong he is. I am an older person of ordinary vitality. My walks are intended less to observe architecture and civic beauty—Gopnik’s main subjects of attention—than to watch the other aspects of life, the flora and fauna, the flowers blooming, the ginkgoes dropping their yellow leaves all at once on a single fall night, the earnest dog walkers with their sniffing canine companions, and especially the entire human species. Walks engage the eye; they promote meditation; they calm and excite simultaneously. A real urban Spaziergang, a stroll, resembles a work of art, in Immanuel Kant’s rightly epigrammatic definition: it exhibits Zwecklichkeit ohne Zweck, purposefulness without purpose. You do not know where you are going until you think it over afterward, when you consider where you have gone. And you do not care. Walks also offer the thrill of surprise. They are a mundane species of performance art. Everyone contributes. Everyone is part of the spectacle.

  You run into everyone. Sometimes you bump into old friends, and occasionally you see people you might have heard of, even celebrities. Peripatetic, I met Dante and Plato on the same July day. The former, an African-American security guard at my apartment building, seemed to be sleeping standing up when I stopped in front of him. With a change of costume, this man with ramrod posture could have been an English Beefeater at Buckingham Palace. He might also have been unconscious. With eyes closed, he said, “I can see you looking at me. I am not asleep.” Then he opened his eyes. We chatted. It turned out he was not dozing but meditating to ward off a bad migraine he felt coming on. His badge identified him. He was, however, clearly not Italian. “Were you named for the poet?” I asked, half joking. “Sure thing. Awesome dude. Great man,” he replied. Was he, too, joking? I could not tell. I did not care.

  Hours later in Riverside Park, out for a postprandial stroll, I met Plato. Plato was a parrot, leashed and walking on a garden rail, his owner standing nearby. She was an Upper West Sider straight from central casting: an artsy woman of a certain age, wearing an embroidered Mexican folk blouse, turquoise brooches, silver bracelets, and dangling earrings. Her hair, graying and unruly, was piled high in a bun. Everyone in this section of the park seemed to know her; everyone also knew Plato, who, she said, has about one hundred words. He perched for photographs on my arm. He might have shared some conversation with me, but a passing friend warned his owner that she had spotted a resident hawk circling around, so the lady scooped Plato up and went back home to the small apartment they share with two cats. One beatnik, one bird, two cats: what a ménage, I thought. Strolling back to my place, I counted my little blessings: first, the serendipity of encounter, and second, the cutting short of something that could have gone on too long. Would Plato, his owner, and I have talked longer and achieved deeper intimacies? None of us will ever know.

  Dallas, my residence for more than half my life, has had a kind of earned familiarity, the comfort that accompanies habit, but not unearned ease. Manhattan, my residence for a concluding chapter or two, will always generate the excitement of anonymity. It makes me feel I belong there precisely because I do not.

  Walt Whitman, quintessential Manhattan walker, described his urban support and comfort as “the impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day.” He strikes the right, paradoxical note. Wandering through the city at all hours produces an impalpability that nevertheless is grounded in the body, in the life of everything and everyone around him that gives him physical and more than physical sustenance:

  The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,

  The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

  The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,

  The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

  The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

  The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

  (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”)

  Belonging and “disintegrated” simultaneously, Whitman ambles around, both in and out of his wandering game. He observes a scene, in the double sense of that verb: he watches it from without, and he performs a ritual, in this case the ritual of walking with and in the cro
wd. It is the ritual that all city dwellers, especially New Yorkers, understand and relish. From such scenes, rituals, and walks, Whitman amassed Leaves of Grass, the book that changed American literature. Walking gave Whitman the “sights and hearings” that he folded into his poetry. Reading that poetry, indeed reading any book, can sustain a walker like me when he then steps indoors, away from the crowd, and into the solitude of the library.

  BOOKS

  Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

  —ECCLESIASTES

  Manhattan, which always changes, always remains the same. We might say the same thing about books, and about reading. However one’s reading habits develop and alter through time, books can stay permanent fixtures in our lives, companions to return to. We have chance encounters with some of them; we make repeat visits to others. Some last forever, and others we banish to charity sales, whether or not we have forgotten their contents. Even those we reread repeatedly change as well as stay the same. The book we read at twenty is not the same one we read again at sixty. Just as the faces we see in the city, Pound’s “petals on a wet, black bough,” appear and vanish quickly, individual books come and go. Even saying “come and go” metaphorically suggests the connections between moving one’s feet through the city and moving one’s eyes over pages of black print. Reading books continues, an unending activity, especially for those who got hooked early. At least it has remained permanent for me.

  Surely Stéphane Mallarmé was thinking of Ecclesiastes when he began his early poem “Brise marine” (“Sea Breeze”) with a similar sense of wearied frustration: “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.” The flesh and the spirit have both become weakened; the promise of books to be read, or to be written, begins to look inadequate or unappealing. Study, endless reading, and plodding attempts to write all result in sadness, not exultation. Even if not deliberately echoing the Old Testament, Mallarmé was expressing the desperation of writers in all languages and cultures. Bound by compulsion, desire, and pride, authors balance their lives between the poles of hope and disappointment.

  So do readers. I began as one. Many people do. I then proceeded to write. Most people do not go that far. For every book, essay, review, or piece of journalism I have written, I have read thousands of pages more. In high school, I read, and then took as a personal motto, Francis Bacon’s coolly authoritative and precise epigram (in the essay “Of Studies”) “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” I have spent a lifetime reading, conferring—mostly in classrooms—and writing. Reading came first; the other activities followed. There was a time before I wrote, but I cannot quite remember when. I fiddled with words in print in first and second grades. And I certainly cannot remember the still earlier time when I did not read. Most obsessive readers begin young and are blissfully ignorant, until later, of why they do what they do.

  Reading has a history. Scholars like Sven Birkerts and Alberto Manguel have detailed for us the changes in reading as a cultural practice, from the days when most people had to be read to, to the modern habit of silent, individual reading. What about the reading of a person who has reached senior status: How has it changed over the decades? How can a lifelong reader measure the course of his own history? Like any attempt at self-analysis, tracking these changes means taking a backward look and a recovery of facets of the person one used to be, and still is, if only in part. Our tastes and customs alter as we age, as both body and mind undergo time’s often not so subtle depredations. “Progress” is hardly the right word; we adjust and adapt for better or worse, and the reader we were at seven or seventeen is not the reader we are at seventy. The eyes require help—stronger glasses, more light, larger print—and the mind might have lost its own Sitzfleisch, the simple ability to sit still and concentrate. Even people with sturdy patience succumb, in the age of the tweet, to modest doses of attention deficit disorder. Focus, both mental and physical, may become difficult to maintain. We must work more strenuously at what once seemed easy, even effortless. We persevere, because reading still brings information, stimulation, and solace. It is the first and the ultimate pleasure.

  Of one’s plans and aspirations, one begins to eliminate items from the lists one made in youth. Things formerly aspired to are now erased as the unrealizable dreams of a different person. I won’t learn Mandarin; I probably will not even get to China; I will never master the Argentine tango; I certainly will not swim the Channel. And I know that there are plenty of books I am not going to read, things I have scratched off the to-do sheet. Schopenhauer, Kant’s first and second Critiques, all of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Nabokov’s Ada, Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. They all elicit an unambiguous “I’d rather not.” Time’s passing requires that we make choices, positive and negative.

  Yeats said, hopefully, “Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.” A sentient, honest person will register how the mind declines along with the body. When I was a college senior, I read all of À la recherche du temps perdu, although with more than an occasional glance at the Scott Moncrieff translation, for an independent study in Proust. Today the English version alone presents what look like insurmountable challenges. Back in my salad days, right before Proust, I did a seminar in Henry James. Four eager English majors sat at the feet of a brilliant assistant professor, in his house, every Monday evening for four hours. The drill: one novel a week, including the daunting last masterpieces. Anyone who teaches today’s college students will confirm that you cannot expect a twenty-year-old to read The Golden Bowl in a week and come away understanding anything at all. Looking back, I know that I must have managed only the skimpiest comprehension, bullying my way through the Master’s baroque, recondite late style, metaphorically chopping through the underbrush of his inviolable syntax with a machete, my eyes glazing over. Today’s college students have more on their plates and in their schedules than I ever did. Some college professors have thrown up their hands and accepted the new realities; they assign only parts of books, selections from Melville, juicy chunks of Homer. Education has returned to the principle of exposing students to the greatest moments, the biggest hits, the most purple passages. It’s as though the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books have come back to life.

  Half a century ago, high schools and universities provided space and time for expansive leisureliness, openness, and wandering by the way. One cannot read Middlemarch or Moby-Dick unless one has unencumbered hours to lose oneself in the text. I have the time today. But rereading The Wings of the Dove would challenge me as much as it would any undergraduate with a surgically attached mobile phone and constant buzzing distractions from outside. The senior mind wanders. I have resisted Twitter, but I know as well that brevity has a lot to do with changes in reading habits. Two kinds of brevity: shorter books and shorter periods of time in which to read them.

  For purposes of travel, especially on vacation, I always carry with me one big book, a loose and baggy monster, usually a novel that I can tuck into at night, on the plane, or in random moments of leisure, waiting for a friend or a bus. I want something I can open and close and be assured of finishing within two or three weeks. If I have to keep at it for much longer, I risk forgetting the start of the book as I heave toward its end. I don’t have the memory required to retain plot details and dialogue, not to mention echoes and repetitions, themes and variations, all the things an English teacher dazzles his students with.

  Not having a perfect memory, however, has many wonderful rewards. One can reread books one read years before with the delicious double pleasure of coming upon some things as if for the first time—“What a beautiful sentence,” “Yes, she delves wisely into the human heart,” “I can’t believe this man said that”—and experiencing others with a shock of recognition. “Oh, I remember this part” vies with “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

  Rereading books from youth or even a later period has another advantage as well. You know that y
ou have guaranteed yourself a good return on your investment. With age, one is more aware of time slipping away as well as accumulating. What does one read? When a friend makes a recommendation, or a review prompts your interest and you decide to make an outlay of time or even money, how long do you give yourself to be drawn in, captured, and lost in your indulgence? One chapter? Ten pages? A hundred? Three hours? Ever hopeful, you may say to yourself, “This is unfolding pretty slowly. The author is setting the stage carefully, engaging our attention by focusing on small details that will become more important when she discloses secrets later.” How much later?

  Reading runs its own risks, and choosing a book is like sitting down at the gaming tables. When will you strike it rich? Reach the payoff? On the next page? If you are smart, you may decide to cut your losses at a certain point and shut the book. (If you have bought an expensive ticket for a play or concert and find the experience painful or tedious, do you stick around after the intermission, on the theory that you’ve paid for the seat so you might as well get your money’s worth? Or do you decide that time is more valuable than money and head for the exit and then an earlier bedtime?) The book bores you; it does not engage you; it has inspired nothing other than irritation, tedium, even sleep. It is now time to look elsewhere.