Waiting for the Last Bus. Richard Holloway

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ it starts early, with our revolt against the reality of the bodies we were born with. Had I been born sixty years later, would I have saved up for hair-transplant surgery rather than wasting my money on those wee sweeties advertised in Church Illustrated? And would I have missed learning one of the best lessons life teaches: that it is better to accept reality rather than deny it, including the reality of our own bodies and the death that is their only end? Throughout most of history, humans had no alternative but to accept these certainties. In our advanced technological society, that is no longer the case. We spend fortunes trying to refashion our bodies and postpone our deaths. And it is easy to understand why. Anguish is a hard thing to bear, even if it is only the anguish of not liking the way we look. The anguish of dying is harder still, especially if it comes before we are ready for it, and we feel cheated of the time we thought we had left.

      But there is no escape from anguish. It comes with the human condition and the self-awareness that is its key component. The secret is to learn how to live with it. Accepting the reality of the way we look and the certainty of our death, maybe one day soon, won’t make us happy, but it might save us from the greater unhappiness of trying to ignore or hide from these realities. The fleeting pain of admitting our situation is preferable to the constant pain of denying it. It takes fortitude, the most useful of the old virtues. Fortitude is one of the most important lessons life teaches, and ageing may be our last chance to learn it. It is the ability to endure the reality of our condition without flinching. It was defined by the gay cowboy in the movie Brokeback Mountain: ‘If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.’ And there’s a lot you gotta stand when you get old.

      Such as going deaf! It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it has to my wife. What distresses me is that I find it irritating. Much of the time I have to shout to be heard by her, a small price to pay for close contact with someone I love. Yet it constantly annoys me. That says something to me about larger society as well as my own impatience. If we are not careful, we can start resenting the presence of the elderly in our midst and the minor irritations they impose upon the rest of us. Their deafness may annoy me, but the glacial way they move can induce bouts of sidewalk rage in me. The day will come when I’ll walk more slowly too, but I’m still fleet of foot, so I get angered by those who hold up my progress along the street or through the aisles of the supermarket. I mutter to myself that they shouldn’t be allowed out after the age of seventy unless they can pass a minimum-speed mobility test. For God’s sake, why can’t they get a move on? If I can have those terrible thoughts about the old in my eighties, I wonder how the millennial generation feels.

      Worse than losing your hearing or your mobility is losing your short-term memory. Those moments when you can’t find a name or forget what you were just about to say to someone. My wife and I joke that we have one good memory between the two of us. That’s the best way to handle the ageing business – with a sense of humour, the blacker the better. In his nineties, my father-in-law stopped buying green bananas, because he didn’t think he’d live to see them ripen.

      Apart from humour, another source of consolation in old age is that vanity and self-consciousness fade away. In his memoir, the American novelist John Updike mused on how embarrassed he used to be by the hats his father wore when he was old. Then when he reached that time of life himself, he found himself wearing the same battered monstrosities. I too have a shelf full of embarrassing lids that I fancy give me a jaunty glamour. My wife tells me they just look daft. Well, daft it is. I shall embrace my inner scarecrow and agree with the Irish poet W.B. Yeats that:

      An aged man is but a paltry thing,

      A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

      Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing . . . ⁷

      It is possible to say a rueful ‘Yes’ to our fading energies and begin to appreciate the humour and understanding that old age can bring.

      ***

      Much more difficult is giving up the prospect of the future. Not so much my own as that of my children and grand-children. Not to be there to see them make their way through life. And not just to see them. To be beside them when they hit sorrow, as they will, for no one misses it. To be someone they talk about, no longer someone they talk to. That’s what the English poet Philip Larkin most hated about death. He described it as:

      . . . the total emptiness for ever,

      The sure extinction that we travel to

      And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

      Not to be anywhere,

      And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.⁸

      Nothing more true, certainly, but why should it be so terrible? After all, we won’t be there to know we’re not there. When you’re extinct you don’t realise it, so it can’t hurt. The Greek philosopher Epicurus said that fearing the not-being-there that follows death is as silly as regretting that we weren’t here before we were born.

      But it is not the thought of being dead that troubles us; it is the prospect of leaving and losing those we love that grabs us by the throat. And we already know something of what that feels like. Life has given us many anticipations of our dying. We only have to recall the memory of other separations to realise how wrenching the last one is going to be. The frail figure watching our car disappear round the bend before turning in at her lonely door; the moment in the station when we can’t say goodbye because our heart is filling our throat, and we clutch hands and turn away.

      Someone is waving a white handkerchief

      from the train as it pulls out with a white

      plume from the station and rumbles its way

      to somewhere that does not matter. But

      it will pass the white sands and the broad sea

      that I have watched under the sun and moon

      in the stop of time in my childhood as I am

      now there again and waiting for the white

      handkerchief. I shall not see her again

      but the waters rise and fall and the horizon

      is firm. You who have not seen that line hold the

      brimming sea to the

      round earth cannot know this

      pain and sweetness of departure.⁹

      Painful as these partings are, there may be the promise of future meetings to console us. And there are ways of keeping in touch with people we love that can compensate us for their distance. In dying, we face the final and absolute separation not only from those we love but from ourselves. Dying not only kills our bodies, it kills our future. I look at my grandchildren now in all their vivid promise, knowing I will miss seeing where their lives take them. And a quiet sorrow touches me. It doesn’t overwhelm me, but as I gaze at them with pride and wondering affection I hear a distant bell toll. And I know it tolls for me.

      In old age, this kind of rumination can make us feel sad about the future we are going to miss. But that shouldn’t be the primary emotion we feel at the end of a long life. It should be gratitude. We won a rare lottery ticket when we were born. There must have been something in our DNA that beat the odds against fusing the sperm with the egg that made our particular existence possible. Millions did not make it off the wasteful assembly line in the great reproduction factory of life. We got through. We made it. For that at least we should be grateful; and even more grateful СКАЧАТЬ