Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (4 page)

But Sophocles has more in store for us as we track this fellow’s fate. Blinded, yes, but not out.
Oedipus the King
ends, as the Riddle of the Sphinx predicted, with an old man reduced to child status, walking now on three legs, being helped by his daughters to exit the world. Yet he is not to die but rather to be preserved for some great fate. Sophocles returns to that fate, as if he felt the original story were somehow inconclusive, that self-blinding was but a stage of this man’s trajectory, that his actual old age and dying would require another story altogether. Oedipus as old man, as seen in
Oedipus at Colonus
, written at the end of Sophocles’ life and the end of Athens’s status as the intact and controlling center of Greek culture, is still a proud even if feeble ex-king, but he seems shockingly angrier, less “wise,” less reconciled to his fate, than the man we glimpsed at the end of the earlier play. His anger at his sons, his repeated ireful self-defense regarding the transgressions of incest and parricide, make one wonder if “maturation” and “wisdom” are useful terms for gauging this man’s long life and trials. Sophocles is unrivaled in depicting creatural indignities: we cringe at the plight of old Oedipus—beggar, outcast, fugitive, ailing, “married to disaster,” as he himself says—brought so low, now in rags, with his “ravaged face.” The very rendition of the blind and ragged old man, utterly dependent on the help of his daughter Antigone, now coming at long last to his destined burial ground at Colonus, has an unmistakable pathos. But once again destiny is beckoning.

The play moves genuinely toward transcendence and transfiguration at the close, as Oedipus actualizes the gods’ final prophecy: his secret burial place at Colonus will be a divine protection for Athens itself. In his dying he will ultimately reclaim, in a different key, the kingly powers he possessed in his prime. At the very portal of death, the miraculous event transpires: the old man rises to his feet, without the help of his children, and begins to move with slow, majestic steps, announcing to us, “I stand revealed at last.” When we consider the horrid revelations of the earlier play—the rebuke to human knowledge, the blind committing of incest and parricide—there is something mesmerizing about this final metamorphosis, as if time and suffering and curse were now being reversed, turned into stature and power and regal strength. Of course, prophecy takes some of the credit here, and there is a Greek discourse about shrines and holy sites, but we cannot fail to see a beautiful reversal of time’s arrow, a reversal of the physiological calvary that the old must experience if they live long enough.

One recalls Pascal’s sinister words
“Le dernier acte est toujours sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste.”
(“The last act is always bloody, no matter how sweet the comedy is otherwise.”) All that is overturned here. At our end we become kings once again. (Ionesco would rework just this conceit 2,400 years later.) It is an arresting yet glorious image of death as our final apotheosis, our final assumption of the form and legacy we leave. I see nothing actually religious here, no prattle about the soul leaving the body and moving heavenward, but rather a decrepit old blind man getting a chance to preen and flex his muscles as exit performance, as savior of Athens. It’s a final harvest, a radiant view of the end.

But that is not how most of us remember this play or this story. Oedipus’s drawn-out miseries and misfortunes, hauntingly visible when the curtain goes up, are given immortal voice in this play as the inevitable punishment meted out by time. This blind man, who enters the stage leaning on his (death-marked, as we know all too well) daughter Antigone, images for us a destiny that has little to do with transgression or holy shrine and everything to do with the “mortal coil.” Sophocles’ chorus is worth citing in full:

It would be hard to improve on these searing lines about the fate of aging. Sophocles is merciless in his scrutiny: you look for pleasures still, as you have always done—is this not how we live?—but they are shrinking, disappearing altogether, being canceled out by time. This is what must happen if you do not have the wisdom or wit to exit the feast at the right time. It is folly. Not that you are condemned to die alone (as we all imagine); on the contrary, you acquire a grisly final companion for this ultimate phase, the death god, who will be faithful to the very end. The wisest course is not to be born, the chorus says, but none of us has that choice. Being born, our next wisest course would seem to be to go back to where we came from. Where do we come from? Can we return and thus escape the indignities slated for us? Is that perhaps what Oedipus unknowingly sought to do when he coupled with Jocasta?

But he lived on, becoming old and feeble, hobbled with infirmities. The chorus envisions them as a dreadful form of intimacy and disrobing: we are stripped of all that gave value and substance to our existence: power and love; in this naked final state, our last lover, our mate, death, comes. Bereft, without cover, we face the elements that will undo us. The winter breakers crash over and through us, flaunting their vigor and our nullity, as if the entire cosmos were now taking its ultimate revenge on the human creature who has lived too long: the dying sun mocks us from the west, for it will return tomorrow to die again, but we go down only once; the rising sun mocks us from the east, for we will not share in the rebirth of light and life; the noonday taunts us with its heat and vitality, for we are detritus; the north finally cloaks us in our last vestments: eternal night.

That is how it ends.

The Oedipus story stands as the entryway into my book. It presents the life of the young as at once enterprising and blinded, crowned and crushed. We live in the murk. Our trajectory from morning to noon is checkered, and the crossroad we come to has consequences beyond our ken. Answering the Sphinx, becoming a king: here is a luminous parable of growing up, of achieving power. Committing (without knowing it) both parricide and incest: here is the horrific rebuke, as great feats of doing stand revealed as great trials of undoing. And this same story in its later phase, from noon to night, offers a comparably double-edged portrait of old age: suffering the merciless indignities of both entropy and exile while eking away a hard life, yet rising at the very end to recovered kingship and sovereignty. There’s a worthy riddle here: does time beat us down or raise us up as we reach the end?

In the pages to come we will look at works of literature (and film) from many different times and places, representing books I know and love, devoted to the trip from morning to noon, and from noon to night. My choices are personal, and other works might come to mind or might have been chosen by other writers. In these stories we will see, once again, the trajectory of the young as they encounter and interpret life’s coercions and riddles, and we will examine the plight of the old as they near their end, as they size up their end. Hence the life story of Oedipus—saved but doomed, doing but unknowing, intrepid but undone, decrepit but triumphant—seems exemplary to me as the master narrative for launching our exploration; it will stay with us, casting a long shadow.

How to write about growing up? As children, especially as young children, we are too busy actually growing up to be able to put this experience into the distanced and interpretive frames of language and narrative. Not only are the great stories about childhood always written by adults looking back, remembering, perhaps inventing, perhaps fantasizing, but childhood itself might best be understood as an adult construct, a retrospective adult project. For starters, what would be the language of childhood? The French writer Georges Bernanos, late in his life, seeking to visualize the entry of his soul into the afterlife, saw himself as child—
“l’enfant que je fus”
—as the deadest of his dead, yet leading the way, even though irretrievable. And on the far side of words. Is it too much to claim that language itself is the price we pay for leaving childhood, the conversion of wonder into grammar? Or could we, alternatively, see language as prize, as central attainment and means of empowerment in the process of growing up?

These matters are at once primitive and abstruse. Anyone who has seen the vibrancy of children at play senses the gap (in beauty and power) between “being” and “speaking.” And that may be the least of it, for language also heralds a regime of deferral and translation. The immediacy of experience is exchanged for the mediation of words. We exit the Garden into a realm of signs. Consider, in this regard, the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw his fundamental life crisis in just these colors. Retelling his life from the vantage point of age and retrospect (in
Les Confessions
), Rousseau recalls the life-altering episode of a stolen comb.
A stolen comb?
Yes, stealing a comb is what the child is wrongly accused of doing, but when he passionately argues that he is innocent, he is not believed. You may ask: Where’s the crisis? I repeat: He says he is innocent, he is not believed. This is no less than the entry into language as facticity, language as unreliable conduit. “There ended the serenity of my childish life,” he writes; words are a broken bridge, our hearts cannot be read.

But the other side of this equation is no less crucial: language as empowerment, language as means of comprehension and agency, language as indispensable tool for growing up. We will have occasion to see that the most “successful” figures in my study, the ones who manage best to make their way into life, whether it be by overcoming adversity or understanding the nature of culture (the culture that contains them), enlist words as one of their chief resources. We will see this writ large, as it were, in the trials and exploits of figures like the
pícaro
Pablos, Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin, and Alice Walker’s Celie.

Further, what would we know about the lives of others if it were not for the written record, the vital transcription of experience into language? Our most precious accounts of childhood, of the experience of growing up and making our way, come to us by way of writing. Writing not only ensures the communication of this key phase of life, it is the tool that enables us to give shape and meaning to it, to retrace it, to convert its quicksilver into cadences and form. Writing eludes (as nothing else does) time’s entropy and erasure, so that the depicted childhood of, say, Rousseau or Dickens or Proust still shimmers in its immediacy (and in its mix of terrors and errors) while those men’s bones moulder in the earth. But that is the least of it: the stories of growing up, bequeathed to us by literature, partake of the miraculous plenitude proper to narrative: they are big with time, awash in culture, so that they yield an echoing script that not only captures the child’s experience but also signals much more: the gathered familial and cultural vectors whose weave inhabits the mind of the child and the foreboding temporal curve to come, as the child leaves childhood and enters the adult scheme. Through the narratives of childhood, the accounts of the voyage from morning to noon, we access something no photo, no single utterance can express: at once an unfolding of human potential and a peculiar map of private and public destiny, interwoven.

And more still: we see, thanks to the optic of these books, the elemental shock that the adult world, with its peculiar rituals, routinely inflicts on the young, and this is tonic, for it is what we adults have stopped perceiving for some time now. Aided, we now see the ticket we bought long ago for admission to “reality.” As readers, as thinkers, as folks with miles to go before we sleep, we’re already positioned on the far side of this dividing line, ousted from innocence and locked into experience, as William Blake would have put it, but for a precious while—as we negotiate, say, the poetry of Blake himself or the novels of Dickens, Twain, and Faulkner—we breathe another air and grope toward an earlier self. Literature restores to us the most moving chapter of our life—the truly kinetic time when everything was mobile, the time before things made adult sense, perhaps the only time things actually made real sense.