Travels with Epicurus (6 page)

When I tell one of my favorite philosophical gags, it is always a little kid who laughs the loudest.

Andreas
: What holds the world up?

Orestes
: Atlas, of course.

Andreas
: But what holds up Atlas?

Orestes
: He stands on the back of a turtle.

Andreas
: But what does the turtle stand on?

Orestes
: On another turtle's back.

Andreas
: But what does that turtle stand on?

Orestes
: My dear Andreas, it's turtles all the way down!

A child gets the delicious absurdity of this dialogue about infinite regression better than anyone between our ages.

In my experience, friendly animals and old people also have a distinct commonality when it comes to pure play. There is a game I play with increasing frequency as I get older: rolling on the ground with my dog, Snookers. It brings me incalculable pleasure. I have yet to experience an unsatisfying roll-around with my doggie.

So how does it feel for this old guy to roll in the grass with his dog—or, to put it in Edmund Husserl's terms, what is the phenomenology of old-man-with-dog-rolling-in-the-grassness? (Leave it to a middle European philosopher to turn what personal essayists have been doing for time immemorial—recording how their experiences
feel
—into abstract scholarship.)

For starters, it feels silly. In fact, I feel so silly that I involuntarily start giggling. My giggling, in turn, makes Snookers jump on my torso and start to lick my face. I push him away playfully, which is to say, I do not entirely mean it, and Snookers knows this so he keeps on jumping and licking. We roll around some more. That's pretty much the whole game.

No doubt there is a physiological element to the way this game makes me feel—probably something to do with how the rolling and giggling affect the flow of blood to my brain—but be that as it may, what I feel is a kind of stoned lightness of being. I feel extraordinarily happy. If this is what second childhood is all about, I am glad to be here.

Now and then a neighbor will come upon Snookers and me rolling around. On these occasions, I believe I am afforded some latitude in their judgment due to my age. In any event, I am pleased to report that both Snookers and I keep a game face.

—

Of course, on a sunny day, all I need to do is look over at Tasso's table on Dimitri's terrace to recognize an old man's finest playmates: his old friends. Happily, back at home I have my own variant of Tasso's table.

Over thirty years ago, when we were still in our early forties, my friend Lee, a comedy writer, established a lunch club for funny guys. Optimistically—we should live so long—he dubbed the club the Old Farts. Lee envisioned a gathering akin to the Algonquin Round Table, but what inevitably evolved was a table of raucous gagsters.

We still gather ever few months in a low-rent restaurant and yak for hours. A serious subject may come up—say, the latest political scandal—but this only serves as the kickoff into a gag, and then another, a “topper,” and then a topper of the topper: jokes upon jokes, many told in the old, unhurried style of our fathers, with lots of bizarre character development and digressive details so the jokes become nuanced, far-fetched stories, a sort of borscht-belt magic realism. The joking is only marginally competitive, although, of course, bad puns are booed so loudly that the waiter often becomes alarmed.

We old guys laugh ourselves silly.

What we are up to, according to Professor Huizinga's ranking, is one of the highest forms of human recreation: playing with words and ideas. Wit, funny stuff—taking the world into our imaginations, playing around with it, and then shamelessly passing off the absurd as the real.

ON THE ZENITH OF MY APPRECIATION OF OLD MEN AT PLAY

It was a half decade after watching those young and old almond harvesters in the Spanish countryside when I first saw old Greek men dancing, a form of ecstatic play I had not witnessed before and have not seen so passionately performed since. I was still new to Hydra at the time and had not yet made the many friends, both Greek and expatriate, who were to enrich my life ever afterward.

Outside the window of my hillside house, a full moon had set the whitewashed houses and stone paths of Hydra aglow in what looked like a photo negative of the island's daytime landscape. What had appeared stark under the sun seemed spectral in the moonlight, and the unearthly light coming through my window drew me out of my room and down to the coastal walkway for a dreamy ramble. It was utterly quiet except for an occasional donkey bray and rooster crow, making me especially aware of the absence of background noise on the island. A place without motor vehicles redefines silence.

Then I heard music coming from the direction of the main port, at first only the stuttering beat of bass notes, then, as I walked toward the music, the Turkic twang of a bouzouki. I followed the sound to a taverna called Loulou's. By then I recognized the music; it was a classic song by Mikis Theodorakis, whose music was at the time prohibited by the ruling dictatorship because of his antifascist activities. The doors to Loulou's were locked shut, but one of the windows was unshuttered and open wide. I peered inside.

Five old men were dancing side by side, connected one to the other by handkerchiefs held in their raised hands. Their craggy faces were tilted upward with what struck me as pride, defiance, and, above all, exultation. All of them were straining to keep their backs erect, though none fully succeeded, yet their legs executed the dance's sideward steps in perfect, graceful synchrony. When, toward the end of the song, the music gradually accelerated, their steps accelerated along with it. For a long moment after the music's crescendo climax, they remained standing silently next to one another with upraised arms. No one shouted
oopa!
as I later learned was customary. What I had witnessed, quite simply, was a dance to life—to its endurance in spite of the totalitarian regime in Athens and, ultimately, in spite of the impediments of old age. This was play at its most exalted.

I fully understood what Plato meant when he stated that pure play has intimations of the divine. In his often-quoted section on playing in the
Laws
, he wrote: “Man is made God's plaything, and that is the best part of him. . . . Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games. . . . What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play
.
”

It turns out that since Plato a great number of philosophers, both major and minor, have weighed in on the metaphysical meaning of play, including the enigmatic twentieth-century German ontologist Martin Heidegger, who asked rather bafflingly in
The Principle of Reason
, “Must we think about Being . . . by beginning with the essence of play?”

Heidegger's question is too far out there for me, yet I do sense something deeply meaningful in this idea of all life being play. It is a worldview that treasures life while ultimately taking none of it totally seriously. This is not so much a cynical “it's all a big joke so nothing really matters” attitude as it is a sense that we can transcend ourselves in the play of our lives. Yes, we are players in a game we can never fully understand, yet what an astounding game it is.

ON PLAYING WITH TIME

“He flips each bead according to some rhythm inside him,” Di­mitri is saying as he gestures toward his father, Ianos, who gazes thoughtfully out the window as he plays with his
kombolói
. “He's like an orchestra conductor setting the tempo of his life.”

If Dimitri's interpretation is right, there really may be something existentialist in playing with the
kombolói.
It is a way of attending to time itself, this “spacing it out” and “making it last.” Maybe Ianos's practice of this old Greek tradition truly isn't a nervous pastime but quite the opposite: it is a way to capture time, to make it his own. He
plays
with time.

I ask Dimitri why, in his opinion,
kombolói
are dying out in Greece. He shrugs.

“Who knows?” he says. “We have become more European and less ourselves. It's not all bad—I grew up in fear of the
matiasma
[the evil eye]. I had to wear one of those blue bracelets to ward it off. I even wore it at sea all those years, and I got a lot of teasing for it. But now only old people still believe in the
matiasma
. To tell the truth, I don't miss all that hocus-pocus.”

“But will you miss the
kombolói
?” I ask him.

“I still have my own,” he replies. “I sometimes play with them, but only when I am alone. Maybe I'm a little embarrassed to use them in public now. But, yes, I will miss them when my father's generation goes and it becomes a forgotten thing.” He laughs. “But maybe it won't. They are making a comeback with some Athenian yuppies—they use them to help themselves give up smoking. They come off the hydrofoil with
kombolói
in one hand and an iPhone in the other.”

I have to laugh at that image. It sums up the tension between the two poles of “lived time” perfectly.

Chapter Three

Tasso's Rain-Spattered Photographs

ON SOLITARY REFLECTION

M
aking my way back from Dimitri's to my room, I again see Tasso on his highest terrace and, minutes later, from the desk window of my room, I gaze over at him again. I now see that there is a small table beside him, on it some old notebooks and what appears to be a box of postcards and photographs. His craggy face seems both pensive and content. It is a day for solitary reflection.

Back in my room, I hear rain beginning to fall, pattering lightly on the tile roof over my head. I feel chilly, a bit lonely, and, well, particularly old. Executing a few exultant dance steps does not seem like the ticket at this particular moment. I retire to my narrow bed to read some more about the philosophies of boredom and play, my interim strategy for warding off the old-man rainy day blues. It feels like a good
kairós
for playing with ideas.

ON IDLE THOUGHTS

Svendsen points out that many early thinkers tied the idle life to the production of superior ideas and a deeper understanding of life. He cites the Roman poet Lucan, who wrote, “Leisure ever creates varied thought,” and Montaigne, in his essay “Of Idleness,” agrees wholeheartedly, adding that “like a horse that has broken from its rider,” idle thought is far more adventurous than regimented thought. Svendsen also mentions the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Hamann, who believed that the idle have a better perspective on philosophical ideas than academics do, in part because they are less likely to get caught up in minutiae. He would get no argument from me on that. Apparently, Hamann could get a tad defensive on the subject of idleness: when a friend criticized him for loafing, he is said to have retorted that work is easy, but true idleness takes courage and fortitude.

True idleness also requires patience, which, in a sense, is the antidote for boredom. An authentic old man can be a master of patience for the simple reason that he is in no hurry for time to pass. I remember one long-ago evening, on an overcrowded train to Philadelphia, hearing a young woman moan to her mother, “God, I wish we were there already!” Her white-haired mother replied eloquently, “Darling, never wish away a minute of your life.”

Even old age's lack of new experiences can be considered a boon. We've done “new” already, and usually found it wanting. Writes Svendsen, “Existential boredom . . . must fundamentally be understood on the basis of a concept of a dearth of accumulated experience. The problem is that we try to get beyond this boredom by piling on increasingly new and more potent sensations and impressions, instead of allowing ourselves to accumulate experience.”

Yes,
accumulated experience
—that is precisely what an old person has available to him in abundance. The trick is to slow down enough that this accumulated experience can be contemplated and even, hopefully, savored.

ON THE SUPERIORITY OF MENTAL PLEASURES

Epicurus was convinced that mental pleasures surpass physical pleasures, largely because the mind has the advantage of being able to contemplate pleasures of the past and anticipate pleasures of the future. According to an explication by the Roman philosopher Cicero, a late-in-life Epicurean convert, this permitted “a continuous and interconnected [set of] pleasures.”

From a modern psychological perspective, this Epicurean ability of the mind to feel pleasure simply by remembering ­pleasant sensations seems exaggerated and overly optimistic. But nonetheless, Epicurus's enthusiasm for the joys of thought—particularly for solitary contemplation and enlightening ­conversation—remains worth thinking about.

Both Epicurus and Plato believed that old age provided a unique chance for unbounded, wide-ranging thought. In the
Republic
, Plato basically attributed this window of opportunity to the fact that we aren't that horny anymore: “Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then . . . we are freed from the grasp of not one mad master only but of many.”

And Epicurus saw this opportunity of old age as one more benefit from leaving the world of commerce and politics behind us; it frees us to focus our brainpower on other matters, often more intimate and philosophical matters. Being immersed in the commercial world constrains the mind, limiting it to conventional, acceptable thought; it is hard to close a sale if we pause in the proceedings to meditate at length about man's relation to the cosmos. Furthermore, without a business schedule, we simply have the time to ruminate unhurriedly, to pursue a thought for as long and as far as it takes us. In a letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus noted that an old man is in an ideal position to open his mind to new ideas “in consequence of his absence of fear for the future.” An old man does not have to fret about his next move because the chess game is over. He is free to think about any damned thing he chooses.

Contemporary brain research contributes a synaptic angle on Plato's observation that in old age we are in better shape for thinking philosophical thoughts. A study done at the Université de Montréal found that older minds are more efficient than younger ones. Writes the principal researcher of the study, Dr. Oury Monchi, “We now have neurobiological evidence showing that with age comes wisdom and that as the brain gets older, it learns to better allocate its resources.” And research undertaken at the University of California, San Diego, found that “a slower brain may be a wiser brain” because in old age those parts of the brain identified with abstract, philosophical thought and with perceptual anticipation are freed from the distracting effects of the neurotransmitter dopamine. “The elderly brain is less dopamine-dependent, making people less impulsive and controlled by emotion,” the study concluded. Aha! So dopamine is Plato's “mad master”!

I am not completely comfortable with letting scientists ­define what we mean by “wiser,” yet I do remain convinced that old people have the capacity to think from a perspective that is substantially
different
from that of their younger selves. This may be because topics more suited to slow thinking come along with thinking slowly, or because an old person simply has more time for contemplation, or because—who knows?—he has been liberated from his dopamine addiction. Whatever the root of his new ways of thinking, he now has the opportunity to think about some fascinating things.

ON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL URGE

We old people often like to think about the accumulated expe­riences of our lives. In that same deathbed letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus wrote, “When a man is old, he may be young in good things through the pleasing recollection of the past.” It reminds me of an expression I heard a neighbor use when I was a child: “That woman's so old she can be any age she wants to be.”

But sometimes an old person wants to do more than just randomly recollect things past; he (or she) wants to search for a thread in his life, something that holds it together as his.

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHENTIC OLD AGE

The autobiographical impulse comes in two models. The first is the currently surging urge to pass along the story of our lives to others: the recent bulge in the over-sixty-five population has yielded an abundance of published memoirs. The second model is simply to get the story of our lives straight for
ourselves
. These often turn out to be conflicting impulses. An inherent problem in writing one's memoirs for others to read is the temptation to indulge in literary nips and tucks. After all, who really wants to be remembered as, say, a man who spent an inordinate amount of time watching
Law & Order
? Not for publication! But just possibly the fact that a man spent many an hour intrigued by
Law & Order
does figure in an honest attempt to make thematic sense of the life he lived. For the philosophically minded, the venture of constructing one's life story for oneself alone figures prominently in the making of an authentic old age.

But some philosophers disapprove. In the second book of his
Rhetoric
, Aristotle, a dedicated curmudgeon on the subject of old folks, wrote: “They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past. This, again, is the cause of their loquacity; they are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering it.”

To say the least, this is not a rousing recommendation to follow the autobiographical urge.

Bertrand Russell takes up Aristotle's argument more tellingly. Russell, a precocious forever youngster who lived to the age of ninety-eight (he attributed his longevity to having chosen his ancestors carefully), wrote in his 1975 essay “How to Grow Old”: “Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age. One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead. One's thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done.”

And in the poem “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?” William Butler Yeats describes what he saw as the inevitable product of dwelling on the past—a personal docudrama of failed expectations:

Why should not old men be mad?

Some have known a likely lad

That had a sound fly fisher's wrist

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl that knew all Dante once

Live to bear children to a dunce;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

No single story would they find

Of an unbroken happy mind,

A finish worthy of the start.

Young men know nothing of this sort,

Observant old men know it well;

And when they know what old books tell

And that no better can be had,

Know why an old man should be mad.

But I find myself more persuaded by the psychologist and existentialist philosopher Erik Erikson, who was convinced that memories laced with regret and despair are not our only option. On the contrary, Erikson says, mature and wise ways of reminiscing are precisely what we need in an authentic old age.

ON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL IMPERATIVE

One of Erikson's most highly regarded contributions to modern psychology was his formulation of stages of personal evolution that go beyond the traditional Freudian stages of early childhood development to include all of life, including old age. This last, he encouragingly called “maturity.”

In each stage, Erikson posited a polar tension that needs to be resolved to get successfully through it. For example, in young adulthood the primary tension is between intimacy and isolation. A successful resolution follows from forming loving relationships with others, while an unsuccessful outcome is loneliness and alienation. In maturity Erikson sees the tension between what he calls “ego integrity” and despair. The fundamental task of this stage is
to reflect back on one's life.

For Erikson, a successful resolution of the tension between ego integrity and despair is a wise and considered sense of ful­fillment, a philosophical acceptance of oneself in spite of serious mistakes and stumbles along the way. Erickson believed that a philosophical acceptance of one's life in old age stemmed directly from a matured capacity for love. He wrote that the key personal relationship in a successful navigation through old age is with, of all people, mankind—which he dubs “my kind”—the ultimate family relationship. An unsuccessful outcome of reflecting back on one's life is unmitigated regret and bitterness.

So in Erikson's philosophy it turns out that this old-age impulse to find a narrative thread to our lives is more than just an indulgence in ruefulness or idle daydreaming—it is critical stuff. This is what Svendsen is suggesting when he writes that “accumulated experience” is the opposite of, and quite possibly the best relief from, the boredom of living one isolated and unconnected experience after another. Tying our experiences together in a personal history is a way we find meaning in our lives.

ON CHERRY-PICKING MEMORIES

Charles Dickens begins his masterwork
David Copperfield
, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

That line always brings a smile to my face. After all, if I am not the hero of my own life, who the hell else could it be? But I suspect that old Dickens was setting up a proto-existentialist gag here: that “anybody else” could be the personification of the outside powers that determined the events in Copperfield's life, say, fate. To put it another way, maybe David Copperfield did not
choose
his life; he just let it happen to him. The existentialists would not approve. Whether or not Copperfield turns out to be the
subjective
hero of his life is the fundamental question that the first-person narrator apparently hopes to answer by recounting his adventures in “these pages.” This pursuit begins by asking what events appear to be meaningful and to follow meaningfully from other events.

Even when we are only composing memoirs for ourselves alone, we still cherry-pick our memories, choosing those that give some semblance of a neat narrative line to our personal histories, some sense of cause and effect, even of personal growth. And, then, of course there is that other nasty problem, which Mark Twain eloquently noted: “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.” It seems, after all, that we'll need to take a look at that pesky philosophical question, “How do we know what is real and true?” although gently qualified by the addendum, “Does it really make much difference in this case?”

When we reminisce for our own private gratification, we usually do not seek out a fact-checker. What we are interested in is recalling an
experience
: how it felt to us, what it meant to us then, and what it means to us now. For example, whether I actually did have a particular conversation about wild strawberries with Professor Erikson back in college, or I am confounding it with a conversation I had with a classmate, or possibly only even had inside my head after attending an Erikson lecture, would not seem to make a determinate difference in putting together a meaningful story of my life. What
may
matter, and perhaps a great deal, is that the subject of this conversation—whether or not it actually occurred—was something that had a memorable impact on me, perhaps on the development of a lifetime interest, possibly even on my subsequent worldview. Indeed the fact that I have this memory and attach significance to it matters more than its absolute, objective truth.