Travels with Epicurus (10 page)

Could Patrick be on to something that I have ignored? Could Aristotelian old-age grumpiness
be the most personally honest way to go? The old man as curmudgeon has a long tradition, including as a comic stereotype in plays and movies. He reflexively grumbles that “they” don't do things the way they used to, which, of course, was the
right
way to do things. Most younger people believe the grump is actually griping about the fact that he is so out of date that he has outlived his usefulness. Come to think of it, that
is
worthy of some serious grumbling.

Turning into a curmudgeon may have its perks. Before my departure for Greece, Patrick said to me, “Bitching about getting old has become my favorite pastime. Actually, it's my new raison d'être.” Hey, it works for him.

But not for me. I remain with Plato's older brother, Glaucon, when he says, in the
Republic
, “But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For, if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do
.
But this is not my own experience.”

My existentialist head cannot help wondering why Patrick's anticipatory depression has not been his “authentic” attitude toward his life all along. After all, we have known since we were quite young that the end of life—especially if we lived a long time—wouldn't be any fun. Does this mean that if we did not plunge into utter despair at the age of twenty-one, we were in total denial? In the scheme of a finite life, how much difference can there be between fifty years and five years until that inevitable and sorry final stretch?

The existentialist Albert Camus certainly thought despair was an authentic response to the apparent meaninglessness of life, let alone to the horrors and sicknesses that await us in
old
old age. But Camus also believed that we can transcend life's inherent absurdity and create meaning through our own decisions and interpretations; that too is an authentic response to what awaits us. All of which is to say that perhaps authentic old age can consist of neither the breathless ambition of the forever youngster nor the unremitting despair of my friend Patrick but something meaningful in itself.

Still, maybe I haven't given Patrick's attitude its proper due. Contemplating Spyros's vacant stare and quivering lips, it
is
difficult for me to keep my own anticipatory depression at bay. As Aristotle mercilessly noted, there is absolutely nothing to look forward to in
old
old age.

As for me, I guess the best way I can keep myself from being preoccupied with the despair of impending
old
old age is by heeding my takeaway lesson from the Stoics, that focusing on the horrors of
old
old age before I get there would be a waste of the time I have left. With so little time left on this side of that final stage, I don't want to spend it dwelling on what is clearly beyond my control. I simply would rather try to figure out how to spend this time in the best possible way.

ON THE HIDDEN PERILS OF ROMANTICISM

Walking back down the steep and rocky path toward the port, I realize the time has come for me to acquire a cane of my own, at least for precarious treks like this one. This idea makes me smile. Although I have never been much of a shopper, I find myself looking forward to picking out a cane. One with a pewter caryatid on top, like Tasso's? Or something less elegant and more practical, with a simple curved handle?

Ahead of me is one of the many “pocket” cemeteries scattered on the hills of Hydra. I stop, wondering if it would be disrespectful to walk through it as a shortcut. I have always found Greek cemeteries oddly consoling; it is their modesty, I think—plain, body-length stone slabs with simple headstones that often contain a glass-covered, fading photograph of the deceased. Now I spot, at the far end of the cemetery, a string of donkeys bent down to munch on poppies. Just behind the animals, I see the back of an old man seated alone on one of the horizontal gravestones, and I can hear him talking animatedly. I am pretty sure that it is the donkey man, Pavlos. He must be chatting with a lost loved one. His late wife? I wonder if he does this regularly—review his day with his lifelong partner as he did when she was alive.

I tread as quietly as I am able inside the cemetery, my eyes straight ahead. I do not want to intrude. And then, from the corner of my eyes, I catch a glimpse of Pavlos's face: he is talking on a cell phone!

I am not only disappointed, I am chagrined. Over the years, more than one of my friends has accused me of romanticizing the Greeks and their way of life. These friends certainly seem to have got it right this time.

But hold on—I can now make out that Pavlos is chatting with his granddaughter, something about a beautiful dress that her aunt is making her for Easter. Pavlos is completely and delightedly into this conversation. He is relishing this happy interlude in the cemetery. My romantic imagination had not grasped the half of it.

Chapter Seven

The Burning Boat in Kamini Harbor

ON THE TIMELINESS OF SPIRITUALITY

A
fire flares in the sea just beyond Kamini Harbor. Cheers rise up from the people crowded at the water's edge and reach me on my terrace. It is the evening of Greek Easter, and the blaze is the traditional burning of Judas in effigy on a raft.

Reflected off the rippling dark water, the flames create a dramatic effect—exciting, festive, yet there is something in the tenor of the crowd's cries that is distressing, a mobbish overtone of vengeance, of “Burn, baby, burn!” It does not sound holy to me.

In his screed
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
, the late social commentator Christopher Hitchens cataloged the ways in which organized religion corrupts us, turning the world into an agglomeration of vindictive mobs. He wrote that whether in “Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem or Baghdad . . . I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

I certainly do not feel threatened by the revelers in Kamini's bay; nonetheless this is one Greek shindig I think I will sit out. Like Hitchens, I believe organized religion “ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”

But this does not stop me from yearning for a spiritual dimension to my life, although I am not clear what that would mean.

ON OLD PEOPLE AND THE GOD DELUSION

Old folks often turn toward religion. It was always so. In our current psychologically minded era, the accepted reason for this is that old people can hear death knocking at the door, so as a coping mechanism we redouble our efforts to cook up a god and a hereafter.

In his seminal essay
The Future of an Illusion
, Sigmund Freud categorically dismissed religion as simply a product of our wishes. Interestingly, and perhaps even bravely, he wrote the essay near the end of his life. In it, he argues that religion has the principal purpose of controlling society and enforcing a moral code by promising a reward for one's ethical conduct on earth
after life is over
, thereby guaranteeing good behavior right up to the end. It is a neat thesis. Currently, evolution theorists and geneticists are giving this theory a fascinating new spin with their speculation that a “religion gene” exists. That gene expresses itself in a group survival characteristic, and tribes without this gene died out because, without a compelling religious moral code, they killed each other off. Obviously, Christopher Hitchens would have taken issue with the idea that religion is a survival characteristic.

Freud's assumption is that if ideas such as a transcendent god and a lovely afterlife come into our minds merely as a result of our
feelings
, then they must be nonsense. At a strictly logical and empirical level, as Sportin' Life sings in
Porgy and Bess
apropos the dicta of the Bible, this assumption “ain't necessarily so.” For example, our feelings could be the sole source of our idea that the stranger in a fedora hat sitting across from us in a train is a serial killer, but it could turn out that the guy in the fedora actually
is
a serial killer. That we came to this idea in a nonrational way has no bearing on whether or not it is actually and independently true.

Piling on the psychological interpretation of why we cook up God are today's new atheists, philosophers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. These thinkers point out that most of us subscribe to scientific, logical-empirical thinking in 99 percent of what we do, but then we go off the deep end into illogical, nonempirical thinking when it comes to God and religion. We pick between the two ways of thinking according to what we need: a scientific head suits driving a car, while an illogical, nonempirical head is a better fit when it comes to praying for salvation.

Sam Harris puts it amusingly: “If I told you that I thought there was a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and you asked me, why do you think that? I'd say, this belief gives my life meaning, or my family draws a lot of joy from this belief, and we dig for this diamond every Sunday and we have this gigantic pit in our lawn. I would start to sound like a lunatic to you. You can't believe there really is a diamond in your backyard because it gives your life meaning. If that's possible, that's self-deception that nobody wants.”

At the basis, this is another “to thine own self be true” argument: either we believe the scientific model for determining what is real or we don't. Self-servingly flip-flopping between the two is just a way of kidding ourselves, being untrue to ourselves.

Are we old people who turn our attention to spiritual matters just kidding ourselves? Are we willfully being untrue to ourselves simply because we “hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near”?

ON THE TIMELINESS OF SPIRITUALITY IN OLD AGE

The Hindus certainly do not think we are being untrue to ourselves. They believe we old people are simply finally ready to get down to serious spiritual business.

This ancient South Asian religion and philosophy has its roots in the Iron Age, with its “modern” development beginning in the second century BCE. Like most enduring philosophies that address the question of how to live, Hinduism marks out distinct roles for different stages of life; it lists four:
brahmacari
(student),
grihastha
(householder),
vanaprastha
(forest dweller or hermit in semiretirement), and
sannyasi
(the renounced one). Respectively, these stages represent periods of preparation, production, service, and spiritual contemplation. Some Hindu texts suggest that the final stage usually commences after the seventy-second year of life. I can relate.

What I find both startling and compelling about this final stage is that high on the list of things an old man renounces is religion itself. The ceremony initiating the
sannyasa
period includes burning copies of the sacred Hindu text, the Vedas, a symbolic rejection of all the religious beliefs and practices the
sannyasi
acquired in his earlier stages of life. Good-bye to all that. The old
sannyasi
is completely on his own now. Through solitary meditation, he has to find whatever spiritual enlightenment he can. In effect, if he is going to have religion, he needs to reinvent it from ground zero.

The renounced one's life makes living simply in Epicurus's garden seem like retirement in Sun City.
Sannyasis
are wandering hermits, living without shelter or possessions. They only eat when food is given to them. Still, there is a resonance between Epicurus's idea of a totally free life and the Hindu's fourth stage. Describing the
sannyasi
life, the “Asrama Dharma” says: “The
sannyasi
has his spiritual eye on goods that men can't give and cares little for anything that men can take away. . . . Therefore, he is beyond the possibility of either seduction or threat.” And in another section: “Business, family, secular life, the beauties and hopes of youth and the success of maturity have now been left behind. Eternity alone remains. And, so it is to that—and, not to the tasks and worries of their life, already gone which came and passed like a dream—that the mind is turned.”

I am certainly familiar with the feeling that my “already gone” life “came and passed like a dream.” All too often it feels like it went by in the blink of an eye. And I also get a feel for what the “Asrama Dharma” is talking about when it says, “Eternity alone remains.” I am in the final conscious stage of life, and increasingly my mind is drawn toward the search for what the Hindus call “the true wisdom of the cosmos.”

The Hindus remind me that the psychological explanation is not the only way of accounting for why we are drawn toward spiritual matters in our old age. The renounced one is not seeking enlightenment because he is caught up in some system of rewards and punishments in the hereafter, and not even because he fears death. He has kissed all those concerns and anxieties good-bye. Rather, now that he is done with the business of life and his connections to worldly affairs, it is time for him to finally focus on the ultimate spiritual questions.

ON ONE OLD MAN'S QUEST FOR SPIRITUALITY

Religion has not played a significant role in my life to date. And I do not find much consolation in the fact that the
sannyasi
starts off with a blank slate too; even though he has rejected the religious training of his youth, I suspect that he begins his journey with a stronger sense than I have of what enlightenment might look and feel like.

Still, my inchoate yearning for some kind of enlightenment is clearly there. I believe it has always been. Indeed I suspect that it is always there—
somewhere
—in most of us. Maybe I am being soft in the head again, but my guess is that deep down even the most rabid atheist has a hankering for a transcendent dimension; he just cannot get a believable bead on it. As for me, I simply have gotten into the habit of ignoring my spiritual yearnings, as if they were some kind of annoying tic. I am like the man who, when admonished by Baba Ram Dass to “be here now,” replied, “I'm cool—I am definitely planning on living in the present
any day now
.”

But again, the unique urgency of old age chastens me: if not now, when?

The fundamental questions at the root of spiritual yearnings are not difficult to identify; it is just hard to make meaningful sense out of them
:
Do I have any kind of connection to everything else? To the cosmos? Are we both—the cosmos and I—in this thing together? And if so, what does that mean about how I should live the rest of my life?

Questions do not get much vaguer than these do, yet it is difficult to think of questions that are more essential. After my bout with Heidegger's “unfathomable question” the other day, I feel better equipped to wrestle with the new atheist's claim that I would be untrue to myself if I even entertained the idea of a spiritual dimension. I do not think I am searching for a
thing
, like Sam Harris's mythical diamond the size of a refrigerator in my backyard. I do not expect to see the face of God or the landscape of heaven. It is some sort of sublime understanding I am after, an existential assent to the universe. Again, it is the philosopher William James who gives some hope to my yearning: no, I am not looking for a
thing
; I am searching for a spiritual
experience.

And so I return to James's
Varieties of Religious Experience
, another favorite old book of mine that I've brought along on this sojourn. Indeed, the copy sitting on my desk in Hydra now is the same one I bought at a Harvard Square bookstore some fifty-plus years ago, my earnest student underlinings and marginal notes still intact. One passage I underscored back then speaks directly to what I am musing about now: “We pa
ss into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account.”

Yes, it is a jiggle of my “yes-function” that I am seeking. And if I have such an experience, I will take it from there. If Harris informs me that the experience was merely a wish fulfillment, I will take that under advisement. But I reserve the privilege of rejecting Harris and embracing my yes.

—

For the likes of me, I do not think eternity can be sought in the way the
sannyasi
does, by focusing everything I have on the mysteries of the cosmos. To be honest with myself, I am not really willing to give up my life as a “householder,” especially the part about giving up my house. I know that it is just such bourgeois attachments as this one that may be keeping me from trans­cending the material world, so if my attachment to home and hearth means I do not sufficiently yearn for enlightenment, I guess I will have to accept it. In any event, I doubt that enlightenment would come to me by focusing on it the way I imagine the
sannyasi
does. I wouldn't even know how to begin to do that.

What is more, I do not think going to services at a synagogue or church will get me there either; it never has before. And unlike William James and Aldous Huxley, my drug trips merely managed to get me to the anteroom of nirvana, not all the way through the doors of perception.

So what is this old man to do about his last chance at spiritual enlightenment?

—

I find myself thinking again about Plato's belief that pure play has intimations of the divine. And again I vividly recall that enchanted night when I witnessed five old Greek men performing their exalted dance to life. To me, it was a glimpse into the transcendent. This exaltation in life is, in the end, one religion I can believe in. But glimpses such as that one come all too rarely.

My ninety-year-old friend Henry, a retired professor who was widowed last year, recently phoned me with a problem he was having. Although his mind is still working well, and his body functions adequately, he is nonetheless considering moving into a retirement home for the companionship. The problem, he said, was his music. He listens to classical music upward from four hours a day, often at high volume, and he does not want to be told by anyone to turn it down; furthermore, he doesn't like earphones because he thinks they distort the sound.

I had to laugh. I know how much music means to Henry, especially at this point in his life, and I am absolutely sure sacrificing just one minute of listening time even for a good conversation just would not be worth it for him.

Henry insists that he is not a spiritual man. He says religion is just hocus-pocus. And yet when we go to a symphony concert together—which is usually one with Mahler on the program—and I glance over at him, I often behold on his creased old face an expression of rapture. Henry is clearly elevated to a higher realm—his spirit soars. I have no doubt that in some meaningful sense Henry has left the building.