Past Present; Future Tense

Nor ever fear A man whose life, alas, has tottered past His fiftieth year.

                                                  — Horace

Earl Fowler

Everyone who lives long enough comes to that moment.

The one where you realize that in the great 1965 Newport Folk Festival of Life — metaphorically speaking, as is our wont in this space — Bob Dylan is going electric with a blistering version of “Maggie’s Farm.” But instead of being thrilled to the marrow, you’re in the hidebound, puritanically traditional, hootenanically fanatical Pete Seeger camp discombobulated by this unforeseen coup de grâce to the folk revival and the accouchement of rock as the authentic voice of a generation.

That is to say, like everyone else who hoped they’d die before they got old, you waited too long. You liked things better the way they were before. New states of being stagger you. You grow old, you grow old. You shall wear your trousers rolled.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? But now? You don’t know what’s happening any more, do you, Mr. Jones? Don’t got your mojo working. It’s superannuated and on a fixed income. Just like you.

It might be a fact, as Dylan warned, that he not busy being born is busy dying. But a countervailing truism, usually attributed to Lenny Bruce, is that there’s nothing sadder than an aging hipster.

If time was ever on our side, the hour when our ship was supposed to come in slipped by unnoticed. And judging by my own craggy visage, the sun did not respect every face on the deck. Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing.

We all get to a point in life, I think, where it’s more pleasurable (or at least less daunting) to think about the things that have been rather than the things that will be.

Even Mr. The Times They Are A-Changin’ himself, who in 1965 told a televised press conference this — “Well, I’d sort of label myself as ‘well under thirty’. And my role is to just, y’know, to just stay there as long as I can” — had succumbed to a more nostalgic frame of mind by the time the album Love and Theft came out in 2001. This is from his song “Summer”:

Summer days, summer nights are gone Summer days and the summer nights are gone I know a place where there’s still somethin’ going on …

She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean you can’t? Of course you can.”

That old road might be rapidly agin’, but these days, getting out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand seems to be more of a gentle suggestion than an urgent injunction.

As William Faulkner put it in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The great 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne elaborated on this less cryptically in his superb piece titled “On Some Verses of Virgil”:

Let childhood look ahead, old age backward: was this not the meaning of the double face of Janus? Let the years drag me along if they will, but backward. As long as my eyes can discern that lovely season now expired, I turn them in that direction at intervals. If youth is escaping from my blood and veins, at least I want not to uproot the picture of it from my memory.

Montaigne ends this bit of reverie with a quick quotation from Roman poet Martial, who lived in the first century AD:

Our lives are two If we can relish our past life anew.

For my money (a Canadian one-dollar bill with the Queen on the front and that vintage prairie scene on the back), no one has ever expressed the pining-for-the-past wistfulness we all feel, whenever we get to thinking about departed friends and loved ones — including the selves we used to be — than that great master of the English essay, Charles Lamb (1775-1834). He wrote under the name of a fictionalized persona (Elia) who was essentially Lamb himself. This is from his playful treatise “New Year’s Eve,” written on the cusp of 1821:

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties: new books, new faces, new years, — from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armour-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W—n , than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue.

While not necessarily relishing the memories, one can derive a certain satisfaction, perhaps even mine nuggets of wisdom, from pondering the setbacks, embarrassments and terrible things that we have done or have had done to us through the years. Forgiving others their trespasses and all that jazz. Laughing ruefully, incredulously, at our own foolishness and insensitivity.

Lamb, like most of us, was battered by some searing experiences. When he was 20, he seized the knife from the hand of his beloved sister, Mary, after she stabbed their mother to death and wounded their father in a fit of madness. The writer soon suffered a mental breakdown himself.

Robert Louis Stevenson, remembered today chiefly for his adventure stories for kids (Treasure Island, Kidnapped) and horror classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, expatiated in his autobiographical essay “The Lantern-Bearers” on a boyhood that mingled “some dismal memories with so many that were joyous.”

Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody — horror! — the fisher-wife herself, who continued henceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even today (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the little old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory.

We are all hag-ridden (my new favourite verb) in the scrapbooks of our memories by oppressive and gruesome recollections. But like Lamb and the tuberculosis-stricken Stevenson — who brought humane, sane and good-natured narrative voices to their craft — most of us can look back not in anger but with a sense of palpable yearning for what poet A.E. Housman depicted as ‘the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.”

This is William Hazlitt, revered today as the essayist arm of the Romantics (principally his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, however much he abhorred the latter’s abandonment of progressive politics as the poet grew older and more respectable), on the satisfaction to be derived from considering one’s past from a mature perspective:

What other self could I find to share that influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I could hardly conjure up to myself, so much have they been broken and defaced. I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named (Coleridge). Where is he now? Not only I myself have changed; the world which was then new to me, has become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness as thou then wert; and thou shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the waters of life freely!

The future holds no such promise or guarantee, particularly as our bodies ripen and we see lots of pretty people disappear like smoke.

Here is Stevenson again, this time from his essay “On Marriage”:

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.

New books, new faces and new years will beam grandfather William inexorably back to the present, of course, where current members of the Baby Boom generation and anyone older than that should experience a frisson of recognition at what Lamb (then only 46) was reporting two centuries ago:

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth? — I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser’s farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away “like a weaver’s shuttle.”

In short, to use the Elia sentence I pinched above, “A new state of being staggers me.”

Despite Hazlitt’s disgust at the conservatism of the over-the-Lake-District-hill Wordsworth, a somewhat melancholy taste for stability, for equilibrium, for upright apple carts, is a near-universal concomitant of advancing age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack-Up” opens with this incisive observation about middle-aged and later experience:

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within — that you don’t feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick — the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

We tend to morph into biddies and fuddy-duddies by following the same path Ernest Hemingway famously outlined in The Sun Also Rises as the way people go bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

Even Hazlitt himself, who rarely wavered in his support for the ideals of his youth, admitted in his remarkable essay “On the Pleasure of Hating” that he was “heartily sick” of his old opinions:

I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was not a bawd, that virtue was not a mask, that liberty was not a name, that love had its seat in the human heart. Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them.

The optimism, alliances and certainties of youth have a way of wandering off and disappearing into the black maw of the jingle jangle mortgage. Turn off, tune out, sit down.

I could cue the disillusioned Oscar Wilde at this point:

O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,

Wearied of pleasure’s paramour despair,

Wearied of every temple we have built,

Wearied of every unanswered right, unanswered prayer,

For man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:

One fiery-coloured moment: one great love: and lo! we die.

But let’s go instead with a Julian Barnes character from his novel The Only Story: “You see — I hope you never get there yourself — but some of us get to the point in life where we realize that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters.”

This has taken us rather a long way from faith in a hammer of justice, a bell of freedom and songs about love between our brothers and our sisters, but life does have a way, as they say, of getting in the way while you’re busy making other plans.

Thankfully, few reach the degree of Weltschmerz so ably limned by Barnes. But Montaigne’s sober meditation on aging remains as germane today as it was nearly five centuries ago, when he watched it emerge from the hollow shaft of a goose feather dipped in an inkwell: “I have seen the grass, the flower, and the fruit; now I see the dryness — happily since it is naturally.”

Happily or not, this is where we are. In a dry season. How terribly strange to be 70. Stranger yet to be 80. Or 90. Do stop thinking about tomorrow. Goodbye to all that.

Remember on Lost when they met The Others? That’s us today. Flight 815 is now boarding.

Now I am become — not Death, not the destroyer of worlds — but a sooty, smudgy museum of myself. A walking time capsule. A begrimed fifth-columnist from the past. A tired cabaret act whose time has passed. Tickets are free. Donations accepted. Just don’t expect any guided tours.

Trespassers will be prosecuted.

It’s easy to get maudlin when you can’t get off the floor. But as his health declined, Montaigne was right about something else, too. He was right about a lot of things, notwithstanding his disparagement of his work as “some excrements of an aged mind”:

I defend myself against temperance as I once did against sensual pleasure; for it pulls me too far back, even to the point of insensibility. Now I want to be master of myself in every direction. Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than does folly. Therefore, lest I should wither, dry up, and overcharge myself with prudence, in the intervals and truces my infirmities allow me, (quoting Ovid) Mens intenta suis ne seit usque malis.

Let not your mind dwell too much on its own evils. Pace Aristotle, moderation in all things, including moderation. Cut yourself some slack. Live a little.

In other words — and these are Stevenson’s: “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.”

Rock’n’roll is here to stay. But we’re not. And before it’s too late, even with one foot in the past and the other in a colder place, sometimes a fellow just has to put on the red jacket James Dean’s character wore in Rebel Without A Cause. (Not sure what the feminine equivalent would be. Maybe pulling on a burlap dress and going barefoot like the young Joan Baez?)

Notwithstanding the ever-thickening veil of time, it’s not over yet, Baby Blue. I might not be an aging hipster, but I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more either.

Getting old sucks.

Still.

We were so much older then. We’re younger than that now.