Oliver Sacks, everyone’s favorite M.D., gave us a glimpse of
what it is like to become 80. (See The New York Times, 7 July 2013.) This is the second time I’ve
had an M.D. use 80 as an indicator of age. But why 80? I was already 90 that first time . Now I’m 100! And it seems that I’ve only just
joined that cadre we call the aged.
I do have
a significantly longer perspective. What does it provide that one lacks at 80
or 50? Not just more experience, even
though, fortunately, most of my experience has been unmarred by bad events.
It is this
enlarged perspective I value most. Dr Sacks presumably lumps this with enhanced
freedom. For me that means escape from the urgencies imposed on us before we can reason for
ourselves.. And escape from the commercial wheel that dominates, as though
there were no alternatives. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the devils
of that pinioned view in my day. It is therefore a freedom to explore new Modus
Vivendi, even those we hesitatingly label utopian. There is so much to unlearn in this final half-century. And
so few reliable guides left to help us do it.
Some of our young, fortunately, are finding their own way.
Paul Shepard, a
neglected Yalie, was one such guide, however. He saw that “This is the Only
World We’ve Got,” that our having invented agriculture was a basic ecological
tragedy, and that our salvation lies not in some other world, but in
rediscovering that we are part of a still-evolving Nature: not its master but a
provisional care-taker of the processes of existence, as A. N. Whitehead, and
almost only Whitehead, saw a century ago. Almost everyone complained that his
magnum opus, Process and Reality, was
too thorny. It is if you leave out his
everyman Modes of Thought.
So, for me, “being ready to go” means, not
going to heaven or hell, since Emily Dickinson freed
me long ago of that Roman intimidation, with “Some people go to heaven
at last, but I’m going all along.” Not
at all grim; hardly weary; just bereft of the energy to continue to love and
work, which Freud, despite so many other mistakes, saw as the simple task of
life. But not quite yet!
