A Writer Reflects on Turning 71
If writing no longer helps me pay attention, maybe I’ll spend more time drawing things, like this “JOHN TO GO” I recently encountered on the Hoboken waterfront.
HOBOKEN, JUNE 24, 2024. Not to be morbid. But I just turned 71, and I can’t help but reflect on how old age will affect my writing.
So far, so good. I’ve never enjoyed writing more. My teaching gig pays the bills, so I no longer write for money, I write for fun. Writing is my way of paying attention to the world and talking back to it. If I have a spiritual path, it’s writing. Hence the brooding over aging’s effects.
Writing is, on the one hand, the ultimate exercise of conscious free will. I’m an old pro, I know what I’m doing. But I’m not entirely in control. Writing in some respects demonstrates what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls “competence without comprehension.”
Almost everything I publish, whether column or book, begins with me sitting on a couch in the morning, pen in hand, blank page of a journal before me. On a good day, thoughts pop into my head, which I put into words. Or do words come before thoughts? I’m not sure.
Ideally, after days or weeks of research, fact-checking, writing and re-writing, I’ve got something good enough to send into the world. I never take it for granted that thoughts and words will come.
Maybe age, for a while, will merely slow me down. That’s the case with hockey, which since the mid-90s I’ve played on frozen ponds in the Hudson Highlands. Younger guys fly by me now, but I’m a wily old coot, I have my moments.
Someday, I’ll be too old for hockey; playing won’t be possible, let alone fun. Same with writing. Which will end first, hockey or writing? Either ending would sadden me, but life without writing is harder to imagine than life without hockey.
As my cognitive powers wane, I could turn to ChatGPT for help. I could feed it a bunch of my columns and ask it to write something Horgan-ish on Gaza or the Schrödinger equation. ChatGPT-Me wouldn’t have to be good, just good enough. Readers might even prefer ChatGPT-Me. Oh, how depressing that would be for Real Me.
I’ve interviewed brainiacs who wrote past 90. Freeman Dyson, Noam Chomsky and Karl Popper come to mind. But these guys are freaks. Maybe I should be inspired that men seven and ten years older than me are running for… No, forget that.
I’m heartened that all four of my grandparents lived into their 90s, as did my father. (Breast cancer killed my mother in her early 60s.) On the other hand, my father and my mother’s father descended into dementia years before they died.
Maybe dementia isn’t all bad. That’s the theme of a recent N.Y. Times essay by Stephen Gettinger, a journalist diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease last year. He takes comfort from how the disease affected his mother decades ago. Alzheimer’s relieved her lifelong depression, and she had “Zen-like moments” in which she could be “delighted afresh by the repeated appearance of the same white carnation.”
Gettinger seems to be suggesting that dementia can counter our tendency toward habituation, taking the world for granted. We’re so busy doing chores that we fail to pay attention to life, to grok its weirdness. That white carnation should delight us afresh every time we look at it.
This upbeat view of dementia reminds me of neurologist and Zen Buddhist James Austin, whom I profile in Rational Mysticism. In his 1998 book Zen and the Brain, Austin conjectures that Zen practice pares away superfluous neural circuitry. He sees enlightenment, the “goal” of Zen practice (the scare quotes indicate that enlightenment means having no goal), as a process of subtraction, not addition.
Austin struggles to say exactly what enlightenment is. The best way to represent this supreme state of being, he finally says in Zen and the Brain, is not to represent it. To dramatize his point, Austin leaves the next page of his book blank. Not even a page number.
Here is the best I can hope for: As my senses and memory blur, I’ll keep doggedly writing, trying to express how things look to me. My writing won’t be worse, it will just be different. If no one reads me anymore, that’s okay, I’ll keep writing for myself.
I could convey my pared-down perspective in doggerel, or doodles. Already, perhaps in preparation for the diminution of my verbal skills, I’ve been drawing things. Drawing is a simpler, more direct way to pay attention than writing.
I’ll keep scribbling in my journal, I hope, as I draw closer to the oblivion whence I came. When I see the one thing behind all things, I’ll leave the next page of my journal blank.
Further Reading:
My Quantum Experiment has lots of reflections on aging and death. See also these columns:
Why Time Flies When You’re Old
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature