AT THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

By Walter Mills


Growing Old

I finally cleaned off my desk at home the other morning, and took the stacks
of paper out to the wire bin next to the compost heap and watched them go up
in smoke.

Somewhere among the flames was the article on Solzhenitsyn I had cut out of
the New Yorker, which I had meant to keep for a future column on aging. The
image of a great writer's words on the subject of growing old floating
skyward on a cold winter's morning will have to serve for the actual quotes
I had intended to use.

As I recall it, Solzhenitsyn's metaphor for growing old was of a gradual
lightening and detachment from the physical world, of cutting loose and
floating skyward. It was an image of increasing freedom; from the body, from
responsibilities and cares, from drivenness. Smoke rising on a still Russian
morning in the winter of his life.

He thought of his earlier years as a continual sentry duty, a rigorous march
back and forth through the forest of the century, like the soldier he had
been in the war. His writing desk was like his sentry post, which he could
not leave for fear the enemy would slip through while he was sleeping. Now
his obsession was leaving him and he only worked a few hours in the morning
and slept in the afternoon.

Twenty years ago, in the house in Baton Rouge that I was sharing with an old
friend and another fellow, a drunken, manic painter who lived far beyond the
edge, I came across a quiet book by another great writer, the Frenchman
Francois Mauriac. It was written late in his life, and in its English
version was called "The Inner Presence," a book of meditations on age and
memory. I can still recall the peace this book brought me amid our turbulent
household. Twenty years later I can still clearly remember Mauriac's image
of this final stage of his life, which he compares to approaching a sand
dune beyond which the sea remains invisible but can be heard more and more
clearly.

I took the book with me when I left because I needed it then and I knew that
as time passed I would need it more. In exchange I left the painting I had
bought from the artist for a week's pay I could ill-afford to spend at the
time. In all my travels I could hardly carry a large painting with me, but I
could always carry a book.

Yesterday, as I watched the smoke drifting up into a dim, gray sky, I
thought of a book I have been reading lately, "My Twice-Lived Life" by the
Boston Globe columnist Donald M. Murray. It is another meditation on aging,
the story of his second life after a near fatal heart attack 15 years
before. As he reaches his late 70s, Murray, like Solzhenitsyn, finds himself
stripping away the obligations of a lifetime, becoming more completely
himself. A veteran of the Second World War like the Russian author, Murray
also uses a military image to talk about his aging. It reminds him, he says,
of the first time he went into combat and saw the piles of bedrolls, gas
masks, and other nonessentials left beside the road by the soldiers
preparing for battle. This is the freedom of letting things go.

I read these dispatches from the battle front of old age and I am struck by
the clarity of the thought and expression. Most of the ornament has been
stripped away from their language, and the images stand clear as if in a
bright light. It is urgent information sent back at some risk, and I study
it, hoping to understand this foreign country. There have been losses, they
write, and the body they once counted on is failing. But I can read in their
reports their spirit shining through, their identity intact, even
strengthened. It is a stark and wintry landscape they describe, but
hauntingly beautiful.



(The above column originally appeared in the Centre Daily Times and is
copyright 2001 by Walter Mills. All rights reserved worldwide. To contact
Walt, address your emails to wmills@vicon.net)
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Walter's work can also be found at recipe du jour.