“for what else is there
but books, books and the sea,
verandahs and the pages of the sea
to write of the wind and the memory
of wind whipped hair
in the sun, the colour of fire.”
– Derek Walcott.
As I get older, the attractions of foreign travel and the lures of encountering new places and fresh faces have faded. I associate holiday less and less with adventure and more and more with peace and quiet. When I was young I looked forward to visiting different countries – I estimate I have visited about forty in my life – and keenly anticipated the possibility of exotic experiences and the enlivening acquaintance of strangers. Now I can much better understand my father who at the age of about 75 entirely ceased traveling and was content quietly with my mother to turn the pages of the sea in their wind-filled house on the north coast of Antigua. I think of my father and mother in their last years in their home in Antigua and a line from Homer comes to me: “There is nothing so good and lovely as when man and wife in their home dwell together in unity of mind and disposition.”
However, one kind of adventuring never palls. It is in the golden realm of books. I like to spend days browsing in bookstores and reading the books finally purchased in wonderfully uncommitted hours. In Toronto I noticed some of the bookstores encourage you to sit and read and they have coffee shops where you can spend time between browsing. I like this civilised development – one can spend hours and hours happily this way.
There is so much to put down that one remembers. The 16th century playwright, Ben Jonson, from quite young kept a book in which he copied down passages which especially pleased him and which he found particularly “apt, wise or rightly formed.” He called the book which he made out of such passages Discoveries. We should all keep such a record.
● In plays notice how the scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end. In childhood afternoons extend for seeming years but for the old years flicker past like brief afternoons. After eighty, the playwright Christopher Fry pointed out, you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. And what is particularly mortifying is how much time is wasted: as Lord Byron entered in his journal, “When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.”
● Getting old has its disadvantages and knowing that one is in the last act, if not quite the last scene, of the play is not pleasant to think about too closely. But the great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a prose poem “Growing Old,” has a more appealing view:
“How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colours all its own…There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past- just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavours. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane…growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.”
● In a recent column I wrote of the marvels that exist in every human being. Here is another miracle.
A hard drive is a miracle of modern technology. It can store the equivalent of a great library as a series of tiny magnetic ripples on a spinning disk of cobalt alloy. But DNA, the information storage technology preferred in any human being can get up to 215 petabytes of data onto a single gram. That is 10 million times what the best modern hard drive can attain. And, while hard drive warranties seldom exceed 5 years DNA is routinely recovered from bones tens of thousands of years old.
Wonderful! Let us treasure and enhance every human being. All are infinitely valuable.
