Cottage
I sit, alert
behind the small window
of my mind and watch
the days pass,
strangers,
who have no reason
to look in.
From Echoes of Memory
LONELINESS
I think that it is impossible for a human to be lonely. I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but the example I would give is when I left Connemara and lived in Germany for four and a half years. I was a bit shocked at first because I knew Connemara very well and I was very close to the humans there, and suddenly when I was in Germany in an apartment on my own, it was utterly solitary. If you want to get away from humans, and you want to be really on your own, Germany is a great place to go! The people don’t bother you at all—if they want to come and visit you they will ring you up beforehand. What struck me was the dual nature of the mind, the inner companionship of yourself. When you say “Hello” to someone, you are breaking in to a conversation they are always having with themselves. So we are always actually in permanent dialogue with ourselves, and therefore solitude is a very rich time. It is the purification of that dialogue. I think what happens in loneliness is that we panic; we somehow see ourselves as isolated and distant from others, and then we really feel abandoned. And there are a lot of people very lonely because they are literally abandoned. Nobody cares about them. There are a lot of other people in relationships, in connection, who are cared for and loved, and they still feel lonely. That is their own responsibility. They feel self-pity, or they feel obsessed with themselves, whereas if they let the rhythm of their solitude run and trusted it, they would be grand. I have learned myself painfully that you can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude. Old age puts you right into confrontation with that possibility, opens it up to you and calls on you to trust and to honor the eternal thing that maybe has been sleeping within you.
LIBERATION
Old age is a time of great freedom. One of the things that militates against freedom for most humans is the weight of responsibility—all they have to do, and their constant obsession with the current project and with the project of life. If there are people depending on you, you have made your responsibilities and you are on the go all the time. You have a whole barrage of expectations coming towards you. You are part of a system or a network which is coming towards you as well, and you have so little space and so little free time for who you really are, for what you would really love to do, for what really deeply concerns you. That is why an awful lot of people in contemporary culture postpone their real lives until they retire.
They work like hell to get everything worked out and everything achieved, and then they believe that when they have that done, they will have time to enjoy. Some of them do actually achieve it. But sometimes if you get into that habit too deeply, you become what you do, and even when you have the time, you are not actually able to enjoy it. Ideally, old age can be a time of great liberation and freedom. It is a time when a lot of the social mystification and mythology calms down, and you return to the essence of things. I think it is not accidental that the body is pared down in old age, because it is part of the creative process. If you are writing a poem, you might have fifty versions of the poem, and might ultimately end up with six or seven lines after maybe having written sixteen hundred lines. The distilled essence comes out. I think in old age, with the paring down of the body, the paring down of social connection and the paring down of mobility, there is a chance for the distilled essence to actually show itself. You often glimpse that distillation in the faces or the eyes of old people. To put it another way, old age is a time of theater. Very often the old body is the ultimate actor’s disguise, and inside that old body is pure distilled essence, and it is a gracious, sacramental moment when you meet it. Patrick Kavanagh has said that we were taught to prepare for life rather than to live it.
That is maybe the primary intention of all holiness, spirituality and love—to free us for our lives. Gabriel García Márquez said somewhere that to live is an art, and no sooner have we begun to learn it than it is already time for us to be departing. There are people now at this moment confronted with their leave-taking. They will be going out of the world in an hour, in a week or whatever, and would give anything to have another week or a month or a year, and they won’t have it. And here are we, even if we are old, we still have time, and time is always full of possibility. It would really be a great gift that an old person could give to themselves, the gift of recognizing the possibilities that are in that time, and to use their imagination. The imagination is the gateway to a full life, and people who awaken their imagination come in to a force field of possibility and there are doors opening everywhere. I think it is unknown what you can do if you begin to see it. But so often, we allow the image that other people have of us to stop us from entering our lives and we become literally what they want. I think in old age you are gone beyond that! You have wild permission! Old people could become very subversive and very fascinating if they actually claimed the possibilities that they had and if they talked out a bit more, said what they feel and didn’t stand back and let the so-called young people, the yuppies and the entrepreneurs, run the whole show. Old people have far more fascinating things to say than an awful lot of what passes for wisdom in contemporary culture. It would be lovely to hear them speak.
One of the most amazing poets of the twentieth century is Czesław Miłosz, and he has a beautiful poem on old age called “A New Province.” There is a lovely line from another poet, Derek Walcott, where he says, “Feast on your life.” There is nothing more beautiful that can be put on the table of your mind than the feast of your own life. To put it another way altogether and to use a Catholic metaphor: every person’s life is a Eucharist, an individual Eucharist, and you are the priestess or the priest who makes the sacrament of your own life happen, and so we should get dangerously into celebrating.
There is also a poem from Octavio Paz that I love. It is one of the poems in his amazing collection Eagle or Sun? and it is about old age as a time of liberation from all the falsities that you burdened yourself with:
With great difficulty, advancing by millimeters
each year,
I carve a road out of the rock.
For millennia my teeth have wasted and my
nails broken
to get there, to the other side,
to the light and the open air.
And now that my hands bleed and my teeth
tremble,
unsure, in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust,
I pause and contemplate my work:
I have spent the second part of my life
breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing
the doors,
removing the obstacles I placed between the
light and myself
in the first part of my life.