A Great Art to Saunter
It has been a little more than five weeks since I have
entered retirement after a career in academia of almost fifty years. I am
thinking! In his memoir, Not Entitled, Frank
Kermode writes that “It seems to be required that when one commits the fault of
parting irrevocably from a career, whether it was a profession or a marriage, a
sentence must be served: a year or two of despondency, with the possibility of
remissions for sensible behavior.” He bemoans the fact that in this change “much
of the interest of life has gone for good,” and that until death not many
pleasures will occur again. I am not experiencing his despair, but I did awaken
in the middle of the night with an incipient sore throat, and what with my
ever-present hypochondria and the
current panic about a flu epidemic, I lost not a little sleep. I guess later I’ll
nap!
Nevertheless, my condition has not yet been so dire as Kermode seems to have experienced, though I have known others whose retirement began somewhat calamitously. One dear friend left a life of work after sixty years and when he entered retirement, like Wily Coyote chasing after Road Runner, he suddenly hit smack against a wall and flattened out. I think he has since recovered his form and appears content, though he often notes how the community into which he retired lacks some basic qualities he enjoyed in his work life. Well, for one, he doesn’t have me with whom he could drink fine wine and liquors, enjoy wonderful books and engage in refreshing and stimulating (for me, at least) conversation. Alas, I miss him for all those reasons and even more, perhaps.
I am not certain who it is that sentences the retiree to a period of depression and the experience of worthlessness, but I suppose that Kermode has assigned to some external inquisitors his internal source of suffering. Having lived his life surrounded by literatures that he loved and studied and about which he wrote, in an environment with (mostly interested, I suppose) students and colleagues, and with invitations to lecture all over the globe, Kermode must have felt flattened out on the wall when Road Runner disappeared. Indeed, Kermode had to learn a new life. He did not retire to but retired from and perhaps that condition of exit was the source of his despondency. Of course, in that leave-taking he did quit the conflicts and anxieties that stem from a sense of being “where one is not entitled to be, doing what one is not entitled to do,” but even conflicts provide some security and sense of purpose. From Kermode’s earliest insecurity seems to derive his present despair. My insecurities offer different anxieties.
I do not experience my retirement as an error in judgment, though I acknowledge that I have chosen to shrink the circumference of the circle considerably and to contract its radii. I recognize now that one doesn’t retire to anything because such a move would not offer a time for some rest, for an experience of empty time, for a time even for some despondency and reflection on a life already lived and the life in which still to create and engage. Retirement for me is not difficult or troubling or depressing experience, but an opportunity of challenge and change: retirement offers to me the opportunity to saunter, but one must first learn to saunter. Perhaps this meaningful time might be better referred to as one of transformation (or even revolution!) as one alters dramatically the daily existence of living. I once owned a poster of an aging and very fit man. The poster read, “Getting Old is not for Sissies.” Neither, think, is this transformation. I experience an emptiness in letting go of the daily routines by which I had lived for almost one half a century, even a letting go of the tensions and conflicts that arose in that existence and by which I felt sustained; but that emptiness is not an absence but a presence—a waiting, a possibility about to realize. (Doth the lady protest too much?).
Some time (tomorrow or next year) I will saunter to a destination, but for now I would be in no rush. I might learn to be comfortable waiting for Godot. In the meantime, I will (finally) finish Tristram Shandy, allow the pile of books-to-be-read (maybe) pile up on the desk, alongside the bed, renew my subscriptions; check movie times at the theaters, and maintain this blog.
Nevertheless, my condition has not yet been so dire as Kermode seems to have experienced, though I have known others whose retirement began somewhat calamitously. One dear friend left a life of work after sixty years and when he entered retirement, like Wily Coyote chasing after Road Runner, he suddenly hit smack against a wall and flattened out. I think he has since recovered his form and appears content, though he often notes how the community into which he retired lacks some basic qualities he enjoyed in his work life. Well, for one, he doesn’t have me with whom he could drink fine wine and liquors, enjoy wonderful books and engage in refreshing and stimulating (for me, at least) conversation. Alas, I miss him for all those reasons and even more, perhaps.
I am not certain who it is that sentences the retiree to a period of depression and the experience of worthlessness, but I suppose that Kermode has assigned to some external inquisitors his internal source of suffering. Having lived his life surrounded by literatures that he loved and studied and about which he wrote, in an environment with (mostly interested, I suppose) students and colleagues, and with invitations to lecture all over the globe, Kermode must have felt flattened out on the wall when Road Runner disappeared. Indeed, Kermode had to learn a new life. He did not retire to but retired from and perhaps that condition of exit was the source of his despondency. Of course, in that leave-taking he did quit the conflicts and anxieties that stem from a sense of being “where one is not entitled to be, doing what one is not entitled to do,” but even conflicts provide some security and sense of purpose. From Kermode’s earliest insecurity seems to derive his present despair. My insecurities offer different anxieties.
I do not experience my retirement as an error in judgment, though I acknowledge that I have chosen to shrink the circumference of the circle considerably and to contract its radii. I recognize now that one doesn’t retire to anything because such a move would not offer a time for some rest, for an experience of empty time, for a time even for some despondency and reflection on a life already lived and the life in which still to create and engage. Retirement for me is not difficult or troubling or depressing experience, but an opportunity of challenge and change: retirement offers to me the opportunity to saunter, but one must first learn to saunter. Perhaps this meaningful time might be better referred to as one of transformation (or even revolution!) as one alters dramatically the daily existence of living. I once owned a poster of an aging and very fit man. The poster read, “Getting Old is not for Sissies.” Neither, think, is this transformation. I experience an emptiness in letting go of the daily routines by which I had lived for almost one half a century, even a letting go of the tensions and conflicts that arose in that existence and by which I felt sustained; but that emptiness is not an absence but a presence—a waiting, a possibility about to realize. (Doth the lady protest too much?).
Some time (tomorrow or next year) I will saunter to a destination, but for now I would be in no rush. I might learn to be comfortable waiting for Godot. In the meantime, I will (finally) finish Tristram Shandy, allow the pile of books-to-be-read (maybe) pile up on the desk, alongside the bed, renew my subscriptions; check movie times at the theaters, and maintain this blog.
posted by Alan A. Block at 9:00 AM
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