Читать книгу One Beat More - Kevin Aho - Страница 7

It was a beautiful, sun-dappled December morning in south Florida. The sky was blue, the humidity low, and there was not a breath of wind as I began my bike ride through leafy neighborhoods in Naples, Bonita Springs, and Fort Myers. Three-and-a-half hours and sixty miles later, I was pedaling over the Estero Bridge toward my house and was suddenly overcome with nausea and lightheadedness. I squeezed the brakes, threw my bike to the ground, and vomited all over the street. Confused and thinking I had food poisoning or simply overdid it on the ride, I slowly rode back home. Then the chest pain came as a dull, persistent ache. I called my girlfriend, telling her that I was having some trouble. She said it sounded like I was having a heart attack. I dismissed it. “No, I’m just hungry and dehydrated and need to take a shower.” She raced to my house and convinced me to go to the hospital as the dizziness deepened. After a quick ECG in the emergency room, I was ushered into a suite of scurrying doctors and nurses who were already preparing the surgery. All I heard above the din was, “Massive heart attack … Widowmaker … LAD blocked … LAD blocked!”

A week after my heart attack was Christmas Day, and I was deeply shaken as I began to take the first tentative steps back into my life. I wanted to begin the day with a slow stroll around the block, but only got to the end of the driveway. My right calf felt tight and achy and my toes were numb. I came back to the house with a grim face: “Something’s wrong.” My girlfriend rushed me back to the hospital, where I received an ultrasound on my leg and, sure enough, a dangerous blood clot was found in my femoral artery. There were multiple days of treatment with a vascular surgeon, angiograms to examine the clot, and various tubes inserted through my left groin down to my right calf. (The right groin couldn’t be used, as this was the side that they had gone up in order to place the stent in my heart.) The surgeon was unable to remove the clot, so he opted for an aggressive intravenous clot buster treatment combined with high doses of blood thinners. I was unable to eat or stand for three days. Every hour, nurses would measure the size of my calf to see if blood was flowing, and each hour I was gripped by terror that the clot was getting larger or the pulse in my right foot was getting weaker. Each night was a din of buzzers, beeps, blood tests, and vital sign checks. I slept in fits and starts.

I was finally released from intensive care after the clot buster medication had done its work, and I was able to move to my own hospital room for observation. The diagnosis was that a clot in my heart had been discharged during the heart attack, and that I would need to be on a battery of blood thinners to prevent future clots from forming. On the second night of observation, an alarm and flashing red light erupted from the heart monitor that hung on the wall; it signalled a thirty-second burst of ventricular tachycardia. The next morning my cardiologist warned me that I had experienced a potentially deadly arrhythmia, which made me vulnerable to what he called “sudden cardiac death.” The solution was to wear a portable heart defibrillator (or “life vest”) for the next few months, as the clot dissolved, and then decide whether or not to implant an electronic defibrillator in my chest.

The combined effect of these events left me shattered. I was only forty-eight years old but suddenly felt old and frail. Ordinary tasks such as walking up the stairs or getting out of the car left me exhausted and out of breath. My future, once open and expansive with possibilities, had collapsed. And the interpretation I had of myself as a healthy and energetic college professor fell to pieces. I felt trapped in a meaningless present, left to the moment-to-moment rituals of taking medication, checking my blood pressure and pulse, and arranging the next doctor visit. I was suddenly forced to confront the existential questions I had spent so many years teaching and writing about, “Who am I?” and “What is the meaning of my life?” Indeed, the ideas of existentialism, that distinctive brand of European philosophy that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth-century France, became an obsession for me as I convalesced at home, frightened and vulnerable. Its focus on the flesh-and-blood experiences of the individual, its emphasis on being authentic and honest about our condition, and its engagement with the ultimate questions of human existence, of the meaning of life and death, were more pressing and vital to me than ever. And I began to see the ideas of existentialism being played out in real life in my biweekly sessions of cardiac rehab.

Here nurses would put a group of heart attack survivors on treadmills and rowing machines and gently encourage us to exercise for thirty minutes while carefully monitoring our heart rate and blood pressure. I was at least twenty years younger than anyone else in the room, and over the course of these sessions I began to talk with and learn from my elders. What struck me initially was how differently they seemed to interpret the experience of their failing bodies. Whereas I was gripped by dread and was hypervigilant about every skipped heartbeat and flashing pain in my chest, they appeared far less shaken. They spoke of the importance of not worrying about things you can’t control, about letting go and taking pleasure in little things. There was an elderly woman, Beverly, who appeared to sense my distress. She sat next to me at the end of one of my final sessions and said: “As you get older, Kevin, these kinds of things just get easier to accept. I can’t explain it.” Her words were strange, but they comforted me. Here, in a cardiac rehab clinic, I seemed to be surrounded by folks who already embodied a kind of existential wisdom. Whereas I was riddled with despair, they seemed clear-sighted about their condition, talked openly about their physical pain and losses, and appeared calmer and more sanguine in the face of mortality. Their weakened and frail bodies reminded me of death, but their attitudes seemed freer to me, more life-affirming. I began to think that maybe there was something about growing old that can make us more honest and accepting about who we are, something that can help us place our everyday worries in a proper perspective, and that maybe we become more like the existentialists as we get older.

As I began to do more research on the wisdom that comes with growing old, this suspicion grew stronger. A key moment occurred when I happened across a remarkable series of articles in the New York Times by journalist John Leland, who had spent a year closely documenting the lives of six ordinary New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds who were all members of the “oldest old,” that is, eighty-five years and up. Leland’s series was later published as a book, titled Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year among the Oldest Old, and in its pages the reader is introduced to elders who struggled with painful illnesses, loss, and bodily diminishment but who nonetheless lived with a marked sense of purpose and joy. Like Beverly, who consoled me at cardiac rehab, these elders weren’t dwelling on their losses or missed opportunities, nor were they overly anxious about the nearness of their own death. Indeed, they all seemed to shatter the ageist stereotypes I had grown accustomed to. Fred, for example, an eighty-seven-year-old African American and World War II veteran with debilitating heart disease whom Leland became especially fond of in the course of his research, accepted his bodily limitations and the proximity of death with a kind of ease and lightness. He embraced his age and savored each moment as it came with a clear knowledge that his time was short. Leland was struck by how Fred didn’t look backward with regret or forward with anticipation. He existed in the present. When he asked when the happiest period of his life was, Fred replied without hesitation, “Right now.”¹ Fred was what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have called a “yes-sayer,” someone who embraces and affirms life as a whole, and all the gifts and losses and delights and pains that come with it. Fred wasn’t overly depressed and wallowing in the loss of his physical strength, his mental sharpness, or his friends and lovers. He embodied the Nietzschean principle of amor fati: he loved his fate and was overflowing with life right up until the end.²

To those already familiar with existentialism, it might seem odd to apply this particular brand of philosophy to the phenomenon of aging. We tend to associate “the existentialist” with the commitments of youth, of doing rather than being, of embracing freedom and rebellion against bourgeois conformism, moral absolutes, and metaphysical security. This figure is often viewed as the embodiment of vitality, courage, and agency, qualities that emerge in the heroic archetype of what the French existentialist Albert Camus branded “the rebel” (l’homme révolté). The rebel is the incarnation of “unbounded freedom,” someone who is “born of abundance and fullness of spirit” and actively embraces “all that is problematic and strange in our existence.”³ Wearing his signature black sweater and black pants and perhaps smoking a Gauloise cigarette in a Parisian café, he presents a dashing figure, passionate, creative, and wholly engaged in the world. It’s no surprise, then, that the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of old age are rarely discussed. Indeed, the only major figure who seriously explores the issue of aging is the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in her work The Coming of Age—a massive tome that paints an especially bleak picture of older persons as beings scorned by society, trapped in their bodies, and largely stripped of any kind of meaningful agency. But existentialism is not just a philosophy for the young and healthy. Indeed, the core aim of this short book is to show that existentialism is perhaps most applicable to our later years, as we struggle with illness, physical limitations, the stigmas of our ageist society, and the imminence of death. In fact the true rebel may well be the octogenarian in a wheelchair or a nursing home, not the twenty-year-old nihilist who is drawn to the radical ideas of existentialism but has not yet had to confront the painful realities of life. As the German language poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, the twenty-year-old may grasp the existential questions intellectually, but without the nearness of death and a deep reservoir of life experience to draw from, he or she has not yet learned how to “live the questions.”⁴

But what exactly are these questions? It is difficult to answer because the word “existentialism” does not refer to a unified movement or school of thought. There are philosophical and literary existentialists; there are existentialists who believe in God and others, like Nietzsche, who espouse the idea of God’s death; and there are some who believe in the existence of free will and others who think that this idea is a moral fiction. Indeed, the term wasn’t coined until 1943, long after the nineteenth-century Danish pioneer Søren Kierkegaard laid the conceptual groundwork for it. And of all the major twentieth-century players, only Beauvoir and her compatriot and partner Jean-Paul Sartre self-identified as existentialists. Other like-minded contemporaries disavowed the label for various reasons. Yet for all these disjointed views, there is nonetheless a common set of core principles that binds this diverse group of philosophers and writers together.

The first principle of existentialism is perhaps best captured by Sartre’s maxim that “existence precedes essence.” This pithy adage suggests that humans are distinct from other creatures in the sense that there is no fixed or pre-given “essence” that ultimately determines or makes us who we are. Humans are self-creating or self-making beings. Unlike my cat, I am not wholly determined by my instincts. I have the capacity to configure my existence through my own situated choices and actions. There is, for this reason, no definitive or complete account of who I am. No matter how old I am, I can always remake or reinterpret myself right up until the moment of death. Existence, then, is not a static thing; it is a dynamic process of becoming, of realizing who we are as we move through the stages of our lives. The existentialist, of course, isn’t denying that our inherited compulsions, our physical bodies, and our environmental circumstances limit and constrain us in certain ways. He or she is suggesting, rather, that we are not trapped or determined by these constraints and that what distinguishes us as self-conscious beings is our ability to care for, to reflect on, and to worry about our compulsions, our bodies, and our circumstances, to relate to them and give them meaning. This is why humans are, as Kierkegaard puts it, “a relation that relates to itself.”⁵ Our ability to relate to ourselves manifests itself in how we choose to interpret and make sense of the limitations and opportunities brought forth by the situation we’ve been thrown into. The fact that we are free to choose and create our existence in this way is what the existentialist means by “transcendence.”

But, insofar as I am self-conscious, I am also painfully aware that I did not choose to be born and that my being is always threatened by the possibility of non-being, by death. This leads to the second principle of existentialism, that the truth of our condition is revealed to us not by means of reason or philosophical reflection but by our emotions and our capacity to feel. When existentialists refer to feelings of “nausea,” “anxiety,” and “dread,” they are trying to capture the gnawing and inchoate sense we have that there is something wrong with us, that there is nothing that ultimately grounds or secures our lives, that there is no reason for us to be at all. Of course, the existentialist also understands that we spend much of our lives fleeing from this painful awareness. We cling to our comfortable routines and social roles; we distract ourselves with gossip and we numb ourselves with intoxicants, soft addictions, and fantasies of an afterlife, all in an effort to escape the feeling of our own groundlessness. But the existentialist makes it clear that the anguish we feel is not something we should recoil from, because it teaches us basic truths about who we are: it teaches us that we are temporal creatures, that our existence is in fact precarious, ambiguous, and uncertain. Understood this way, these unsettling feelings present opportunities for personal growth and transformation; they have the power to shake us out of self-deception and complacency, reminding us of what is truly at stake in our brief and precious lives.

And this leads to the third principle of existentialism, that the primary aim of existence is not to experience pleasure or material success. It isn’t even to be happy or to be a good person. The aim, rather, is to be authentic, to be true to oneself. This means that I should not just conform, or try to fit in with the socially prescribed roles and values of the day. I should commit to the values that give my life meaning and that matter to me as the unique individual that I am. But one of the keys to being true to oneself is to first recognize that there is no stable self or “I” to begin with, that the very idea, in Nietzsche’s words, of an enduring self “is a fiction”: one’s self “does not exist at all.”⁶ The first step on the path toward authenticity, then, is to be open and honest with ourselves about our own protean nature and the ambiguity of our condition.

In this book I put forth the idea that it is often easier to be inauthentic and to live in a state of self-deception when we’re young and healthy. Brimming with strength and vitality and facing a future wide open to possibilities, we feel secure and invulnerable, as if death wouldn’t apply to us. But, as we move into old age, it becomes increasingly difficult to live in denial. The reality of finitude presses in on us every day as our bodies weaken, as illness overtakes us, as friends and family members die. For the older person, as Beauvoir reminds us, “death is no longer a general, abstract fate: it is a personal event, an event that is near at hand.”⁷ I want to suggest that growing old may actually push us in the direction of authenticity, of facing and accepting the frailty of our existence, and in this way makes it possible to live with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose.

Of course, it is also important not to romanticize the aging process. It is filled with meaningless suffering and loss; it can leave us feeling abandoned, crippled by depression and filled with anger. But the point of this book is to unsettle the common view in our society that old age is some sort of wasting malady or affliction. As American psychologist James Hillman points out, the original meaning of the word “old” has nothing to do with deterioration and decline; it is formed on an Indo-European root that meant “to nourish” and “to be mature”—the same root we find in the Latin alere (“to feed, rear, nourish, nurse”) and alimentum (“nourishment”). To be old, in this light, is to be “fully nourished, grown up, and mature.”⁸ This may be why the elderly patients in my cardiac rehab appeared to be so different from me. Whereas I was panicked at the thought of coming face to face with death, they were more composed and mature. Nourished by their vast life experience, they seemed better prepared to integrate and accept death into their lives and cherish the limited time they had left.

In the following chapters I try to shed light on a simple idea: that our life is not diminished but enhanced when we are honest and accepting of ourselves as aging and dying. When Rilke refers to the “masterpiece of a long-ripened death,” he is pointing out the ways in which growing old can nourish us by releasing us from habituated patterns of self-deception and from the anxieties of denial and can help us come to an awareness of what genuinely matters in our lives. Aging, understood this way, is a long and slow instruction that teaches us the most important lesson: “to learn how to die,” how to recognize that the future is an illusion and that all that exists is the beauty and mystery of the present moment, a moment we all too often take for granted in the harried rush of youth and middle age.⁹ The autumn of life, then, can be viewed not just as a time of physical decline and infirmity but as one of existential renewal and awakening, a time that allows us to experience what Rilke calls “the ripe fruit of the here and now that has been seized and bitten into and will spread its indescribable taste to us.”¹⁰