On Entering My Seventh Decade in a Strange Land: Some Thoughts of Turning Sixty Under Emerging Fascism
"To live in each moment authentically, bravely, and beautifully is how we create meaning in the world."
Last week I entered, as one friend reminded me, my seventh decade. While I’m not big on birthdays, the fact that I almost died several times nearly two years ago makes every extra year I survive a bit more meaningful, or at least I like to think so. The truth is that having almost lost everything, I was given the gift of realizing that none of it matters, yet all of it matters.
Laying on what I was quite sure at times was my death bed, I found myself pondering how rapidly, in my case out of the blue, all can be lost. I teach Humanities so it brought to mind the words of the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, “To put it shortly: all things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusions; life is warfare, and a visit in a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.”
Indeed, despite all our vanity, the leveling reality is as Aurelius puts it, “That in a short while you will be nobody and nowhere; and the same of all that you now see and all that are now alive. It is the nature of all things to change, to perish and be transformed, so that in succession different things can come to be.”
While I find Aurelius’ brutal truth-telling strangely refreshing and comforting in its own way, I’m also inclined toward the existentialist formation of Ernest Hemingway that counsels the need for “grace under pressure” in the face of a chaotic and frequently meaningless world.
How we carry ourselves when facing what James Baldwin called the “roar rising from the void” matters. We can create beauty by mastering the moment and transcending suffering through art and human connection, and love. In the darkest places, sometimes we can find the most profound form of solidarity which grants us a transient but transformative escape from the existential loneliness of our existences.
To live in each moment authentically, bravely, and beautifully is how we create meaning in the world.
When I was younger, I sought the ecstatic and believed with William Blake that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” We can find ourselves by losing ourselves, surrendering to the loss of our small selves to a larger one. Perhaps somewhere on that road I would, as Kerouac put it, find “it,” “the pearl” would be handed to me in some unexpected place.
Along with that, as I aged, there has also been my own form of idiosyncratic secular Zen that still prods me to dive into the present moment and whatever it may hold, to just be and let the wonder of what is unfold. When we are truly present, there is dawn in us. The loss of selfhood that Aurelius presents in stark Western terms may be something liberating. The nothing that we fear is at the heart of everything.
Maybe, as Tom Joad says channeling Preacher Casey as he reaches back to Emerson, everybody is just part of one big soul and our part of that big soul links us to everyone in the world.
But how does any of this translate to politics, to the larger social world that shapes and makes us? If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we never tell those stories alone. And of all the stories we tell ourselves, history is, as the Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson wrote, the narrative “that hurts.”
We are, inevitably, inextricably wedded to each other; we make each other who we are moment by moment, but not all of us have the same amount of power or resources. Hence, like it or not, we need to enter the “warfare” that is life, stake a claim, and place our bets on a particular tale about who we are, a vision of the collective good or simply play a bit part in some other person’s story.
In my view, this means playing the game of politics even as we know its rules are arbitrary and sometimes rigged. You have a view (a construct to be sure) of the common good and put your wager on it. If you have a grand idea in your head, a utopia of sorts where all injustices are addressed and we all live full, authentic lives despite our circumstances or obstacles, you fight for that vision knowing (if you are wise) that you’ll never see it but that perhaps you might manage to improve your fellow humans’ lives for a brief moment in our collective race from the womb to the tomb.
This doesn’t mean imposing rigid ideology or a blueprint but fostering a kind of anticipatory consciousness that seeks to shatter the taken-for-granted, the “always so” and insist that no one should be written out of the story, that everyone deserves basic dignity, human rights, and autonomy over their lives.
There is no guaranteed outcome that drives you but the notion of right action, and, one hopes, your affection for others. We have a duty to our fellow travelers on the planet.
The day that I was born in 1965, a tornado struck the Twin Cities and killed one-hundred and eighty-three people. That same year saw the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the assassination of Malcolm X, the Watts uprisings, increasing American involvement in the Vietnam War, Bloody Sunday in Selma, the first spacewalk, the occupation of the Dominican Republic, the Beatles’ explosion on the scene, and LBJ was the first American President to be warned about the potentially dire consequences of climate change.
And the rush of time and the cycle of life and death, tragedy and triumph has proceeded for sixty years and six days as you read this. Everything is always at stake all the time.
Where does this leave us? With all due irony, let me quote again the words of an Emperor, “The lamp of a light shines on and does not lose its radiance until it is extinguished. Will then the truth, justice, and self-control which fuel you fail before your own end?”
Nobody ever knows this answer, yet we persist and struggle, nonetheless.