"The Undiscovered Country"

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life.  A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”  ~Mark Twain

Once I turned 70, I noticed that I watched the news with a slightly different take; when there is news that some well-known person has died, I always note the birth date and age.  While I don’t actually keep score, it feels like I give a plus mark to anyone who lived longer than 70, and a minus mark to those who didn’t make it that long.  I don’t consider this ghoulish or depressing, but simply a reckoning for my own chances or odds for a long life.

I’m not afraid of death since I simply believe I will cease to exist.  But there is no doubt that I’m not ready for death: I have much more to do, and since this is my one shot at living, I want to enjoy every possible moment.  It’s the finality of death that makes living so precious and wonderful.  Philosophers have pondered the “existential void” of the finality of death; some have despaired.  For me that void is all the more reason to savor what time we have here.

The photo above is one I took in Paris at Père Lachaise Cemetery; it’s a pretty grand place, filled with the tombs of many famous people.  It would be tempting to want to be buried in such a place.  But I’m not a great author or musician, so we’ll leave the few places left there for the famous.  My ashes will go elsewhere.  For a long time I just planned on having them scattered (a euphemism for being dumped!) in Stillhouse Hollow Lake by whoever lives longer than I, followed by a beer poured in after me; and then everyone jumps in for a swim.  But lately I have given some thought to having my ashes interred at the Texas State Veteran’s Cemetery.  I’m not sure why that is, other than the cemetery is right down the road from my brother’s house and he’ll have to think about me every time he drives past.  But maybe at least a part of it is that desire to endure past death, and there will be my name, my military branch, and the fact that I’m a Vietnam veteran.  For as long as the cemetery lasts.

But even that kind of memory, or durability, won’t last forever.  I will eventually join that great mass of men and women who roll “around in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”   I hope, when death does come, I will be able to approach it as another poet put it, and be like “one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”

Moving on . . .

According to Albert Einstein, “Life is like riding a bicycle.  To keep your balance you must keep moving.”  Apparently, I’ve taken this to heart.  I’m 70 years old and by my count I have moved 33 times; that is, I have only lived in each house/home for an average of 2 1/2 years.  According to Einstein I must be truly balanced.  Frankly, all that moving suggests quite the opposite.

I’ve lived in some places longer than others, of course; 2 1/2 years is an average.  I lived on the farm as a kid for 14 years, the longest location (my first three years were spent in Oklahoma City).  I left the farm to begin my moving around at age 17 as I headed to my first ill-fated attempt at college.  Before moving to Chicago I lived near Killeen, Texas, for nine years.  That’s the second longest.  The shortest, as near as I can remember, was when I moved to Oklahoma City from eastern Oklahoma and after about three months I headed to San Diego.  I wasn’t sure how to count my time in the Navy, since I virtually traveled around the world--on a ship; I settled for listing my shore assignments and counting my ship assignment as one location.

The reasons for moving are manifold: jobs, escaping jobs, lovers, the excitement of new places, and once to be near my mother as she got older and needed me more and more.  The only common denominator I can find is a general and ongoing discontent.

The thing about all this moving about is that I have never really felt that I belonged anywhere.  Even as a kid I was totally focused on getting away from the farm--and the small town nearby and the unpleasantness of most of my elementary and high school experience.  I lived in Texas four different times: twice in Dallas, once in Houston, and then in Killeen, and yet I never felt like a Texan.  Nor did I feel like an Okie either, even though I lived in that state the longest.  California likewise.  And I’ve been in Chicago almost six years, and while I love the city and moving here was one of the best moves I’ve ever made--and I have no plans to move again--I don’t feel like a Chicagoan either; I feel like an import.  No place that I’ve ever lived have I felt like I was a total and complete “fit.” 

I’m running out of time in my life.  I don’t envision any more moves, and maybe with a little more time I’ll settle into being a Chicagoan; but I’m not holding out much hope.  Why this lifelong discontent with my place of residence?  I haven’t a clue.  Maybe in another blog I’ll explore that some; but I’m already uncomfortable just thinking about it.  Maybe I’ll just concentrate on the “balance” part and leave the actual motivation alone.

"School's Out for Summer!"

Okay, technically, my school is not out forever; I have one term to make up which I expect to do this summer.  But my four years spent studying classic literature and philosophy have been a remarkable journey, and I’ve loved almost every moment.

I’m taking about my four years in the Basic Program for Liberal Education for Adults.  What a singularly silly name: it sounds like a remedial program.  But it’s part of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.  Add those two together and that’s a mouthful.  What it is is simply a four year program for studying the Great Books.

Great Books is capitalized, as it was a compilation of important western literature and philosophy developed out of the University of Chicago in the early 20th century by, among other, Jacques Barzun and Mortimer J. Adler.  I first ran across it when my grandmother subscribed, for me mostly, to the Great Books from Harvard University arriving regularly in 51 green volumes (I have no idea where she ran across this subscription but I am grateful).  I had them for years, but now they are gone.

The program consists of three terms for each of the four years.  There are no exams nor papers to write.  There is simply a group of interested people led by a professor in the program.  The student body is varied; in my class there were three lawyers, two retired, two public school teachers, me and a retired librarian, a retired nurse with a PhD, a semi-retired priest, and a retired, although only around 50, air traffic controller, among others.  It was as varied a group of people as one could pull together.  There were Liberals, moderates, and Conservatives, religionists and pagans.

The curriculum is set by the department.  There's a link at the bottom where you can get all the information about the program including a complete reading list.  But I want to mention a few works I’ve studied and my reactions to them.

The works probably wouldn’t surprise anyone, although some are better known than others.  Sometimes the authors are well-known but the selection of the work is not what one might expect.  For example Nietzsche is on the list, but we didn’t read Thus Spake Zarathustra; rather, we read his Genealogy of Morals.  Other works are totally expected:  Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes Leviathan, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.  One term rotates a work of literature each year, reading either War and Peace, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Tom Jones, or, the year I went through, Middlemarch.  We read six dialogues of Plato, but that’s hardly a surprise (The Symposium was my favorite).

Some of the works I had read before, some I had even taught.  A few I had read before and either didn’t remember or didn’t like them originally: Pride and Prejudice, for example, was a book I hated when I read it as an undergrad over 40 years ago; this time I loved it.  Some works came easy; some I struggled with; I never really got my mind around Aristotle (except his Poetics, which I read in college and later taught); his Nicomachean Ethics is mostly a blur.

If I had to pick a favorite it would Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.  But going back to Dante’s Inferno was a delight; and I was reintroduced to the amazing essays of Montaigne (about which I wrote an earlier blog).  The least favorite would probably be Aquinas and Pascal and the aforementioned Aristotle.  But I intend to revisit Aristotle to wrestle with him again.

I’ll miss my friends in the program and the regularity of the process.  Fortunately, the Basic Program offers a wide range of alumni courses, which I plan on taking as long as my mind--and my knee--holds out.

It has been voyage of great discovery, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have gone through this.  And my reward?  A certificate to hang on the wall. And an extraordinary introduction to some of the great minds of human history.
-----------------------
Web site for the Basic Program:  https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/content/about-basic-program