by John Allen Paulos
Bertrand Russell’s advice for aging gracefully is rather simple: Broaden your horizons. He recommends that we should try to expand our interests and concerns. Doing so will help us become less focused on ourselves and more open to the world around us. He adds metaphorically, “An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
I think to a large extent people tend to do this naturally. Businessmen often become less concerned with their assets and money and more with their larger family and society as they get older. Likewise lawyers frequently grow tired of having their briefs in a tangle and mellow out as they age. A similar phenomenon holds for athletes, academics, and workers of all sorts.
Of course, not everybody follows Russell’s counsel. Some remain hard-charging and a few so much so that they resemble the man in Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”Given the opportunity to possess all the land he can walk around in one day, the man’s greed leads to his death and thus provides the answer to the question in the title. A man needs about 6 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet – enough for a grave. More appealing is Dylan Thomas’ contrary exhortation not to “go gentle into that good night” but rather “to rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Notwithstanding Tolstoy and Thomas, the rocks and waterfalls of a life do tend for most people to give rise to a desire for calmer waters. Sticking with Russell’s metaphor suggests that in the limit we might arrive at what the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland first termed in a letter to Freud the “oceanic feeling,” a sensation of eternity and of being one with the world. Stated differently, our personal identity slowly fades and is replaced by an impersonal cosmic one.
Being drawn to these tendencies and to words like “oceanic,” “eternity,” and “cosmic” is not a dissociative disorder, at least I hope it’s not. It might, however, be a common consequence of retirement and aging, which entails putting one’s work life behind one or at least putting one’s memories of it at some psychological distance.
Not incidentally, my resonance with Russell’s quote is not unrelated to my semi-retirement last year. Speaking personally, when I remember the countless experiences of my life, the places I’ve lived, the people I’ve known, the teaching, writing, and traveling I’ve done, sometimes it almost takes an act of will to realize that the character in these remembered experiences is me, myself, and I. Moreover though the experiences differ, there is nevertheless an increasingly been-there done-that similar shape to them.
Age provides a loftier perch wherefrom we’re more likely to look at the events, themes, and patterns of our lives as occurring and recurring repeatedly. Suffering from a mathematician’s myopia,, I’m well aware that repetition, self-similarity, and fractals are common ways for artists to suggest infinity and, as a special case, the endless and eternal waves of the ocean, which eponymously at least suggests the oceanic feeling.
Over time one’s life can grow to appear the same, the same, the same, like looking into a nested series of mirrors and seeing your reflection in your reflection in your reflection, etcetera. As in Borges’ fiction, the mirrors suggest the notion of infinity and also of illusion. Are the ever shrinking, fading images in the nested mirrors really of us? Again Russell’s words, “becoming merged into the sea, and painlessly losing its individual being.”
(For the mathematically interested, the so-called Sierpinski carpet is a graphical illustration of how one gradually can lose one’s individual identity and yet still leave a trace of oneself. To construct the carpet, start with a square in a 3×3 grid and cut it into 9 identical subsquares. Now cut out and remove the central subsquare and then apply the procedure to the remaining 8 subsquares, and then over and over again to the ever smaller resulting subsquares ad infinitum. Surprisingly the Sierpinsky carpet has zero area with everything except an uncountably infinite number of points cut out and removed, our dust, if you like.)
These metaphors of infinity and aging undermine our exaggerated pretensions and mundane obsessions, and may even force us to view ourselves in something like the way we view the dilapidated statue of the boastful pharaoh Ozymandias.
Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself, perhaps like the woman writing her son a very long letter in the middle of which she congratulates him on taking a speed reading course and adds that because of the course he’s probably already finished reading her letter. Life, like the letter, isn’t over until it’s over.
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John Allen Paulos is an emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Temple University and the author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. These and his other books are available here.