Wednesday, November 20th

A DISMAL DAY, rain, everything leaden. I forgot to say that yesterday when I was hurrying to get to an appointment on time I fell forward on the stairs and wrenched my shoulder. It shook me, because it brought vividly to mind the hazards of living alone. One feels fragile. And I realize that anxiety is never far away because what would happen to Tamas? The cat can get in and out through my bedroom window, but he would be trapped if anything happened to me and it might be days before I was found (Louise Bogan was found lying dead on the floor in her apartment in New York). Such anxiety should keep one alert and I believe that it does, alert and reminding oneself not to hurry. Most domestic accidents happen because someone is hurrying … But on a deeper level than the mundane fact of a possible fall or heart attack I feel sure that after sixty everyone has death in the back of his or her consciousness much of the time.

Yesterday the mail brought me a mimeographed essay by a Jungian therapist in which she uses Lear’s great speech that begins, “No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison” as a beautiful expression of what growing old can mean. She says,

“The wisdom of common speech, which we so often miss, speaks to us in the phrase, ‘He is growing old.’ We use it indiscriminately about those who are in truth growing into old age, into the final flowering and meaning of their lives, and about those who are being dragged into it, protesting, resisting, crying out against their inevitable imprisonment. Only to one who can say with his whole being, ‘Come, let’s away to prison,’ do the lines which follow apply.

“ ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.’ We may think of Cordelia in this context as the old man’s inner child—the love and courage, the simplicity, and innocence of his soul, to which suffering has united him.”

Growing old … what is the opposite of “growing”? I ask myself. “Withering” perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. But there is also an opposite to growth which is regression, in psychoanalytic terms going back to infantile modes of being. And maybe growing old is accepting regression as part of the whole mysterious process. The child in the old person is a precious part of his being able to handle the slow imprisonment. As he is able to do less, he enjoys everything in the present, with a childlike enjoyment. It is a saving grace, and I see it when Judy is with me here.

Growing old is certainly far easier for people like me who have no job from which to retire at a given age. I can’t stop doing what I have always done, trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal is a good way to do this at a less intense level than by creating a work of art as highly organized as a poem, for instance, or the sustained effort a novel requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle into which to pour vivid momentary insights, and a way of ordering day-to-day experience (as opposed to Maslow’s “peak experiences,” which would require poetry). If there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it may be in what E. Bowen said: “One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument.”