I write this after returning from a visit to the doctor, and find myself thinking about the phenomenon of growing older. Of course I prefer the euphemistic “growing older” to the not-so-glamorous “growing old”! Within reach of 80 I do feel pride in age, however. (There is always paradox in life.)
In the doctor’s waiting-room, I was sitting with other older persons, all of us more or less grey – except for some (not only ladies) who should have shown grey by now, but who, clearly, take euphemistic living to the very brink!
There is much to commend age (depending on the person): a restfulness; a grasp of meanings beyond the reach of youth; even a growing capacity for self-critique. There is much also to disapprove of: the problems I went to see the doctor about, for instance. I try not to think dualistically, but it seems that two levels of existence force themselves on us, not intimating a unity of life, but rather a dialogue between “spiritual” and “physical” things. In charge of this dialogue is oneself – and the outcome of it depends on how you handle it. It will never be easy: physical pain, in any case, permits no smooth passage to tranquillity and, unfortunately, often stands in the way of a sense of humour.
But I left the doctor’s place feeling I had experienced a worthwhile lesson. While waiting, there was a woman sitting opposite. Her doctor then came and called her. She got up heavily and, as she passed my chair, said in my direction: “It is not nice getting old.” I could not make out in that fleeting moment whether she was bitter; whether she had any sense of humour left; whether she felt hopeless. Still I understood (perfectly, I think) what she was saying.
Something I distrust, however, and believe is self-centredly indulgent, is the nailing of one’s pain to the high mast, making a public show of it for all to see and be urged to pray for you. (This is undignified, even if the aura of it all is canvassed as “love”!)
Age is a condition of life to be dealt with respectfully, whatever the aspects of it, since “people are living there”. I am of course indebted to fellow-playwright Athol Fugard for the phrase. It is full of human content. Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy of the worth of, and respect due to, all life (not only human life) opens out on a landscape of Creation even more profound.
These thoughts apply also to realities quite different from that of old or older age. There are the big cities of the world, for instance, with all their in-the-face presence: New York City, London, Shanghai… We ought to be mindful of the fact that, here too, “people are living there”. This is so obvious, we think: after all, there are so many people around, criss-crossing so many streets, frequenting so many places (skyscraping buildings, business centres, trade expositions). Yet the loneliness of many, despite the hustle and bustle, exists – loneliness, and often sadness: laughter and intimations of pleasure are ever-so-often misleading.
Randomly, I have some other realities on my mind different from old age, and in need of the consideration that people are living there.
When the news is read and one hears the name of some place you have not heard of before, you consult a map: just where in the world or on a continent is it? I recently came across a name like this, that of a group of islands called “Ryukyu”, south-southwest of Japan. I discovered that these islands and islets are sparsely peopled, some of them not at all. But I also found (when searching further) that people are indeed living there robustly: farming flourishes, with rice and sweet potatoes grown, and sugar cane and pineapples; fishing is important, the sea being all around. And the history of Ryukyu is tied in with exchanges over time between China and Japan.
There are so many other similar small places around the world. Homebound, I think for instance of the hamlet of Goree, where I was a small child – a very tiny place, but part of the big land mass of our Karoos, which in turn are part of our solid continent of Africa. Could anything happen in Goree, ever? Well, people were living there (and still are); there were children; and my parents were teachers of those children, my father even playing the role of a small-time minister or priest on Sundays, preaching sermons for the people living there. And, when they died, he buried them. All this certainly contributed positively (or otherwise) to the great fund of existence.
Homebound also, I think of St Helena. Many South African coloured people speak in fond terms of forebears of theirs as “St Helenas”. The island lies – as one source puts it – beyond “the endless steel edge of the horizon”, some days out from Ascension, in the South Atlantic. It was once “Britain’s loneliest major outpost of empire, a most solitary place, almost purpose-built for exile… The obvious place to send the defeated Napoleon in 1815”.
Way out of bounds as St Helena might be, those who approach it from the sea will (suddenly) sight “the twinkling lights of houses, the crawling firefly of a car high on a mountainside”, and realise: “People are living there”! And the island is reported to be a beautiful place, having been (romantically?) described as “close to paradise”.
Returning to Goree: in that little place (not even mentioned on my map), my father’s rather staid Gereformeerde style of doing things – somehow it was accommodating – opened up for me appreciation, as time passed, even of culture very far removed from it.
It has, felicitously, been possible for me to imaginatively engage, in later life, with the world of the Navaho (sometimes, unfortunately, referred to as “American Indians”). Readers may want to look at the story of the Navaho as recounted by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton – the book is useful, albeit written from a vantage point of “our” America and “their” territory (much the same contour of thinking that we find in South Africa).
We are speaking here of the world of, and around, Arizona’s canyons: Grand Canyon and others – Canyon De Chelley, also Monument Valley. This is a magic land of cosmic soil erosion, forged mainly by the great Colorado River. It defies literal description. I have mentioned it here before, and now speak of it again only because I have never recovered from its impact.
Kluckhohn and Leighton point out that “Navaho” is not their own word for themselves. In their own language they are (simply) diné – “The People”.
What makes it easy for people like myself to think ourselves into (rather than to relate to) such a culture – to comprehend it even if not to access it – is the communality of problems shared by minority groups in respect of the governing powers of countries (in this case America and South Africa).
In our country there is the superficial, glib, almost happy-go-lucky talk about a “rainbow nation”. But “nation” is an elusive concept, and the idea that so many “peoples” – supposedly the different colours of the rainbow – can be comfortably lumped together into a union to constitute a nation is (if I may again use James Thurber’s word) gobbledygook: precious nonsense.
In this connection I agree with the sentiments of the well-known social worker, Ms Di Oliver. In a recent lecture at UWC, “Helping: the core concept of Social and Community Work”, she writes – with the concept of democracy in mind – that “Against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the mid-1990s, the government soon abandoned the Reconstruction and Development Programme, also of the 1990s, and the emergence of the National Development Plan a couple of years ago, there is a long, long way to go to achieve the promised transformation of our country.
“With a constitution in place that is the world’s envy, a negotiated Bill of Rights, a Human Rights Commission, Public Protector and independent judiciary, there is much of which to feel proud… However, our country is failing to meet the most basic needs of the vast majority, there is deepening poverty, a widening gap between rich and poor and widespread concern that, after 21 years, the quality of education with which our young people leave school is wanting.”
I must, of course, not omit mentioning that Ms Oliver (a former director of the Cape Town non-governmental organisation Nicro) assuagingly quotes the South American psychologist Martha Cabrera to the effect that “it is difficult (for a society) to build a democracy when (its) history still hurts”.
As usual, let me try binding together the thoughts I have put out in this writing. Perhaps the link that joins all, is the wisdom of Plato that: “the state is man writ large”. Like any man or woman, therefore, a res publica (a country, a society) gathers wisdom, like moss, as it grows older: wisdom cannot be fast-forwarded! And we have to take care how we go – not over-gingerly, yet caringly, caressingly almost, like a good doctor, always aware that “people are living there”.
All in all, things are not so difficult. The schedule of requirements for personal and societal well-being, though rigorous, is not exacting beyond one’s moral means (even when in pain physically: but perhaps I have not been pushed to the very limit yet). I conclude, therefore, on the cheering note of the Latvian philosopher Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950) that, essentially, what is required for coherent living is the expression of justice. (Hartmann’s Ethik, says his translator Stanton Coit, rightly, “is the most comprehensive treatise on ethics which has ever been published”.) The virtue of justice is a living-out of the “minimum of morality”. (Hartmann’s famous words occur in Volume II of Coit’s three-volume translation of 1932, on page 232.) It should not be hard to achieve this minimum, and we are capable of addition, even great addition, to it: after all, true freedom goes way beyond justice, the latter merely paving the way for all higher forms of goodness.
As postscript: Over long years I have grown to be (almost obsessively) anxious about insularity of thought – and of living. (I am not talking about anybody’s treasuring of individuality.) Imagine my disappointment when I reached Oxford’s environs of Philosophy in the first half of the Sixties, and found there scant knowledge of, and in some quarters no acquaintance at all with Hartmann’s great work. I was surprised (after all, this was Oxford!), for this was intellectual behaviour and an attitude as if there weren’t philosophers living anywhere outside of England!