The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
“It’s a bit of a struggle, I can see. You’re writing about how to grow old gracefully but you don’t know how. Why don’t you just do a fliparoo and write a different chapter: How not to grow old? Not physically but mentally.”
It’s not easy, she concedes. When young people wear checkered pants or listen to vinyl records, it’s called “retro,” but if an old person dresses like a teenager it’s called “pathetic.”
So, I ask, if growing old is a bummer and society won’t allow me to act young, at least not without being brutally mocked, where does that leave me?
“That leaves you at acceptance.”
“Acceptance?”
“Yeah, you should write ‘How to Accept Being Old,’ or some crap like that.”
The kid might be onto something.
“So how does one accept being old? What would you advise?”
“You just go with the flow, don’t disrupt the brain waves.”
“Brain waves?”
“Figurative brain waves, Old Man, figurative. If your brain is telling you, ‘Hey bro, we’re old. Let’s chill out,’ you should chill out.”
What Sonya is suggesting is very Stoic. If the heart of wisdom is, as the Stoics believe, distinguishing what’s under our control from what is not, changing the former and accepting the latter, then old age makes an excellent training ground for Stoic wisdom. As we age, the balance shifts, from control to acceptance. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. Resignation is resistance masquerading as acceptance. Pretending to accept something is like pretending to love someone.
“Acceptance” appears infrequently in Beauvoir’s work. The Beaver was so busy choosing and becoming and working her projects she rarely had time to simply be. Projects can take many forms, though. Sometimes they demand beaverlike industriousness, but not always. Learning acceptance—not resignation but genuine openhearted acceptance—is itself a project, perhaps the most important one of all.
I am at the Café de Flore, on the Left Bank. Two compelling reasons bring me here. One: I’ve had my fill of Le McDonald’s. I can’t take it anymore. (I’ve left Sonya to her devices and her nugs back at the hotel.) Two: This was one of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s favorite cafés. They conversed here, drank here, thought here.
They wrote their books here, too—at first because the café, unlike their postwar apartments, was heated, and later because, well, they liked writing in cafés. Existentialism is a philosophy grounded in lived experience and nowhere is experience more lived than in a Parisian café. You couldn’t ask for a better laboratory of human failings and possibilities. That was true in Beauvoir’s time, and is true today. One glance at the café’s inhabitants reveals life in all its manifestations. The young couple swooning over their espresso; the older men embroiled in intellectual fisticuffs; the elegantly dressed woman, alone with her chardonnay and her thoughts.
Inevitably, café life seeped into Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophy. Consider the waiter, says Sartre, in a passage about the importance of authenticity.
A waiter is not a waiter the way a glass is a glass or a pen is a pen. There is nothing in his nature that makes him a waiter. He didn’t simply wake one day and say, “I am a waiter in a café.” He chose this life, and voluntarily succumbs to its customs. He doesn’t have to wake at 5:00 a.m. each day. He could stay in bed, even if it means getting fired. To view his job as anything other than a choice is to deceive himself—to act in “bad faith.”
Sartre observes the waiter more closely. He is a good waiter, a little too good, a little “extra,” my daughter would say. “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid,” says Sartre. “He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.” He is not a waiter in a café, concludes Sartre. He is playing at being a waiter in a café.
A lot of us sleepwalk through life like this. We confuse our social roles with our essence. We get “taken hold of by others,” says Sartre, and see ourselves only as they do. We forfeit our freedom, and lack authenticity (a word derived from the Greek authentes, meaning someone who acts independently).
This abdication is particularly true, I think, of the elderly. Others see them as helpless and inconsequential, and soon they begin to see themselves this way, too. They play at being an old person. They order the early-bird special and take Caribbean cruises and drive for three miles with their left-turn-signal indicator on because, well, that’s what old people are supposed to do. Hold on, says Sartre. Do you genuinely like the early-bird special? Is it a choice you made consciously, purposively, or one you simply slid into?
It doesn’t have to be this way. Consider retirement. After a lifetime playing a certain role—banker, journalist, waiter—we’re suddenly stripped of this identity. Who are we then? Maybe, like Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s novella, we come to the realization our life has been a lie—and, worse, one we told ourselves. Confronted with finitude, we’re more willing to discard our roles, like an actor stepping out of character as soon as the show is over. We might, like Ivan, experience a moment of liberation, even if it comes too late.
I decide to reread Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age. Maybe it’s not so dark after all. This time I mark passages with either a “B,” for bummer, or a “G,” for glimmer, as in glimmer of hope. Afterward, I review my markings. The “B”s outnumber the “G”s by a wide margin. Case closed, right?
Not so fast. I am a free and authentic being, acting in good faith. I can choose what to focus on. I cannot not choose. So I choose to focus on the “G”s.
Taken together, they form a much shorter but considerably cheerier book. I also read Beauvoir’s memoirs, all four of them, as well as several biographies.
What I discover is a story within a story, like one of those messages written in invisible ink, only visible when you hold it up to a certain kind of light. When I hold Beauvoir up to the light, I see someone who aged extremely well. Her fear of old age faded, replaced by quiet acceptance and even joy.
Beauvoir, proud French intellectual that she was, would never deign to compile a list of the “Top Ten Ways to Grow Old.” I, neither proud nor French, have no such qualms.
1: Own Your Past
What to do with our past? That is a knotty question for people of any age but especially the elderly. They have more past than the rest of us. Everywhere they turn, they’re bumping into their past, tripping over it. It takes up precious closet space. They might be tempted to discard their past, or donate it to charity. That would be a mistake. The past is valuable, and in two distinct ways: one therapeutic, the other creative.
“There is a kind of magic in recollection, a magic that one feels at every age,” says Beauvoir. The magic traces its roots to the past but blooms in the present. We always experience our past, no matter how distant, in the now.
Our past animates our present. Beauvoir couldn’t imagine a present life without a rich past. “If the world behind us were bare we would hardly be able to see anything but a gloomy desert.”
Recall is not replay. Memory is selective. It requires not only retention but forgetfulness, lest we end up like poor Funes, the character in the Borges story who, after being thrown from a horse, recalls everything in great detail, and suffers terribly.
We are, the existentialists remind us, free to choose which memories to activate. Why not recall the good? Why not be more like the ancient Greeks, who had a category for words expressing retrospective joy but none for its negative counterparts: guilt and regret?
There is another kind of recollection, one more creative. I call it the Great Summing Up. The old, standing near life’s summit, can see further. They discern hidden contours of their past, narrative arcs that eluded their younger selves, and see their life whole. They also begin to notice benign coincidences—“the meeting-point of many converging lines,” says Beauvoir.