'The True Pleasure in Writing'

 “Here I am nearly ninety, prepared as few to enjoy delicately with or rather through my eyes, my ears, my touch. I should give myself up to looking and seeing, to listen to sweet voices and beautiful sounds. I should cherish and reread all the Classics with my present understanding. I should help to form the young for the pure pleasure of it. I should live disinterestedly, as a kind of spectator.”

Rather lofty aspirations. Not a conventional retirement scheme, which is likelier to include fishing and playing golf, if not hearing aids and colostomy bag. Only recently have I even dared to think about retirement. I turn sixty-eight next month. I always assumed I would work until I dropped, comfortably shod in my boots. I learned early, from Great Depression-era parents, that life is very much about work.  

The author of the passage quoted above, art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), is writing in his diary on this date, Sept. 19, in 1954, three months after his ninetieth birthday (Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947-1958, 1963). He sets us up by aligning all those shoulds, only to bring us down abruptly:

“Not at all. I am possessed by the demon of productive work. I spend my ever diminishing moments when I am still really alive on study of photographs, with a view to compiling a new catalogue of Italian paintings, with a view to perpetuating my own attributions, my own errors. I bother and worry about publishing. I read for information and seldom for pleasure. I get cross over the ways of the world, particularly over the art productions and art appreciation of today. This last is so absurd, seeing that if they do what I do not care for, they do me no personal harm.”

Except for the part about seldom reading for pleasure, I’m with Berenson. I’m fortunate. All of my adult life I’ve earned my living by writing. Even purely utilitarian writing brings satisfaction. I don’t look into such things too closely. I’m grateful for the alignment of my abilities, sources of pleasure and what life has handed me. Joseph Epstein is eighty-three and remains very much a writer by inclination and profession. This week alone he has published at least two essays -- “Fame” in Commentary and “Style Reveals the Man” in First Things. In the former he writes:

 “For me the true pleasure in writing is found in the work itself: in the delight in amusing phrases, well-turned sentences, rhythmical paragraphs, conclusions I had little or no idea I would arrive at until my composition was complete. I have long subscribed to E.M. Forster’s remark, when asked his opinion on a subject, that he didn’t really know what he thought until he had written about it. Writing, in this view, is an act of discovery, and so it has been for me.”