'Old Men Are Generally Narrative'

A blunt fact of modern life: When young, everyone we knew – family, friends, neighbors – lives nearby. Our lives are well-populated. With age, that alignment of geography and acquaintance attenuates. Live long enough and our birthplace turns incrementally, across the decades, into a ghost town. I’ve just learned that the last high-school teacher I remained in touch with has died. No surprise. She was eighty-three. She introduced me to Yeats. I introduced her to Nathanael West.

In September I’m returning to Cleveland for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, and I had planned to meet with my teacher for coffee, as we last did in 2016. The good news is I will spend time with my nephew, my niece and her baby, and one surviving friend. I haven’t lived in Cleveland since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983, though they remain “home” in some primal sense. 

In his Rambler essay for August 7, 1750, Dr. Johnson writes: “[T]he images which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature, the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all attempts of erasure or of change.”

 

In other words, people and places persist in memory as we knew them, not as they are. Inevitably, there’s a clash of expectation and reality. The old map is no longer reliable. Familiar scenes seem somehow “wrong,” not quite accurate. Johnson understands this discordance, though he was only forty when writing his essay:

 

“The time of life, in which memory seems particularly to claim predominance over the other faculties of the mind, is our declining age. It has been remarked by former writers, that old men are generally narrative, and fall easily into recitals of past transactions, and accounts of persons known to them in their youth. When we approach the verge of the grave it is more eminently true . . .”