THE TRUTH ABOUT OLD MEN - final chapter

CHAPTER TWENTY

One of the great, enduring truths about old men is that there are no such things. There are only little boys who occasionally look in the mirror and can't believe what has happened to them. The child looks and wonders, "What will I become?" Later he asks "Who am I?" And finally, just when he's reached the age of asking, "What happened to me?" he sees he is not alone in the mirror -- never has been. There's a shadow standing behind him, and the shadow is fear.

Thoreau's observation that, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" was a remarkable insight. I might tell you there is a nose between the lips and the eyes on most faces. That's another thing I never heard anyone say before, and I suppose the truth of both statements is so plain it's hardly worth pointing out.

Every man knows the shadowy fear Thoreau called desperation, but the ghost goes by different names at different times in a man's life. In the early days it may look more like lust. There is a seed in the belly that grows larger with each day that passes, until it is larger than the man, himself -- larger at least than his ability to resist it. Well inside the young man is a particular understanding that never makes its proposition plain to him. It is the screaming universal voice of a thousand grandfathers whose efforts to survive through the generations of their spawn will come to conclusion unless he fathers a child. This is the truth of it, but to the young man living on the surface of his self it has a smaller feeling, and when he looks in the mirror he simply says to his reflection, "I gotta get laid."

Later in a man's life desperation goes by the name “responsibility.” His family believes they are safe with him and it's his job to encourage that illusion. It is his way of sparing them the insecurity he privately shoulders alone. But the shadow is ever whispering the world is a lethal place, and he is ill-equipped to protect himself, let alone his family. Together, they cling to a dream it will all turn out okay, but alone in confrontation with his solitary self, what the world calls responsibility is a muffled roar of desperation. It's a desperate hope that nothing will expose his utter helplessness to protect those who are dear to him from the overwhelming weight of a merciless world.

As the age of curmudgeonry sets, in the old man reaches a fork in the road. One of the chief components of his faith in the future falls away and “hope” ceases to fuel optimism. It is no longer prudent to speculate about winning the lottery. No knock upon his door will find opportunity waiting on the other side. He will not be discovered by a Hollywood producer. He will not stumble upon some great invention that will forever etch his name in the encyclopedia. There will be no best-seller, and any rich relation who might pass away and leave him flush is already dead. If life were a game of 5-card stud, he would already have made his draw, and the truth of the hand would now be plain.

Those old men who spent their lives amassing wealth now realize it is a game that cannot be won. A goal achieved produces only a higher goal. For wealthy men there are no goals. There are only steps and redeveloped goals, and death will take him somewhere along the staircase, which is exactly where he began the game.

Wealth, itself, is a relative value. It can only exist in a world where there are far more people with far less. That relegates the vast majority of old men to financial failure, and now that the cards are all visible and faith in a windfall future is exhausted, the old man must confront the shadow behind him by its rightful name -- desperation. It is here we find the greatest utility in the notion of God. In fact, without this devotion, almost nothing can save him from despair.

In the face of such futility it's proper to ask why any curmudgeon such as I would squander his remaining time writing down all these observations, which are plain upon their face. Where is the point? The predictable despair is the point. This penetrating, consuming pain, Thoreau's desperation, the ghost of fear in the mirror are the point. In a larger context the well-educated curmudgeon can assist less fortunate seniors in the digestion of this discomfort if only he will re-energize the benevolence that left him around the time his erection did.

I will need to be precise with language here, and the needy senior must pay close attention as the key to escaping the pain is delicate in its configuration, not at all well known in literature and nearly non-existent in dialog between the human units. It is only visible to the old man, himself, and most of us are past concern about the welfare of other victims, so the reader is not likely to learn it elsewhere.

Life is a bit like a trip to grandma's house, during which your car breaks down on the highway. You lift the hood and observe the plume of grey smoke rising from the engine. Life, this milieu that is punctuated by desperation and ends in despair, begins with the lifting of the hood and the observation of the smoke plume. As LIFE unfolds we are concerned with a central proposition -- what caused the smoke to rise from the engine? We are certain it is connected to the mystery of the automobile's failure and the solution to the problem can only come with the answer to the question about the smoke.

And so we spend LIFE considering this plume of smoke. Along the way, we analyze each of the separate functions of the automobile engine, using our human intellect and emotion to attach value to them in an attempt to deduce the reason for the smoke. The smoking episode may occur repeatedly in the story of an automobile and there may be many occasions on which it blows away and a repair is made. Eventually, however, the smoke will not vanish and it becomes clear the engine is on fire. The car is a total loss and there is no solution. Life for those curmudgeons who began it by lifting the hood comes to a conclusion with a trip to the junkyard.

The well-kept secret only an old man knows is that LIFE was such a distraction we forgot about the trip to grandma's in the instant we lifted the hood of the car.

To negotiate the inherent despair involved in life, we must go further back in time. We must go deep beneath the skin. We must consider the point of the automobile.

LIFE seems to be all there is because we are analyzing it through its own prism. Do not expect answers about the trip to grandma's to come in a conversation with the car. The car's concern is with the fire beneath its bonnet, not the larger journey. To get to grandmas after the expiration of the automobile one must take one's brain down to the size of a quark, a component particle of a proton or neutron, existing in the eye of an atom.

An organism experiencing LIFE is merely an assembly of countless atoms behaving in a particular way. LIFE, therefore, is merely a snapshot moment taken along the journey an organism's component parts are traveling. Somewhere along the trip the hood is lifted and an episode we call "consciousness" occurs. This is the smoke. In that snapshot each of us assembled atomic units engages other assembled units, and this is no accident or event without meaning, because it is the result of a universal commandment issued to each component of our being.

The greater journey which embraces LIFE began in a time when each component part of the universe, including every atom of your body and every grain of sand on every beach on every planet in every solar system, was locked together in a harmony so perfect there was no space between the particles. Think of it as a small ball of stuff. And then something happened that brought about an interruption in the harmony, causing the ball to fragment and the fragments to fly off into the ether.

The greater journey is about the effort on the part of each particle to reunite. The first clue to the truth of this equation is in the arcing trajectory of the particles as they flew away from the event. Without some compelling predisposition to reunite, the trajectory of the particles would never have arced and none would ever have touched another again. But there was a need possessed by each particle of existence -- a need to come together...to restore the state of perfect harmony, which once sustained the ball of stuff in its original configuration.

Through all the journeys of all the particles across the billions of earth years since the event each particle has exhibited a solitary behavior -- they need to reunite. This predisposition brought about the gases, then the suns, then the planets and, finally, the organisms. In each of its phases, the assembled particles of existence have come closer to reaching their goal. Human consciousness is no accident or unrelated phenomenon. It is a state in which the reassembling particles of existence have begun to study their own journey. This is the meaning of the metamorphosis. It is the purpose out of which we have been fashioned.

Understanding the conclusion of this event is, for the moment, beyond the capacity of us human units who are, throughout our time as living creatures, preoccupied with the smoke pouring forth from the engine we call LIFE. But it is possible to find meaning within the snapshot that will sustain us until the fire beneath the bonnet burns out. Most of us are too intellectually lazy to address the greater event. They will expire praying to the god du jour for a heaven that will never come.

It is the rest of the old men who will suffer. These curmudgeons who have put away their faith in Santa Clause, who have recognized the bold truths civilization has tried to hide from them and found only the specter of desperation standing behind them in the mirror may require this handbook to serve as a personal answer to the problem of spiritual salvation.

You are a link in a chain, old man. You are a truth greater than yourself. You have been preceded by a million grandfathers and, in your infancy, by a smoke in the ether. Your job is to father a child, so that the chain of which you are a part is not broken. Human consciousness, this thing we call LIFE is merely a vehicle designed to consider ways in which the particles of existence can be brought back together in perfect harmony. It is the sub-atomic need to reestablish this harmony which caused the planets to form and organisms to evaluate possibilities. This is the need that provokes copulation, creates cooperative civilizations of men and sends us on journeys across unknown waters to conquer uncharted lands. It is at the heart of all human exploration and the reason we cannot resist the challenge to populate the stars. Every individual human unit is a complex collaboration of smaller particles engaged in a solitary goal. The one commandment common to all creatures and all pieces of existence can be spoken in two words. They are: COME TOGETHER.

No matter what failures you may believe yourself guilty of, redemption is at hand. If you are father to a child, you have done the only thing required to justify your life. The rest of your efforts, the successes along with the defeats, will evaporate like the smoke from an engine fire. If you produced no successor to your earthly presence, it is never too late to help a child along. In this way your time on the planet can be spent with consequence. Anything else is a whisper in the wind.