Notes Nearing Ninety: Learning to Write Less | Hacker News Reader

Notes Nearing Ninety: Learning to Write Less

theparisreview.org

248 pointsquickfox41 comments

Open articleView on HN

I read this in the Subway (NYC) the other day:

" I remember my mother toward the end,

folding the tablecloth after dinner

so carefully,

as if it were the flag

of a country that no longer existed,

but once had ruled the world. "

- Jim Moore

Edit - Typo.

Such a moving, poignant poem. Thanks for sharing.

This was short, honest, and really refreshing. I'll have to read more of him.

I wrote a comment then deleted it because I hate me too comments, but I putting this back. It is all the things you said and I found it very touching. Last time I talked to my Dad a couple of weeks ago, he told me he's tired. I'm going to call him tonight to see how he's doing.

I can't imagine having the kind of talent to put words together as Mr. Hall has. Thanks, quickfox, for posting this.

[This](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/double-solitu...) piece for The New Yorker is one of my favorites from him.

Wow. I’m in tears. Haven’t read anything so beautiful in a long time

I highly recommend "Essays After Eighty"

This was short, honest, and really refreshing.

That happens with older writers. Generally, the farther back you read, there's less and less of it.

> These black leaves are the words I write.

That sentence and the whole paragraph it punctuated are so profoundly beautiful. I want to write more, but brevity in this case, says more than I ever could...

Beautiful and profound. Not all decades in life are created equal. Don't waste a moment!

If the mind and body remain strong, I wonder if the atrophy of ambition is just due to a waning sense of purpose? At 96 my grandfather was still driving his van solo every summer from Michigan to the central highlands of Mexico to help my father on his farm. He stopped at 97 after getting a viral infection that sent him back to Michigan to recover. My father and his family went up to take care of him, but he slowly decline and then died just one week shy of 100.

I'm now 62 and I can already feel my sense of purpose waning. I realize now that I'm not going to change the world. My wife died last year and now I can see that whatever I achieve now it will all be forgotten in a few short decades. Sometimes I think "why bother doing anything?". Mostly I keep busy with things that I had no time to do until I retired at the beginning of this year. But, it has to be said that some of these things are just finishing projects that have long been on hold and that I want to finish just for the satisfaction of having completed them.

Sorry, rambling. Intimations of mortality have that effect on me sometimes.

Sorry for your loss, and hope you have friends / family for support.

But, in terms of "why bother doing anything" - well, that is a big bag of worms, which really none of us should entertain as a thought. In reality, in 100 years just about every single one of all of our best projects / art / websites will be long gone.

And that is ok - we cant have art galleries with 10^12 paintings to view, but I think the point of life is for us as individuals to do what we love, teach and help others and just enjoy it.

So finish the projects you want to do, for the satisfaction of doing it. And if you want, start a twitter account / blog and talk about it there. Chances are someone will get something from it.

That's what the internet is all about - lots of hidden gems and views into what other people do with their lives.

Ha, I finished reading this and thought, "reminds me of this poem I heard on This America Life". Turns out the poem in TAL is _also_ from Donald Hall [1]. I'll have to read Essays after 80 now.

1: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/651/if-you-build-it-will-th...

What does "the inevitable loss of ambitions fulfillment" mean?

>inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment

You are missing a key apostrophe there, "'", which grammatically means that ambition belongs to fulfillment.

The author is saying that as he ages, the fulfillment he once felt by being ambitious (e.g. writing books, starting a company, learning new things) goes away.

Does that make sense?

I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't a "factual" piece as much as it is his reflection on aging. It might be true to him but not true to others.

That, over time, you lose the fulfillment your felt when first achieving your ambitions.

Or, put otherwise, the further you are in time from an achievement, the less fulfilling it is.

Ambitious people set high goals for themselves. High goals usually take time and energy to achieve. When you're old, you are on short supply of both, and so a person ambitious in their youth can no longer afford to be as such at say 85. You've only got so much time left, it's not worth it to be a prospector.

The author likens this state of affairs to that of an aging athlete who can no longer play the sport they loved playing in their youth. For an ambitious person, settling for a slower pace can be a difficult transition.

I can hear "loss of ambition's fulfillment," in two ways, which gives it power in tight, poetic prose:

1. It is no longer fulfilling to be ambitious (i.e., a quiet home-centric, narrowing life can be fulfillment enough)

2. Ambitions are no longer fulfilled (i.e., there's not enough energy or time in the day to meet ambitious goals)

Unlike the others, I took it to mean the loss, the gap in one’s life, after their ambitions are fulfilled. If one has led an ambitious, successful life, their early life is filled with problems and purpose. Later years have lost that purpose, even, and perhaps especially, if you’ve been successful.

> Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even _old_ endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment.

I needed the whole sentence to parse that phrase. Here is what I understood: Ambitious persons who live to be old will struggle with the realization that although they remain ambitious (a certain type of stretching into the future this characteristic of _youth_), they lose the ability (energy, focus, commitment) to fulfil those ambitions. Matching those two conditions found inside one's self as the reality of one's self is a terrible struggle and out of that follows an inevitable sense of loss.

"When I was eighty, still doing frequent poetry readings, audiences stood and clapped when I concluded, and kept on clapping until I shushed them. Of course I stayed to sign book after book and returned to my hotel understanding that they applauded so much because they would never see me again."

Brings to mind Mary Oliver[0]

"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

[0] http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html

Your quote, for someone that hasn't read that poem, lacks context, and can be interpreted in the opposite way it was intended.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

"An athlete goes professional at twenty. At thirty, he is slower but more canny. At forty, he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, sixty, seventy. Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment."

I'm not sure I struggle with the loss of ambition's fulfillment. Maybe that will come after where I'm at now. But the ambitions of my teens, 20s, and 30s seem pretty dumb, in retrospect.

I definitely struggle with the fact that it takes time to do things, and time is shorter than it used to be, and so I should probably prioritize and focus. But I know that kind of psychological railroading is not all-around good for me, personally. I used to be so focused that it sucked the fun out. So I continue starting all kinds of branches that will still look new when I'm dead. I have zero problems with the energy I get from these little departures and enjoy watching the new branches form.

Why were your earlier ambitions dumb?

Not the OP, but I definitely have found that many of the things I spent money on, therefore my earlier ambitions, are not things that have any value to me today. Can't say that they were "dumb" per se, but I definitely haven't found that they lasted in their appeal. It has been amusing to see my kids destroy some things that used to have value to me.

Some examples: Collections of any kind. Dominance in any game. Completeness of any endeavor.

I'm finding I enjoy getting as good as I can at some things. But I ultimately don't care how good I am. Easy example is biking. I'm having a ton of fun getting as fast as I can going up a hill going home. Even though Strava is amusingly letting me know that there were over 500 folks that are much faster than I am on the same hill. (To its credit, they put much more emphases on Personal Records than they do on how you are doing against others.)

Same for some series. I ultimately don't care that I haven't read every last book of some series. More, if I really want to know how the latest Marvel movie has turned out, wikipedia is much faster and just as fulfilling for me.

> that many of the things I spent money on

As I've aged, my perspective has become 'many of the things I spent time on'. I can make more money.

As far as how to spend that time, I try to spend a lot on a few exceptionally valuable things. Donald Knuth expresses it well when talking about email: Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.[0] (I'm not Knuth so I can't say it's my role, but it's my goal.)

For my personal life, I've decided that nothing is more valuable than loving relationships (platonic or romantic), so that is where I try to spend my time.

[0] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

Amusingly, I've found trying to digest many of Knuth's writing has been very enjoyable for me as I've gotten older at computer science. I get an odd sense that the industry doesn't respect his particular style and contribution as much today as it used to. Which is a shame. He is much more empirical than he is often presented. More, he is willing to discuss his mistakes and false starts. Something I don't recall having seen in many other works. (Mayhap I'm just having confirmation bias.)

I almost posted something about having nothing being worth more than my relationships. I certainly feel that, to a large extent. However, I also have trouble separating my work from my life. To the extent that I'm not even sure I want to.

You are what you do. You spend so much time in life working, and your work is your main function in your integration with the rest of society (and all the relationships that entails).

And I think there's a certain humility to be found in that, in identifying yourself with your work, and a job well done, as opposed to your work being about you, a reflection of your ego. (Those two ideas might sound like they're the same thing, but I don't think they are.)

Identity is often contextual. When you're with friends, you're one person, when you're at work, you're another, and yet a third with relatives. You can hear it when people's accents change when talking on the phone, their bearing changes according to their interlocutors. If who you are is the sum of the contexts your exist in, full retirement is a kind of death.

I've gone a bit further than that. You simply are. What you do is what you are choosing to do. In some ways, it is easy to see how you can be "defined" by what you do. But that is easily a distraction in many cases. Consider, few of us consider ourselves defined by how much we sleep.

In large, we are defined by what we define ourselves by. Sure, there are extreme cases where the world defines someone or something. But by and large, those are the exceptions.

Sleeping people are little more than dead, but we don't sleep all the time.

I don't think we get to define ourselves. I think we are mostly the sum of our responses to stimuli.

I don't think we disagree that much. I'm more saying that there is no external definition of what we are. Most people are unknown to history. You can get bummed out about that, and it is intimidating.

However, it also means you are not necessarily held to any external definition.

I think this view has serious limits. In large, being in complete control of yourself is a luxury most people don't have. To that end, the views that folks can somewhat legitimately hold of themselves are greatly limited by their circumstances.

To play with both of our views together, the interpretations that you can honestly hold are going to be the responses of the stimuli you are subjected to.

Which is my way of saying to try not to get hung up if you are disappointed with any of the current state. It is, in many ways, fleeting. Keep what you can of what you like. Similarly, though, the fleeting nature of things is also irrelevant. If you liked something, continue to have liked that thing. No reason to change, unless you want to.

This sounds slightly contradictory to my earlier point. However, the things I collected now hold no value. That I collected them, though, I can fondly remember. If that makes sense.

> You are what you do.

I used to argue that, but it omits our entire internal life. Our internal lives are so much greater in scope and, I think, by far the majority of our experiences.

Taking the competition and obsession and optimization out of things made some things really enjoyable to me that I used to despise. For example running, when I was younger I would try to optimize and plan and improve constantly until I sucked all the joy out of it. Now I instead just run once around the lake at whatever pace I can keep and it's very cathartic. (I'm not even old)

It is funny, because I definitely fear that I'm trying to "improve" more than I am just trying to "enjoy the ride." That said, as things currently are, this has managed to offset/replace any real need of exercise outside of my commute, and is giving a fun area to try and get social, to boot.

I am ridiculously happy that I didn't get involved at this when I was younger. The "arms race" that is cycling gear is borderline absurd. I finally splurged and bought ultegra wheels, which cost more than my first few full bikes. Probably combined. I am enjoying them, but am very thankful that I'm not optimizing for every last ounce of weight I can.

Dumb, yes, dumb. The ambitions were unrefined, unintelligent, and I had no idea how to make an ambition more refined and add more intelligence to it. But the truth is, that is a thing you can and must do.

Were I to start again I would use defined models to refine those ambitions. I would analyze them and refine them again and again, the more important they are. Which is to say, my _current_ ambitions are much more refined, flexible, well-modeled, than they have ever been.

[I work with people and coach them on this stuff, and so here I have to say: I don't recommend this course to everyone; this is me relating my own experience. To some, a process like ongoing analysis has a similar effect to removing one's computer's cooling system, and so they shouldn't worry so much about analyzing things.]

If I set out to do something today, I am much, much more likely to succeed. My life has been transformed (see profile). I temper this by saying that this dumb-talk is as much a warning to my future self as it is a lamentation. But recent measurements of my personal health and happiness do seem to indicate that my recent ambitions are much less dumb. If future-me has any complaints he can talk to the spreadsheet, he can talk to the journal, he can talk to the people to whom I listened more, because I was more mature.

I do think I was an intelligent person overall when I was those ages, and hindsight is 20/20, but yeah, still those were dumb ambitions and my happiness suffered measurably.

I don't see "overcoming dumbness" as a neverending pursuit, either. Evidence seems to show that you can minimize your dumbness until its effect is like rolling a 1 on a d100, then a d1000, and so on. In university I believe I had maybe a d10.

Take a simple technology like saying "I'm sorry. I messed up. Can I get a do-over?" That move right there can potentially level you up to a d100.

I am semi-tongue in cheek here, so I hope I don't burn too many of a reader's analysis cycles. Better to learn this stuff yourself through trial and error.

I remember being shocked when a professor told us undergrads in a very respectful way that we were "dumb undergrads." But you know what? He was right in a big way.

Not OP, but- I grew up deeply steeped in a culture that prized being the best. At something, anything, as long as you were the best. Second was worthless.

In retrospect, it's just, why? Ok, so you become the best. Now what?

are you concerned that you’ll never find ambitions for which justifications endure?

(sub specie aeternitatis)

I wouldn't say I'm _concerned_ about that. Even the right to kick that question around, or just forget about it, is pretty fun & precious to me. :-)

> (sub specie aeternitatis)

That's quite, err...thank you for that. The Wikipedia article on this one is pretty lofty, whew. But from what I can understand, the _point_ of relating that phrase is to conjure up something like "with a better perspective you'll always see your past more clearly", with which I do agree. However I'm not sure it merits Latin at this point except as a sort of rhetorical respect-production technology...which admittedly you might as well use when you can. (Email subject: You may have unclaimed respect points from a recent HN discussion) Let me know if I'm wrong about the phrase and its meaning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com