Composing a Further Life

that makes you disloyal. It doesn’t, any more than it’s unloving for a parent to correct a child, and it’s really important to keep making that case. Ambivalence is the human condition. There is not a parent on earth that hasn’t occasionally hated their child. There’s not a child that hasn’t sometimes hated the parent, and that’s just how it is.”
    “You know, it’s one of the values of getting older,” Jane said, “at least for our generation. I’ve lived long enough to have remembered and lived in Europe at a time when this country was revered for democracy and fairness and freedom and those things, and I particularly was exposed to it because my father was a kind of symbol of the things about America that people in other parts of the world held dear. To have experienced that and then watched our image deteriorate for the rest of the world was so painful.”
    Jane in her memoir criticizes herself as a parent, so I wondered how her experience of multiple kinds of parenthood had played into her effort to understand what it is to be a parent. “The thing about my book that seems to have surprised people the most is that I admit that I was not a good parent,” she said. “That’s not something you’re supposed to do. But the fact is that I could not
not
’fess up, because my daughter would have called me on it. So my goal was to communicate to my children, particularly to my firstborn, my daughter, that it had nothing to do with rejecting them. No matter what you try, until you’ve healed yourself, you end up repeating some of the same mistakes. And I repeated some of the things that … When I die she will read it differently. I’m urging people in my book that I’m writing about the third act to talk about these things while they’re still alive.
    “What has happened to me is … I can’t just take off and go to Hanoi and do the things that I did. I can’t—the way my activism manifested itself during my second act was physically really challenging, constant traveling and speaking. I can’t do that now. What has shifted is that I feel more like a teacher.”
    As far as I can tell, Jane has been a teacher all of her adult life, but now her concept of what it means to be a teacher is shifting. Partly this is because she has become increasingly confident of her own values and of the validity of what she has to say. In order for her life story to become a legacy, she has to take ownership of it. But it also takes time to outgrow the narrow meaning of teacher as that person who stands in front of a classroom and to think about the way we teach through our actions and especially by modeling the process of learning as we teach. The future is built from what we are able to pass on, whether in words spoken or words on paper, actions taken or gestures made, but the modalities of teaching change in the course of the life cycle. In different ways, Cross, Ted, and Jane are putting what they have learned into the hands of a new generation they respect but cannot and should not control.
    * See chapter I, reference 3, on this page .

CHAPTER XI
Knowledge Old and New

    W ITH EACH PERSON that I have interviewed at length, I have begun in childhood, going even further back by learning about the background of parents. This book has been a study not of old age or even of late adulthood but rather of the ways in which the extended period of health and activity achieved by modern science fits into a lifetime, and of the potential contributions that period can make to human society. I have been exploring the idea that our new longevity is not equivalent to an extension of old age, years added on at the end, but rather a period inserted in the life course after the era associated with full adult participation and generativity but before the decline of old age, a period characterized by the accumulated experience of adulthood but endowed with health and energy, so that wisdom is combined with activity and often with activism for the common good. Continuing health makes it possible to make choices, and these choices reflect the ongoing ways in which individuals compose and re-compose their lives, intuitively seeking balance, fulfillment, grace.
    Many writers have tried to capture what is distinctive about our species.
Homo sapiens
is also
Homo ludens
and
Homo faber
. Alfred Korzybski described our distinctive quality as “time binding,” a characteristic that includes the ability to recall the past and to