Composing a Further Life

relationship to him is to lift him up, but my back won’t allow it. When I want to pass on something I have learned in life, I have to find ways of translating it to the experience of a different generation, just as I had to translate myself in adjusting to life in other countries. As I searched for a title for this book, however, I found myself rejecting titles which suggest that we can newly create ourselves in later life, yet this is a common rhetoric. One of the strengths of American culture is our belief that we can reinvent ourselves, 8 but one of the weaknesses is the willingness to discard earlier learning.
    The challenge to creativity is to go forward drawing on what is useful and valuable in past experience without being constrained by it or continually looking backward. Civilization literally depends on what is passed on, but it depends equally on the capacity for every generation to modify and reinterpret what has been passed on. One of the questions to ask in Adulthood II is, What knowledge do I have that needs to be shared in some form before it is lost or overlaid by more recent, and perhaps dangerous, preoccupations? Yet just having knowledge that I regard as valuable does not mean that I will be able to pass it on, whether to a student or a friend or a grandchild. Paradoxically, it often can be passed on only if I am listening and learning at the same time, yet this contradicts our stereotype of the authority that might come with age. Becoming a mentor or a consultant or even a teacher involves not only affirming past learning but also embracing new.
    As I think about the different people I interviewed, what strikes me is not so much what they know but their ways of engaging with the world, which have been developed and honed over time. I think of how Dick Goldsby has developed the patience needed as an educator, or how Hank Lawson has become an increasingly disciplined craftsman; of Ruth Massinga’s practicality and Jim Morton’s exuberant openness becoming ever more inclusive; of Dan Jepson’s willingness to take care of others and Jane Fonda’s growing capacity to combine public commitment with her inner truth. These are themselves forms of wisdom acquired and modeled in action, examples of knowing
how
rather than knowing
what
. They might be translatable into wise sayings, but because each of these individuals is active, at this stage of life they are
wise doings
, and the message they carry is more powerful than words. What I find in each of these lives is a pattern of learning, often through improvisation, often in spite of frustrations, that is ongoing.
    When I interview people, I often have the sense that they are learning from the reawakening of their memories as they retrace the past. Memory is precious, but it is not always clear how to use it or what obligations one has to what has gone before. Looking back over a lifetime takes different forms. A body of professionals has evolved who help individuals through a partially formalized process of “life review,” which has always in some sense been one of the preoccupations of old age, taking many forms and often focusing on one aspect of a life, rather than the whole. There are always surprises, as the remembering and retelling flow into the present and toward the future. Sometimes the answer to “What next?” is to reach back in time for something that has been neglected, perhaps for years. Some people return to a childhood home or seek out old friends long out of touch. Some people return to a skill that has been neglected, dusting off the grand piano or digging out an old set of watercolors.
    Scholars often review their scholarly output and sort and catalog their papers as a way of looking back. A colleague, Robert Cohen, philosopher and historian of science, whom I see at Inge Hoffmann’s seminar on life histories and case histories, is busy in retirement going through his professional papers and preparing them for archiving. Scholarship sometimes involves questioning old conclusions, but scholarship moves forward only when the earlier work is available.
    My own papers are going, in installments, only very roughly sorted, into the Schlesinger Library, which is now part of Harvard University. I went back through all of my writings, from poetry to technical articles, in the preparation of the collection
Willing to Learn
and wrote an introduction to each item included there to explain the way the ideas were interconnected, one