Composing a Further Life

are always and forever all the ages we have been and will become, grown into a pattern as inclusive as the chambered nautilus that wanders the ocean, carrying with it all the stages of its life. 16

CHAPTER V
Acts and Chapters

    T IME, AS WE EXPERIENCE IT , is far from “like an ever rolling stream” as Isaac Watts described it 1 —or, if like a stream, it is far more varied than the simile suggests, sometimes wide and placid and slow-moving, sometimes racing through narrow gorges, sometimes scattered with boulders. There are landmarks and turning points along the way. The pace changes. Time has a structure, a variable cadence. Sometimes, indeed, the flow seems to stop. Contemporary thinkers discussing the process of evolution now describe it as “punctuated equilibrium,” 2 or, less formally, “punk eek.”
    The Eriksonian stages are impossible to specify for exact ages and may seem arbitrary, yet they reflect a reality in the way people experience their lives and in human cognition and perception, both of which depend on differences. 3 Thus, for instance, in speaking of colors, although there is no clear line between them, we name areas of the spectrum as if they were clearly distinct rather than varying continuously; in the same way we act as if night turned to day without twilight. We remember our lives in terms of periods, with beginnings and endings, and we think in terms of watersheds and transitions, turning points and critical moments. The ability to record and calculate time, breaking it into shorter periods, underlies the capacity to plan, to do first this and then that, to look both forward and backward.
    Discontinuities—sudden growth spurts, sudden advances in learning and capability when everything seems to go into fast-forward—are especially clear in childhood. The same is true of aging, when, quite aside from the effects of any specific pathology, vitality may suddenly seem to ebb more swiftly, so one can speak as the French do of
un coup de vieux
, a “hit of old age.”
    The discontinuities in lives reflect discontinuities in the environment. For most human beings, the year is divided up into seasons characterized by different activities, like sowing and harvest, which are then marked by festivals, so that work does not continue at a constant pace. The concept of a Sabbath—not only the Sabbath that occurs weekly but the Sabbath that occurs every seven years (which exists today in the form of the sabbatical year that many academics are granted to refresh their thinking) and the Jubilee specified in the Torah, which occurs, with a remission of debts, every seven times seven years—is one of the great gifts of the Judaic tradition to the world, implying not only recurring events but recurring times of rest and reflection.
    Punctuation may be essential to the examined life. For several years, I have been concerned that an effect of increased longevity has been to make adulthood, as we currently understand it, too long. As we look ahead to possibly even longer lives, we will probably need to invent some new forms of punctuation, new landmarks—if only to avoid the destructive trend to switch spouses as a way of measuring time! But even without a culturally shaped set of landmarks, I notice that, when people tell the stories of their lives, they tell them in terms of stages, eras, chapters, or acts, and mark these out with changes of career or location as well as with new relationships.
    Because I have worked with life histories on and off since I first volunteered to be a teaching assistant in Erik Erikson’s course on the human life cycle, I have turned to his model repeatedly as I have passed through different stages in my own life, both in search of understanding and in the effort to pin down and make available to my peers insights derived from research and from experience. I chose, for example, to study precursors of language in a set of filmed mother-infant interactions when I was pregnant and in my first years of motherhood. I wrote in middle age about the discontinuities in women’s lives as I contemplated the discontinuities of my own life, some caused by following my husband’s career, some by the interruptions of childbearing, and some by external events, like the Iranian revolution or the sudden death of a college president. I wrote a memoir of my parents when I was in my early forties, fairly soon after their deaths, for the death of one’s parents, when one becomes part