Composing a Further Life

continuing punctuation of mortality plays a part in the search for meaning and in life’s joys. Glady Thacher has created half a dozen nonprofits, each in response to the need of a particular time. Some will be dissolved, some will evolve to meet newly recognized needs. In the last year I have dissolved a small foundation called the Institute for Intercultural Studies, 12 which was created by my mother after World War II and which I have managed for over thirty years. By 2007 it was clear to me that we had completed the tasks for which I’d kept the institute alive, passing on the work of my parents and their colleagues to a new generation to debate and build on. Just as people die, so do most institutions, and only by asking whether they have fulfilled their mission can we fully understand what the mission was.

CHAPTER VI
Focusing Multiplicity

    I MET J AMES M ORTON at a Lindisfarne conference in 1974. He is a big, bluff, jovial man whose midwestern accent is overlaid by years at Exeter, Harvard, and Cambridge University in England. He had become dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City two years before and was earning headlines by beginning a series of new programs. Jim has summoned me repeatedly over the years to talk to groups or to preach from the cathedral pulpit, and I have drawn him into conferences and onto the board of the Institute for Intercultural Studies, the small foundation started by my mother that I managed for thirty years after her death. In 1997 he retired from the deanship after serving for twenty-five years. By the time we sat down with a tape recorder to talk about his life and how it had unfolded since his retirement, he was seventy-seven and we had known each other for some thirty years.
    Jim was one of the first people I interviewed when I began to think about how people compose their lives after retirement, because it has always struck me that he approached his task at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine much as I think of people composing their lives. As we spoke together, I had the sense of how he had drawn on experiences going back to childhood as resources but had at the same time been improvising all along, finding ways to integrate what he had learned, finding synergies that combined multiple, seemingly conflicting elements. Jim was sixty-seven when he retired from the deanship. How, I wondered, would someone with such a diverse range of experience and curiosity choose to focus his energies in retirement, when he no longer had the cathedral and its resources as a staging ground?
    Jim’s parents lived a gracious and privileged life, seriously interested in the arts, with influential friends scattered across the country. His father headed the drama program at the University of Iowa, which was one of the top theater departments in the country at that time. “This was before Yale had its drama school, mind you,” he told me, “this is in the thirties. The Rockefeller Foundation was very interested in getting cultural stuff into other universities, and they put a lot of money into the University of Iowa, an aggie farm country university, so the Departments of Painting and Theater and Poetry all had very good people and buildings. A new theater was built, and the department had subdepartments of scene design and of lighting as well as directing and acting.… The man who was in charge of scene design required all of his students to make models of theaters, and I remember going down into the room in the basement where all these models were stored, and it just blew my mind.… Mr. Gillette gave me a model theater that he had cleared out, which I had with me at college. So … sort of theatrical-artistic-architectural stuff, all in a rather hands-on way.… I was a very happy kid.”
    Jim’s mother had grown up in Houston and went from there to finishing school in New York, but she never went to university. Her father had given her a Steinway for her tenth birthday. “She was never a concert pianist herself but played and ultimately presided over all kinds of musical events that she organized, many of which took place in our home. Music was her world, which was great.
    “So there I was,” he told me, “as this little boy—an only child at the university.” Only children often have a special entrée to the adult world, paying attention to adult conversations and concerns, as I did also. “My father’s house was always full of his graduate