Composing a Further Life

as music if they are played backwards. For Jane, a return to Broadway was a return to an earlier period of her life, though not a period she was particularly nostalgic for. But she played the role from her heart, and I found it full of echoes. We compose our lives in time, improvising and responding to context, yet weaving threads of continuity and connecting the whole as we move back and forth in memory.

CHAPTER IX
What We Pass On

    E ACH NEW GENERATION of adults inherits a way of being from the previous generation and passes one on to the next, with changes large and small occurring at every step. The handing on of accrued learning and experience takes place in many different forms, not only in relation to biological children but in relation to students and others whom we teach and guide, sometimes specifically preparing them to replace us. In the days when skills were transmitted primarily through apprenticeship, part of the obligation of the master craftsman was handing on his skills. In the modern world, however, there is an increasing gap between the practitioner of a craft, whether it be fashioning machine parts or crafting legislation, and the training of someone who can follow in his or her footsteps, for alongside every type of master craftsman there has emerged a group specializing in transmitting those skills, teachers for whom transmission is more important than but does not necessarily exclude practice.
    One of the key issues in conversations with older adults concerns legacy—not only the material or monetary legacies they will be leaving, but the values and commitments and skills they have striven to model and pass on that constitute a nonmaterial legacy, to kinfolk as well as to the larger society, often rooted in contributions made through lifelong participation.
    Some of the people I interviewed for this book, including myself, inhabit the academic world, in which everyone is expected, to varying degrees, to function in three ways: to do original scholarship; to transmit knowledge both new and inherited to the next generation; and to participate in the governance and maintenance of the scholarly community (this last is often referred to as community service). But individuals vary greatly in which of these activities they regard as primary, some pouring their energies into committee work that might lead to a departmental chairmanship or even a college presidency, some resenting every obligation that takes them away from original research, and some focused almost entirely on their students and on improving their own performance as teachers. I once commented naïvely to a colleague that surely we were there to serve the students, that was the whole point of the enterprise, wasn’t it? “Not so,” he said, “they are here for us”—which I took to mean that being employed as teachers created the opportunity to be scholars. His was a minority view in a competitive liberal arts college that required publication and original research but on the whole regarded these activities as necessary to support the quality of teaching, not as ends in themselves.
    On the other hand, there are professions in which practitioners do not think of themselves as teachers—or may begin to think about teaching only when they become concerned with preparing their successors or finding a way of “giving back” in retirement, for instance, as mentors of troubled adolescents. Hank Lawson, for example, was very clear that teaching and guiding the young was part of his role as a parent, but teaching was probably not defined as a part of his job at the boatyard, although I suspect that his conversations and explanations were helpful to younger workers as well as to the owners of the boats he worked on. His retirement is notable not only for the transfer of skills and standards of workmanship to a different scale and different materials but also for his capturing and extending his potential as a teacher.
    As I listened to men and women telling the stories of their lives, I became aware of the great variation in the importance given to teachers and other sources of guidance and learning in their narratives, going back to their student days. In some cases this was probably accidental, depending on the flow of a given interview and the mood of the day, but Dick Goldsby, who lost his father when he was five, consistently emphasized his debts to his teachers and mentors over several days of conversation, whereas Dan Jepson