Correspondence: Under the influence

Edited by Moristotle

I drank beer last weekend with a guy in a red baseball cap. At some point, I asked him what he liked about Trump, and what the slogan on his cap meant to him. After as many beers as he had drunk, he was quite forthcoming:

Letting go...sooner or later

Fair Oaks, California (2011-10-10)

In "Is today Saturday?" (May 6), I wrote about browsing folders of letters and postcards before consigning them to the recycling bin. One of the school friends whose letters I mentioned wrote me a short reflection on this, which he gave me permission to share.
    Jon Price was an undergraduate at Yale when I was. I enjoyed his derisive wit, which never seemed mean, but simply just. We were both interested in philosophy; we discussed Zen frequently and believed we had discovered a Zen way to approach the game of pool, which we played frequently, if not particular well. (Not sure that our "Zen way" worked.) But a game of Eight Ball became for me a way to get away from academic concerns for a while. 
     Later we played Scrabble also. Jon usually trounced me in this—he'd mastered the use of the high-score letters, and he had a larger vocabulary as well. But surely I won a few games over the years (I liked to play all seven of my letters).
    Jon seemed a master of living right here and now and screw everything else. He could handle anything that came along; he knew where he fit in and how to get from here to there. I didn't know any of that.
     I don't know what he saw in me, unless maybe he liked the fact that I tolerated his friendly abuse and admired his ease. Plus, "Morris" was also his father's name.

Jon was the friend I mentioned here in "Still" (October 16, 2006). My wife and I visited him the summer after we got married (1966). It was his kid sister I wrote about who told us forty years later what a "powerful" impression we'd made on her. "The way you looked at each other," Susie said.
    And Jon's mother (Madeline) had made an impression on me. I'd told them of our eloping and remarked that we "really couldn't afford to get married," and Madeline hadn't hesitated to ask, "Then, why did you?" Maybe that was part of what impressed Susie. What did money have to do with love?

Jon wrote:

Hi Morris,
    I read your blog post on your second retirement. Congratulations.
    I retired twice or three times in a way, although all part of the same process. First as a full-time faculty member at the California State University, seven years ago. Second as any kind of faculty member at the CSU, except emeritus, two years ago. And once again after returning from my Fulbright in Portugal. This one feels like real retirement, and I'm not yet as proactive as you. When I first left CSUS [Sacramento] and abandoned my office, I had to clear out forty years of files. I threw away many of them, but kept a whole file drawer's worth.
    Your letters are still sitting in my files. Maybe someday I'll reread them, like Krapp and his tapes [a reference to Samuel Beckett's one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape (1958)].
    It was nice, though, that I got a mention in your blog.
    It was nice you enjoy each day. Sometimes I feel like that, others not.
    It was good you hugged your wife. Say hello to her for me. She has been a very good person and a good wife to you. That reminds me of how long I've known you—known you both—though we haven't seen much of each other lately. But I do remember we celebrated my 21st birthday together and, for me at least, that is a very positive memory; it was nice to have a very good friend visiting, along with his new wife. I also drank too much. I hardly every drink much any more.
    So stay it touch, and let me know how your retirement is going.
    Fondly,
                            Jon

I take "proactive" the only way I think actually applies here: I was getting rid of stuff before I died and someone else had to do something with it.

Harold Pinter as Krapp

    Krapp was the same age in the play as I am now. It's his sixty-ninth birthday, and the tape he (and the audience) listen to is the one he made when he turned thirty-nine.
    When I was thirty-nine my wife and I were still in California, and we had visited Jon fairly often in Fair Oaks, from the time we put our daughter in a padded child's seat in the rear of our 1967 VW; our son had recently graduated to a standard seat belt.
     Since we moved to North Carolina (the year I turned forty), I've seen Jon only a handful of times. I visited him and his wife in 1987, I'm sure. I was a surprise guest at his fiftieth birthday party (arranged by Susie)—that would have been 1995. I remember being very tired at the party and taking a nap on a couch in an adjacent room, within hearing of the happy din. And sometime after that he visited us with his son in Chapel Hill. In 2002 or 2003, I think, he visited me at another friend's I was visiting in San Francisco. And, as the top picture indicates, I visited him (with my daughter and her husband) last October. I'm not sure there have been other occasions, but I think there was one (or two).
    In all those years I think the birthday card (or email greeting) I sent failed only once to arrive in time. I suspect that I've enjoyed Jon's appreciation of my remembering more than he's enjoyed my remembering.
    I may have discovered a minor reason why Jon thought of Krapp and his tapes.

A more significant reason might be that Krapp's tapes mark the passage of Krapp's life. His "last" tape might not just be his most recent but literally his last.
    Our lives, Jon's and mine, have passed, since Yale, in letters (and emails).
    We'll keep in touch until the last.

...while you're busy making other plans

Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans¹.

According to the character Philip, a "philosophical therapist" in Irvin D. Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, quite a few others have "quoted" Schopenhauer:

And not only Thomas Mann but many other great minds acknowledged their debt to Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy called Schopenhauer the "genius par excellence among men." To Richard Wagner he was a "gift from Heaven." Nietzsche said his life was never the same after purchasing a tattered volume of Schopenhauer in a used-book store in Leipzig and, as he put it, "letting the dynamic, dismal genius work on my mind." Schopenhauer forever changed the intellectual map of the Western World, and without him we would have had a very different and weaker Freud, Nietzsche, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Ibsen, Conrad. [p. 50]

The Schopenhauer quotation [on p. 91 of The Schopenhauer Cure] that reminded me of John Lennon's famous statement was:

When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim [for the intervening time, temporarily]. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.

    Lennon's is easier to take and more memorable, isn't it? Without that final sentence.

But we need that sentence, to be reminded not to let our lives just slip by unappreciated while we're busy making other plans.
_______________

1. He might have said this in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine about 1970. At any rate, a citation in a Google hit list included both the part of the quotation I searched on and a reference to Rolling Stone.