Measure of My Days Read online

  Books by FLORIDA SCOTT-MAXWELL

  Women and Sometimes Men 1957

  The Measure of My Days 1968

  These are Borzoi Books, published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Reprinted Three Times

  Fifth Printing, May 1973

  © Copyright 1968 by Florida Scott-Maxwell

  All rights reserved under International

  and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-13643

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82834-7

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  A Note About the Author

  We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. If it is a long defeat it is also a victory, meaningful for the initiates of time, if not for those who have come less far.

  Being old I am out of step, troubled by my lack of concord, unable to like or understand much that I see. Feeling at variance with the times must be the essence of age, and it is confusing, wounding. I feel exposed, bereft of a right matrix, with the present crime, violence, nihilism heavy on my heart. I weigh and appraise, recoiling, suffering, but very alert. Now that I have withdrawn from the active world I am more alert to it than ever before. Old people have so little personal life that the impact of the impersonal is sharp. Some of us feel like sounding boards, observing, reading; the outside event startles us and we ask in alarm, “Is this good or bad? To where will it lead? What effect will it have on people, just people? How different will they become?” I fear for the future.

  In the past when sorrows, or problems, or ideas were too much for me, I learned to deal with them in a way of my own. At night when I got to bed I lay on my back and gave to their solution what I knew would be many sleepless hours. I would let the problem enter me like a lance piercing my solar plexus. I must be open, utterly open, and as I could stand it the lance went deeper and deeper. As I accepted each implication, opened to my hurt, my protest, resentment and bewilderment the lance went further in. Then the same for others involved—that they did, said, felt, thus and so, then why, face why and endure the lance. As my understanding deepened I could finally accept the truths that lay behind the first truths that had seemed unendurable. At last, the pain of the lance was not there and I was free. No, free is not the right word. My barriers had been lowered and I knew what I had not known before.

  Now that I am old something has begun that is slightly the same, enough the same to make me start this note book. When I was sewing, or playing a soothing-boring game of patience, I found queries going round and round in my head and I began to jot them down in this note book which I used to use for sketching. The queries were insistent, and I began a game of asking questions and giving answers. Answers out of what I had read and forgotten, and now thought my own, or out of my recoils and hopes. If the modern world is this, then will it become so and so? My answers must be my own, years of reading now lost in the abyss I call my mind. What matters is what I have now, what in fact I live and feel.

  It makes my note book my dear companion, or my undoing. I put down my sweeping opinions, prejudices, limitations, and just here the book fails me for it makes no comment. It is even my wailing wall, and when I play that grim, comforting game of noting how wrong everyone else is, my book is silent, and I listen to the stillness, and I learn.

  I am getting fine and supple from the mistakes I’ve made, but I wish a note book could laugh. Old and alone one lives at such a high moral level. One is surrounded by eternal verities, noble austerities to scale on every side, and frightening depths of insight. It is inhuman. I long to laugh. I want to be enjoyed, but an hour’s talk and I am exhausted.

  What a time of fact finding this is. Research into everything, committees of experts formed to solve each problem that arises; computers given more information than would seem possible for a human brain to use, and statistics taken as final truth. The stir and determination make it appear that the complexities of life have just been noticed, but soon every detail will be clearly seen and solved.

  Yet something very different seems the taste of the age, a liking for the blurred, the unlabelled, amounting to a preference for sameness, inclusion, oneness. To include and condone is modern, while to differentiate is old fashioned. This seems to hold socially, morally. Is it a claim that the less good is not exactly the same as the good, yet it has its rights, and must be protected as though it contained a new value? Perhaps it does. New values are coming to birth and suspension of judgment may be wise. Or are we all so confused that we remain amorphous, hoping a new pattern will form itself without our help?

  There seems a widespread need of living and learning the dark side of our nature. Perhaps we are almost on the point of saying that evil is normal, in each of us, an integral part of our being. This age may be witnessing the assimilation of evil, thereby finding a new wisdom. We have been insisting for centuries that evil should not be, that it can be eliminated, is only the absence of good, resides in others; if others are evil we are not, or so little that it hardly matters. Now we are fascinated by evil. Does it begin to be clear that it is half of life, and at its extreme is truly evil? Are we learning that without the tension between good and evil there would be no dynamism in life? Perhaps our two cruel wars were a climax of evil making us see a truth we have always fled; if this profound realisation is taking place, then what seems our decadence may be the stirring of a new reality, even a new morality, God willing and man able.

  What a perilous morality. Will humanity ever be equal to it? Where will the difference lie between the man who blindly lives his chaos, and the man who consciously endures the conflict between the opposing sides of his nature? The latter will gain clarity, a deepened awareness, and he will achieve responsibility for many aspects of his being, but much of the time the two men will look the same.

  I notice that parents are very cautious about inculcating any special virtues in their young. They almost look to the young to create whatever virtue they need most. This behaviour can seem a failure, a wrong done to the young, but parents may be mute because they are unsure, and so the young are forced to choose, to learn the reality of good and evil at first hand. All this may have to be. Adults are bankrupt of certitudes. The young may have to learn in their own right the negative of every positive. That evil is the inevitable half of good may be the unacceptable truth that we are all taking in, and it could be the forerunner of a new balance. If such a possibility lies ahead, then we must be moving toward a goal of greater consciousness, where we will admit our dual natures, and assume responsibility for all that lies within us.

  Has this hope not lain behind all moral effort, all the varying attempts that brought such bad with such good? Have we come anywhere near the avowal, “Evil that belongs to me is my sacred responsibility?” Or are we only saying—“Evil hardly matters, we like it.” What confusion we are in, and what soil for new virtues. May the young be strong. We have to hope, for our present formlessness could lead to self-hatred. It might even lead to a hatred of others, which could create a wish for destruction, until atomic war could express humanity’s verdict on itself. This is too dreadful to look at. Do old people see life in terms of failure because we are failing? Perhaps. We are apocalyptic. We no longer function, so we warn and condemn. The only useful thing we might do is to feel compassion for those who make the mistakes we are t
oo old to make.

  I used to draw, absorbed in the shapes of roots of trees, and seed pods, and flowers, but it strained my eyes and I gave it up. Then ten years ago I began to make rugs. A few were beautiful, though never straight. This gave them vitality. As I created patterns, banged and pulled, the wool and I struggling—the wool winning sometimes; at great moments I in full command—my heart knew peace, and my mind was as empty as a cloudless sky on a summer’s day. But my hands were too arthritic, it had to end, and now only music prevents my facing my thoughts.

  Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago I enjoyed my tranquillity, now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general, that I want to put things right as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervour.

  Old people are not protected from life by engagements, or pleasures, or duties; we are open to our own sentience; we cannot get away from it, and it is too much. We should ward off the problematic, and above all the insoluble. These are far, far too much, but it is just these that attract us. Our one safety is to draw in, and enjoy the simple and immediate. We should rest within our own confines. It may be dull, restricted, but it can be satisfying within our own walls. I feel most real when alone, even most alive when alone. Better to say that the liveliness of companionship and the liveliness of solitude differ, and the latter is never as exhausting as the former. When I am with other people I try to find them, or try to find a point in myself from which to make a bridge to them, or I walk on the egg-shells of affection trying not to hurt or misjudge. All this is very tiring, but love at any age takes everything you’ve got.

  What fun it is to generalize in the privacy of a note book. It is as I imagine waltzing on ice might be. A great delicious sweep in one direction, taking you your full strength, and then with no trouble at all, an equally delicious sweep in the opposite direction. My note book does not help me think, but it eases my crabbed heart.

  I love my family for many reasons; for what I see them to be, for the loveliness they have been, for the good I know in them. I love their essence, their “could be”, and all this in spite of knowing their faults well. I love the individual life in them that I saw when in bud. I have spent much of my life watching it unfold, enchanted and anxious. At times it has seemed like frail craft shaking out sails. I have feared for it when it was becalmed, when it was in danger, and when I knew nothing, nothing. I have felt respect, even reverence, for I have seen it meet tragedy and gain nobility. I have watched it win its prizes and I have learned the hard truth a mother learns slowly, that the quick of intimacy she has known becomes hope for loved strangers.

  A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe. It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

  No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their new-born child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.

  Age is truly a time of heroic helplessness. One is confronted by one’s own incorrigibility. I am always saying to myself, “Look at you, and after a lifetime of trying.” I still have the vices that I have known and struggled with—well it seems like since birth. Many of them are modified, but not much. I can neither order nor command the hubbub of my mind. Or is it my nervous sensibility? This is not the effect of age; age only defines one’s boundaries. Life has changed me greatly, it has improved me greatly, but it has also left me practically the same. I cannot spell, I am over critical, egocentric and vulnerable. I cannot be simple. In my effort to be clear I become complicated. I know my faults so well that I pay them small heed. They are stronger than I am. They are me.

  But who is it that knows me so well and has to endure me? There is the I that has to bear all the other I’s and can assess them correctly; and there is the I who feels such sick distaste and drunken elation at being itself, all its selves, who is even thankful for the opportunity of having been itself, uncomfortable as it has been. Is the judging I a separate entity, and who can this wise I be? It feels higher, greater than I. I fail it, it scorns and rebukes me. Then who is it? I feel like a hierarchy, and perhaps I am one. I am my chief interest because to me I am life. My curiosity, delight, pain tell me about life itself. This makes me a monster of egotism, but that is what I am and have to be, for how else do I know, really know anything? I observe others, but I experience myself. As I long to understand, even a little, who could be as helpful to me as myself, muddled creature that I am, since it is my mortification, my respect that tells me what is real.

  If I am myself with ardour, and no other way seems possible, I am also helpless in my own grasp. I come up against my own limitations as against granite. I observe and reflect yet when I am asked for an opinion I feel part of a network, am not a solid point, am very nearly absent. It amounts to this: that near the end of my life when I am myself as never before, I am awareness at the mercy of multiplicity. Ideas drift in like bright clouds, arresting, momentary, but they come as visitors. A shaft of insight can enter the back of my mind and when I turn to greet it, it is gone. I did not have it, it had me. My mood is light and dancing, or it is leaden. It is not I who choose my moods; I accept them, but from whom?

  As I do not live in an age when rustling black silk skirts billow about me, and I do not carry an ebony stick to strike the floor in sharp rebuke, as this is denied me, I rap out a sentence in my note book and feel better. If a grandmother wants to put her foot down, the only safe place to do it these days is in a note book.

  I suppose that humanity is still very tribal. It feels tribal. For centuries to come, perhaps forever we will be working out the separation of the individual from the collective bond—that protective oneness that you see everywhere, and know is deeply essential to each of us. Perhaps primitives are less closely held together than I assume, but their unchanging ways over long periods must imply the existence of very few people individual enough to differ from the group, or strong enough to establish their difference. Perhaps many do differ but wisely conceal it, since it is the most uncomfortable thing in the world to stand alone.

  The ordeal of being true to your own inner way must stand high in the list of ordeals. It is like being in the power of someone you cannot reach, know, or move, but who never lets you go; who both insists that you accept yourself and who seems to know who you are. It is awful to have to be yourself. If you do reach this stage of life you are to some extent free from your fellows. But the travail of it. Precious beyond valuing as the individual is, his fate is feared and avoided. Many do have to endure a minute degree of uniqueness, just enough to make them slightly immune from the infection of the crowd, but natural people avoid it. They obey for comfort’s sake the instinct that warns, “Say yes, don’t differ, it’s not safe”. It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty.

  Perhaps these times in which we live are more dangerous than they seem, and in a different way. Mass values prevail until I wonder if we are all herding together because a great challenge lies ahead. If we can manage to face it an increase in consciousness could be due. Then who is in greatest danger? Is it
the individual whose fate it is to oppose the mass, succour the nascent value? The individual is the carrier of value by which we live; but what if we forget this, what if the crowd becomes too strong, what happens then? Can the hero, the ordinary man of course, rise to the height that will be required of him?

  A man once said to me, “I don’t mind your telling me my faults, they’re stale, but don’t tell me my virtues. When you tell me what I could be it terrifies me.” I was surprised then, I understand now, because I believe we may be faced by the need of living our strengths.

  If truth is measured by numbers, it being assumed that what the majority want is good and must be, then my wild heart (my now wild heart that never used to be wild—or if it was did not know it—did not indeed benefit by it) flames for the truth of the few. We choose many things by a tribal truth, many more than we like, but there is a truth in the very pit of one’s being that opposes tribal good. What honest heart denies that many delights are based on the premise that others will not, even cannot, do what you do? Sometimes it is because you feel the need of doing something in your own way, sometimes it is the sheer delight of being lawless that you crave; or, more lightly, because you are drawn to the charm of the exceptional. If too many do what you do its quality is changed. If some things are done commonly it becomes tasteless; but there are things that can be done rarely and remain delicious.

  It is clearly innocent to wish to be quiet or alone, but then others must not come where you are. It is natural to wish to be the only one to leave your footprint on pristine sand; to lie in an unvisited wood is idyllic, but if others do the same then all is degraded. Even motoring, as it once was, required an almost empty road, and what sort of climber likes a crowded mountain peak? It is undeniable that one needs the absence of others to enjoy the magic of many things. I deny that these are privilege. They are necessities that man may know himself, and that man may know nature when she is unsullied by him. So vital are these joys that I am convinced that crowds endanger our quality; with them, in them, we become unworthy of each other. And what do we live by and for but that evanescent achievement, the merit of mankind?