Angry Old Men

 Earlier this weekend, a neighbor family set up a live band in their driveway, at the end of our small and narrow dead-end street. They proceeded to blast their well-amplified self-created music straight in the direction of my first-floor accommodations, as I am in the next house up from them on the opposite side facing. The music wasn't bad—actually it was well-performed—but that was not the point.

The point is this assault of beats and chord progressions came at an inconvenient time. I was trying to read and then blog, and I felt that I had not consented ahead of time to this added wrinkle to both plans. I would find myself staring at the blog post, unable to come up with the next line, unable to complete a thought at all, because just as it was coming into being, the next song would start. 

I would find out almost immediately afterward from talking to my next-door neighbors that this was a one-time annual event, not a permanent fixture, but for a morning and afternoon, I thought I saw a glimpse of a horrifying new reality. "I'll never be able to write again!" I gasped. "I didn't agree to this! Why wasn't I consulted? How can they just come and start making that racket practically in my backyard?" 

And all at once, I had a vision of myself as among the preternaturally old. "Oh," I thought. "So this is how it happens: how one finds oneself without intending one day having turned into an angry old man, telling the neighbor-kids' garage band to quiet down, and chasing people off one's lawn." And so, I thought. What of it? And I quoted to myself the line of Yeats: "Why should not old men be mad?"

Of course, I am not really old; in the eyes of my elders, I even qualify as young. But if what they say in consolation to the genuinely aged is true—that age is just a number, or a state of mind—then it must be a truth that cuts bitterly both ways. One can also be among the old-in-spirit. Old before one's time. In J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, the author notes that Byron achieved middle age at all of thirty-two.

It was a fitting Sunday to read Coetzee's short novel, by the way, which can be finished in a day but seems to extend outward in infinite directions, such that I find it hard to believe that it was really just Saturday night that I picked it up. The book is, among other things, profoundly Yeatsian in its mood. And it is the old Yeats I am thinking of—the angry, superannuated Yeats who feels passed by. 

Coetzee's protagonist, much like Yeats when he's in this vein (John Berger detects the same note in Picasso), feels angry most of all about the loss of his seductive powers. I don't relate to this part, having never had any noticeable powers in that direction, such that I might feel their absence. It seems no indignity to lose the bloom of youthful passion to one whose dignity all along had to seek other foundations.

But I could vibe in a more general sense with the fear of obsolescence that the novel evokes. Disgrace depicts a man forced to quit his job and retire prematurely due to scandal, finding himself with a sudden excess of time and dearth of purpose; and amidst my own angst about whether to stay in or leave my current employment, it seems either an omen or a siren song to dash me against the rocks.

It's surprising that, in a novel replete with literary allusion and bearing so many Yeatsian overtones, Coetzee is mostly spare of references to W.B. himself. There is one oblique nod to "Sailing to Byzantium" through an echo of its most famous line, but otherwise Coetzee's protagonist draws more from the store of the early 19th century Romantics: Byron, Wordsworth, Blake chief among them. 

But Byron, as we already saw, also answers to my purpose. Here is truly a man to whom age was just a number. He managed to find himself exhausted and used-up at thirty-two, ready to pack it in at thirty-six. Coetzee's protagonist, likewise, though forced to resign his post at only fifty-two—a time many would consider still mid-career—treats this as practically a death sentence. 

There are personal and historical reasons for this in the novel that go far beyond age, and which would require a full exegesis to unravel. But it's the character's sheer state itself—the bare condition in which he finds himself—that spoke to me most starkly in this moment. The sense of opportunities spent and no new openings to look forward to: no "finish worthy of the start," to cite Yeats' poem again.

This is what had me up at four in the morning on a Monday. "No!" I cried out mentally. "I'm not spent yet! There is more still for me to do!" And so the great circular thought chased its tail around my head once again: is my job breeding complacency, preventing me from pursuing higher things? Or is it the hard road thereto, and I would be getting off my destined path if I left now? 

A friend whose inner life crises track alongside mine with eery consistency recently sent me his own middle-of-the-night email: "Greatness is harder to achieve than it seemed when I was starting out," he said. Greatness, the higher life. But what and where might it be! And perhaps the truth is what a character in Coetzee's novel retorts: "there is no higher life. This is the only life there is."

Which can be read as either a counsel of despair or a counsel of acceptance. I don't myself know how I take it. Like Coetzee's novel as a whole—like life, like many of the answers to our striving and to our most urgent questions about what we should do and where we are headed—it is ambiguous.