On Turning 60: The Moral of the Story

Are we supposed to be grateful for birthdays because they force us, if only for one day a year, to examine our lives? This may be true of most people, who have never bothered to cultivate their inner lives. But for someone like me, for whom the inner life is just as important as the outer life, the life in the senses, the last thing I need is an excuse to examine my life. But I feel obliged today on my 60th birthday to mark the occasion with a selfie. (That isn't me in the photo.)

I envy people like my parents, who were born and who died in the 20th century. Straddling two centuries, as I do, is a dirty trick. Evelyn Waugh could declare that "The trouble with the 20th century is I live in it." (The trouble with the 21st century is, I'll be lucky if I live in half of it.) And while Waugh would probably have been more comfortable in the 19th (or 18th) century, we would've been deprived of the exquisite poignancy of his novels, which were an elaborate memorial to a vanished way of life, a "kind people who cared for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching, as one day at the Last Trump they hoped to meet their Maker, with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase." (Vile Bodies)

"The Last Trump," indeed! When I think about the twelve men who have been president in my lifetime, I am inclined to conclude that the most effective, the most impactful, and the most liberal of them all was Dwight David Eisenhower. Kennedy was president for just shy of three years when he was murdered by a nobody. Ronald Reagan was, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, "as dumb as a post." (Yet Conservatives use him as their shining example). Reagan cut the wealth tax down to 28%, claiming it would boost the economy and create millions of jobs. It did not. Eisenhower was a moderate, a rational conservative. "I like Ike" was the campaign slogan that he ran with and won with. His eight years as president were distinguished by peace and a prosperity unprecedented in American history. The economy boomed, despite the fact that the tax on the wealthiest Americans was at a whopping 91%. During his two terms, the interstate highway system was constructed and more Americans than ever were on the move in their big, resplendent American cars. I was born when the going was good for America. It's decline ever since then has been clearer at some moments than others, but it has been declining steadily.

Looking at the young generation in 1967, Philip Larkin (who always sounded older than his years) felt compelled to write:

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives -
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.


Larkin was pointing out that every generation gets it wrong, the ones who thought in the 1920s that the young would find total happiness unburdened of the religious dogmas of the past as well as the ones who thought that dispensing with the formalities of sex and marriage would lead to absolute fulfillment. What they all get eventually is the same thing - a world that is indifferent to them and their wishes for happiness. Old age. Death.

So, why do I feel, at the age of sixty, as if I am just getting started?

Let me conclude these random birthday thoughts with Aesop's fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

A shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, “Wolf! Wolf!” and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains. The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: “Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep”; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated or destroyed the whole flock.

The story is very well known and endlessly used as an example of the unintended hazards of raising false alarms. "There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth." It is also an admonition to people for believing what liars tell them. So goes the conventional moral of the story. But there is another moral to the story that is completely overlooked, and one that experience has taught me, because, regardless of the boy's "lies" of a wolf, the sheep were lost. If the villagers had responded on the fifth time the boy raised the alarm, the flock would've been saved. 

When someone calls for help, whether or not they give us a reason to disbelieve them, it's our moral obligation to take them seriously. I am addressing this last message to those family members and friends who have discounted my own cries for help in the past, not because I ever gave them reason to, but simply because they refused to believe me.

WOLF!