HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HAPPY DEATHDAY
Apr 23, 2006 (Shakespeare’s 442nd birthday)
Perhaps it’s because I share my birthday with Adolf Hitler, born exactly fifty years earlier, but I’ve always had a doubtful attitude toward birthday celebrations, especially mine. Besides, I don’t like getting birthday presents, or being the center of attention. And groups singing “Happy Birthday To You” (to anyone) give me the willies, out of tune ones, or worse, some of the choral groups I belong to, singing in “sophisticated“ harmony.
In my forthcoming novel, Golem Song, Alan Krieger tells his girlfriend, Debbie, about his attempt at a fix:
“I actually did write another birthday song. I sent it in to
Reader’s Digest hoping it would be adopted by the whole country, beginning with the semi-literate lower classes.”
“What happened?”
“I’ve got the rejection slip in a cheap frame in the bedroom.”
“Oh, that’s what that is.”
“Wanna hear it?”
“Sure. Do you think I should sit down first?”
“Yeah. Pull up a couch. You can put those ridiculous boxes down. Ready?
A semi-happy birthday
to you, ma’am (it could be “sir”), while you can,
for happiness is fleeting
and death does have his plan.
Though now you’re able-bodied
and full of life and vim
your body will be sullied
and taken o’er by him—
Deb-bie. (You put the person’s name in there.)”
“They didn’t accept that? I’m shocked.”
“Yeah. And the tune is even from the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ It’s the chorale when Christ is up on the cross.”
Birthdays. The number of years ahead is ever more miniscule compared to the number of years behind. And time passes ever more quickly. Memories become less detailed, reunions more frightening. Hair grows gray, skin scaly, trim turns thick.
Aging. We would do well to study up. I can recommend no better commentary than Jean Améry's On Aging (Indiana U. Press, 1994). This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Améry's forte is to pull no punches, but rather, in naming what is now happening, in depicting what's ahead, to equip us to better understand our universal plight.
Each of his five chapters confronts a different aspect of growing older, and finally, old. The first, "Existence and the Passage of Time", describes our changing sense of time, and the gradual shrinking of our space-in-the-world as we fill up with time. The second chapter, "Stranger to Oneself", considers the many ways that we become alienated from our own bodies, bearing them up now, instead of their bearing us. The third, "The Look of Others", develops the notion of social aging, the realization that it is no longer possible to live up to one's potential, but that one simply is -- because one was. This chapter leads naturally into the fourth, "Not To Understand the World Anymore", a depiction of cultural aging, in which one tries, awkwardly at best, to understand the sign systems of the present through the understandings of the past, and thus becomes aware of being a stranger in the present world. The last chapter concerns our final chapter: "To Live With Dying". Aging, Améry asserts, is "the stretch of time in which we meet with the thought of death." Here, he challenges each of us to find our own uncompromised combination of "revolt and resignation" -- the subtitle of the book.
A serious reading of Améry's book generalizes out beyond the individual into the aging of a nation; the aging of the idea of a nation; the aging of the memory of a nation. July 4th, coming up.