“Keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold, and I’m gettin’ old.”
– Neil Young, “Heart of Gold”
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A few months ago, I met Lizza, who’s in her early 30′s. When she realized I was older, she talked about “feeling it.” The coming of age. Old age… and all its concomitant side effects.
I feel the same. There’s a certain wistfulness in the realization that time’s passing. And that sooner or later, time, my time, will be up.
Most of my friends and acquaintances merely laugh it off.
I don’t. (Or, I try to, only that I imagine hearing a faint echo, as if the grim reaper itself were Old Sir Mick singing “Time is on My Side.”)
I feel old. Even when I feel young inside, my body feels old.
Even what I used to think was this raging fire inside my soul seems to be just dying embers.
I finally managed to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” a few weeks ago. I’ve always presumed, from what friends tell me, that the book was about love. Specifically, the unrequited kind.
Having finally read it, I think the book is as much about getting old as it is about love. And it’s not just about unrequited love. It’s about the various kinds and ways of loving and non-loving. And like Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (which incidentally, also tackles aging and mortality), Marquez’s novel grapples with the problem of the one and the many, in the context of sexual relations.
The book opens with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour committing suicide because of gerontophobia, the fear of old age. (Despite his name, Jeremiah is not a prophet of love.)
Ah, if it were only the case that what the mind conceives, the body always achieves! And then, we’re confronted with the limitations of our bodies. Like Stalin’s son in Kundera’s novel, we discover that the nobility of our identity is not commensurate with the many frailties of our bodies.
Jeremiah commits suicide to escape the indignities of growing old. Of having an aging, worn-out mind/body that’s not in full possession of its faculties. Better quit while you’re ahead of the game.
The body (with all its filth, blood, mucus, shit) has long been a stumbling block for many an idealist and philosopher. Ah, if we could only eliminate the body, then… we’d be better off. We won’t be prejudiced/biased. We won’t get tired. Won’t get sick, hungry, nor thirsty. We won’t have to be distracted by other bodies. Heck, we won’t even have to die.
It is interesting to note that in both Kundera’s and Marquez’s novels, we find this discrepancy between the perceived nobility of love and the assumed vulgarity of the body. Teresa finds her stomach loudly rumbling in hunger just when she arrives at the door of Tomas’ apartment. Even worse for Florentino Ariza, his constipated and unruly stomach refuses to cooperate just when he was to have, after around 50 years of waiting, the longed-for conversation with Fermina Daza.
And who knows? What if indeed love is just sublimated lust?
In Kundera’s novel, Tomas moves from the desire of many to the love of one: Teresa. And it’s not even a conscious decision that he makes out of the strength of his will but one which circumstances, so to say, force upon him. In contrast, Florentino Ariza begins with a private profession of his fidelity to Fermina despite his spurned love, only to find himself slipping to engaging in (and documenting) sexual trysts with over 600 women. The novel ends with Florentino and Fermina sailing, as geriatric lovers, in a boat named “New Fidelity.”
Aside from affirming the possibility of a genuine friendship (platonic love, so to say) between men and women in the case of Florentino and Leona Cassiani, Marquez’s novel also talks of various degrees and forms of “love.” Florentino, in a way, loved the more than 600 women he went to bed with. (Of course, there is the difficult case of America Vicuna in the light of pedophilia. Will have to read Nabokov’s “Lolita” someday.)
In the end, what makes the unbearable lightness of growing old bearable?
Perhaps, among others, the idea (and this one especially for couples like Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza, married or not) that one can somehow get used to (tolerate, and even like) the idiosyncrasies of another person in close quarters. That understanding and friendship can be had between persons with a long shared history.
Perhaps, among others, the idea (and this especially for the Florentino Arizas of the world) that hope and love, despite the illusions and obsessions, can spring anew. Even in old age, in the time of viagra.
At the end of the novel, upon being asked by the captain how long they could keep up the coming and going of the ship, Florentino answers, as only he could answer:
“Forever.”
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For more on the mind-body duality, see Part III of The Matrix Overloaded.
Tags: Aging, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Life, Love, Love in the Time of Cholera, Milan Kundera, Mortality, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The more you resist, that more it persists…
The clock ticks, and the moment has passed. At some point you stop counting. When I was 15, I thought about killing myself at 30 because I thought there was nothing to live for after that, and yes to “save” myself from the indignities of being a corny mature person. Now I am 46 and to quote Nicolette (Sly, Massive Attack), “I feel like a thousand years have passed, I’m younger than I used to be…” Growing old is only bad if you keep resisting it. Then, it grabs you by the balls (or tits) and drags you down.
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