One of the useful functions of retirement must surely be to relive one’s youth. In between comes a time of working to support a-family and pay the mortgage, which can be irksome to the spirit. It’s easy to forget how hard it was to become adult: to find somewhere to live and pay a month’s rent in advance plus a month’s deposit and find a non-irksome job if possible.
I love the word “irksome”. I was looking for a synonym for “pesky”, the epithet I usually apply to my mobile phone. I try to minimize its irksomeness by keeping the same old one. It belonged to my daughter several years ago but is still far too modern for me. My grandparents had a candlestick phone, with no dial. You had to pick up the receiver and wait for the operator, then request the number. It was considered bad form to jiggle the receiver rest up and down to attract attention. Any phones more modern than that, I treat with suspicion. My grandfather treated even that one with suspicion. He’d bellow impatiently at callers in monosyllables: “Yes? Yes?”, hoping to discourage any further audacity.
It was a lovely big house with a quarter-acre of garden. Post-war austerity had compelled my grandparents to let several rooms to tenants and he found it irksome to answer the phone on their behalf. I and other descendants in the male line have continued the tradition of barking into the mouthpiece, or that pinhole that passes for a mouthpiece these days.
Every generation extols that Golden Age before the great decline in values, but on closer examination we see that it merely harks back to the days of our youth. But let’s tear ourselves away from that topic and consider “not-doing” some more. TV commercials foster covetousness and the urge to earn more, which requires constant hustling, as opposed to sitting on a bench watching the world go by; or squatting on one’s heels in the shade of a dusty pueblo. I like the old-fashioned word “constitutional” that I read in Conrad today, meaning the brisk walk that a gentleman takes for no other purpose than to keep fit and breathe some fresh air. “Not-doing” certainly includes constitutionals.
This is my thesis: that a sane person will revert to a state of not-doing when the needful has been done. Not-doing doesn’t mean being a couch-potato, in fact it includes whatever is necessary for the retention of sanity—something which will vary for each individual. The small child keeps constantly busy, perhaps talking to its teddy-bear or imaginary friend. I do pretty much the same. It’s called blogging. I help keep the house clean, because it’s a joy to do so, providing constitutional exercise and pleasure to the eye when it’s done. But once the house is in its optimum state, I’m not going to change it. The walls can stay the same colour with the furniture in the same position. I’m satisfied with the friends I have and don’t seek more, or even to see the existing ones more often. I’m satisfied, even with my natural and inevitable bass line (or baseline) of mild dissatisfaction, that gets me out of bed in the morning, dissatisfied with further sleep.
We have it completely wrong. Our much-vaunted technology angers the gods. Iit certainly angers Nature, as does our promiscuity. Technology has no use other than to support a higher population. We allow “labour-saving” and aspirational goods to tempt us, but they have to be paid for with the inanity of call-centres replacing the holy rituals of hanging out washing for the joy of seeing it billow in the open sky.
We have it completely wrong. Our much-vaunted technology angers the gods. Well it certainly angers Nature, as does our promiscuity. Technology has no use other than to support a higher population. We allow “labour-saving” and aspirational goods to tempt us, but they have to be paid for with the inanity of call-centres replacing the holy rituals of hanging out washing for the joy of seeing it billow in the open sky.
I recall in Borneo sarong-clad women washing clothes on rocks in the river. I wasn’t on a tourist trip goggling at quaintness, but there to stay with relatives rooted there, of those tribes. The women in the river were only a generation away. The Industrial Revolution would never have started there. No, it started here in this land of cold winters, in the dying years of the colonial slave trade. A new slavery was born from yoking men, women and children to newly-invented machines. I am of the people who did that, suffered that, though I hold more proudly my possible Aboriginal blood from Australia. (I’m a direct descendant of Archbishop Sumner of Canterbury, but I take no pride in that.)
The way they taught me history, I never questioned its insane cruelty, except when directed to do so. They taught us the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Indian Mutiny, but never the Massacre of Amritsar, when General Dyer got his Gurkhas to shoot thousands of women and children like fish in a tank. My teachers avoided any implication that the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire were intrinsically bad. I don’t think they were being deceitful, merely blind.
The obvious flaws of the Soviet Empire and Communism were convenient to prevent us, the prisoners of capitalism, from attempting escape: most of us, that is. Islamism is equally convenient, since to non-Muslims it’s related to an alien religion. The Cold War was a kind of cartel: not to keep prices high, but to breed a complacency where there was no incentive for either side to clean up their act, seeing that the “enemy” was so much worse. The same today. If Islamism didn’t exist already, the West would have had to invent it. Perhaps they did.
I don’t have any solutions to offer. I have strong opinions but don’t offer them as something of any value. That is not why I write. If I were to leave a tiny legacy to the world in written form, it would defy the classifications of the Dewey Decimal system. I do have something to say, but its essence is not a set of ideas to save the world. If I could show by example rather than content a body of self-expression derived from independent thinking, it will be enough to call it my life’s work.
We don’t need more ideas. We need clear-sightedness, so as not to drown in dross and imitation of dross.
PS on 15th July 2018: on the smartphone you can literally know where you are, because it offers GPS, in the form of a “you are here” map, so I understand. But I’m not smart enough to use them.
a wayfarer’s notes 