Losing It: The lament of an aging professor

The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I am 65, and I think my brain just hopped a bullet train heading south, leaving a shadow of itself behind, just enough to let me worry whether it is time to close up shop, before the people in gray close it up for me. Will I know when I am an embarrassment? Do my younger colleagues, sometimes very much younger, already know? Am I missing the hints that they are sending my way? Will anyone show up for my retirement dinner? Will I? Will my memory still be good enough to recall everyone who did not show up, so that I can even up the score? And just how would I, feeble and without the wit, manage that? Will I be able to come up with their names, should I manage to recall their faces? And why am I consumed with fears about that dinner some five years before it will take place in exactly the same way I would lie awake at nights worrying about botching my bar mitzvah three years before I had to go on stage and man up in the Jewish way? But then once you, yes you, stop worrying about ridiculous things like this, you’ll have not only lost touch with the world, but with yourself.

What of my clearly decaying scholarly capacities? Of being unable to continue learning or, if able, then unable to retain what I have recently learned? I can’t even come up with words like “refrigerator” or “kitty litter” and must endure my wife’s hand gesture of irritated impatient contempt to “get on with it.” Can I ever get lost in a book again without my mind wandering? I have always been suspicious of those parents who claim that their dull normal and badly behaved children are really geniuses suffering from attention-deficit disorder and need to be dosed with Ritalin or given extra time on exams. But now it seems, in some kind of poetic justice, that I have ADD, the only difference being that I really have it. My doctor actually prescribed Ritalin for me, which, as it turned out, my health insurance refused to cover because I was over 18. Not willing to pay the unsubsidized price, my avarice, itself an attribute of old age, has kept me Ritalin free.

Everything distracts me. Being interested in something has become unmoored from my ability to attend to it. Ambient noise, intrusive trivial thoughts, e-mail, stock prices, Green Bay Packer blogs (Green Bay was my hometown), variously and predictably plague me. Ambient quiet is distracting too, and sent me to the Internet to buy a white-noise machine. I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of Solitaire, and then when I lost, I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row. Says the ancient rabbinical Pirkei Avot, or the Ethics of the Fathers, some 1,800 years ago, “If a man is walking by the way and is studying and then interrupts his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree?’ … Scripture considers that it is to be regarded as if he has forfeited his life (or as if he bears guilt for his soul).” If the beauties of nature cannot justify distraction, what of Solitaire? My offense is capital, but I can no longer remember which circle of hell awaits me for sins like this.

Has Nemesis gotten even with me for the contempt I did not quite disguise for the dead wood of 20 years ago by making me petrified wood in the eyes of my younger colleagues? You see them, don’t you, giving signals that they want to break off the conversation you are holding them to almost out of spite, but desperately too, telling them, oh, just one more thing, but talking faster as a concession to your perceiving in some primitive part of your brain that you are boring them silly, which they can perceive that you can perceive, and so on in an infinite regress. You even find yourself following them down the hall as they head for the hills, still chattering at them, self-destructively unable to break off.

Yes, I know. There is no small amount of self-flattery in a lament of losing it: It claims, I once had it to lose. Have I inflated my own past abilities? Complaining about how much “it” I have lost is a claim to a reasonably worthy past and an attempt to claim such former heights that even if I acknowledge my descent, I am sneaking in a claim to being still plenty high in absolute terms. Besides, there are always a couple of lazy and dim colleagues whose real contribution to the enterprise is to make less lazy incompetent ones feel that we deliver value for the price. Never mind that my keep would pay for six entry-level scholars in history or anthropology who are now unemployed (I confess to making law-school wages, hence the six rather than two entry-level positions I am chewing up). Self-deception and wishful thinking, looking on the bright side in a self-interested way, keep us conveniently colorblind to our real value, seeing black when the ink is red. Or simply not caring if it is red, when we see it.

But unless you are one of those insufferable souls with self-esteem of such quality that no disconfirming evidence, no matter how devastating, can dent it, or unless you are already well embarked on dementia, these delusions about our minds are harder to maintain than the falsehoods we maintain about our appearance. You get caught once too often having forgotten things that are shameful for someone in your field not to have at your beckon. You fear too that you may be pretending to have once known it, that in fact you have forgotten nothing. Claiming forgetfulness is a way, pathetic as it is, of saving face. Where once you could blame things on drink, you now blame them on inevitable decline, and on having sampled a few sips of the River Lethe. (Drink, whether from rivers or bottles, figures in many myths of memory and forgetfulness.) In the questioning after a public lecture, you find yourself unable to deny that the questioner is thinking better about your subject than you are. You tell yourself: At least I am still capable of shame. I can still recognize when someone is a whole lot sharper than I am. How many clowns in my racket can be skewered by a questioner’s comments and not even know they were shown up for frauds and fools? But that ungenerous thought, despite its truth, dares the gods to make me one of them, if they have not done so already without my knowledge…

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