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The Nation's Pulse
Sunset Thoughts at the Beach
The time in life when all good things must end.
SEA ISLE, N.J. — They had a contest here last week in the Press of Atlantic City that asked readers in 25 words or less to submit answers to this question: “Where do you want to spend the last years of your life?”
The winner was Nandini Taneja, from Mays Landing, with this reply: “Alone in a rented oceanfront apartment, praying daily for the years I lived, choices I made, people I hurt, hearts I broke.”
For an aspiration, that seems to me to be a little too morose and out-of-the-way, but the editors liked it because its “vision of responsibility and atonement was especially moving.”
From Ventnor, Tom Krick was the most negative and succinct about the location of his end days: “Anywhere but New Jersey (and that includes hell).”
More political, David Smith in Absecon was looking for an escape route from America’s swing to collectivism: “Sadly, because this government is slowly turning this great country into the SSA, the ‘Socialist States of America,’ I am looking into moving to Australia.”
Tom Murphy in Atlantic City seemed less unhappy with socialism: “In my subsidized high-rise in Atlantic City. Looks like, though, it may be in a doorway in Atlantic City if Social Security isn’t fixed.”
Personally, my favorite was an upbeat answer from a woman in Egg Harbor Township, Elizabeth Thomas: “On the road again like Willie Nelson or Dierks Bentley, free and easy down the road I go.”
An even more upbeat way to go out on the road is Bruce Springsteen’s. I always thought his singing sounded like just hollering, but on the way to his recent concert in Pittsburgh my wife told me that he’s a poet, so for the first time I listened to the lyrics.
His wild romantic glory dreams intact , Bruce sang “Born to Run,” just as he has at every concert since the '70s: “I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.” How sick!
I don’t think much about the sunset years. Too often, those years become the grim and fearful world that John Updike, who died in January, described through his characters in his final volume of stories, a time of standing unsteadily on the brink of old age, increasingly separated from old friends and associates, depleted by bad health, and preoccupied with the approaching void, the final step where “death is real, and dark, and huge.” Yikes!
Similarly, Philip Roth in his latest novel, Exit Ghost, has his longtime alter-ego, a now-decrepit Nathan Zuckerman, living isolated in a rustic New England retreat, incontinent and impotent as a result of his treatments for prostate cancer.
Zuckerman had moved away from New York “to be rid of the lingering consequences of life’s mistakes,” to write and to be alone.
“I had banished my country, been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love,” Zuckerman says. “I had issued an admonition. I was out from under my life and times. I lived, by choice, where I could no longer be drawn down into the disappointments.”
His potency gone, Zuckerman’s desires remain unbroken: “And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking 30-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”
Zuckerman envies the woman’s husband and the man he expects to be the woman’s lover, both “armed to the teeth with time.”
“The ninth and, apparently, final Zuckerman novel is a blisteringly bad-tempered indictment of modern America filled with the usual gripes of Roth,” writes Alfred Hickling in a review in London’s Guardian. “But one also senses that Roth has chosen to write the eulogy for his generation. In a supremely poignant scene, Norman Mailer gets up to speak at George Plimpton’s memorial service, saddened to acknowledge that Plimpton’s demise ‘was neither humorous nor unusual. He died not in pinstripes at Yankee Stadium but in pajamas in his sleep. He died as we all do: as a rank amateur.’”
About the Author
Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise and an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (20) | Leave a comment
More Articles by Ralph R. Reiland
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Doorgunner| 6.2.09 @ 7:59AM
The last years? Shotgun in hand, setter at side, cock pheasant crowing on next rise. I can atone there, I can regret there, I can forget there. And to fall there is increasingly looking like a privilege.
Doorgunner| 6.2.09 @ 11:45AM
And Mr. Reiland,
I"ve always thought the opening line from Springsteen's Hungry Heart, "Got a wife and kid in Baltimore, Jack. I went out for a ride and I never went back" summed up the sort of juvenile, indisciplined sense of entitlement that translates as modern liberalism at the polls more succinctly, more pointedly, than than Roth's oeurve. Springsteen pithily -with unknowing luck- pours out an almost Freudian slip of a revelation. It Roth took volumes.
But as far as Freudian revels can go... at least Roth did know how to write.
Son Of Sam | 6.2.09 @ 12:35PM
My wife and I do not have in our vows "until death do us part" because our love is immortal and besides, we don't see dying as meaning that we're now free to date.
There are no last years: our souls are immortal. I look forward to being with my wife, my children, my brothers, my mom and dad, my family and friends for all eternity.
stay strong until freedom dawns
Son Of Sam
http://www.samadamssos.bravehost.com
Old Texican| 6.2.09 @ 12:35PM
My last years?
"When I die I hope to be in Texas, where folks still wave and smile in traffic. I hope to continue quietly mentoring splendid young people, and perhaps even introducing them to Christ."
Old Texican| 6.2.09 @ 3:18PM
Old Texican| 6.2.09 @ 3:11PM
Mr. Baker
I apologize. I went off on you and there is no excuse.
I have had the opportunity to visit with many of those bomber pilots and crewmen that survived.
Many of our bomber pilots of WWII had fewer numbers of hours of experience than a "modern" private pilot of a Cessna 172.
Having also spent some several hours with serious strategists/tacticians of WWII, I was continually shocked by their tears at the futility of much of their "mission".
Legitimate numbers suggest that the German war industry was producing extremely well right up to the end of the war...in spite of the "strategic" mission of the bomber fleet.
...our kids died blowing up bricks...along with collateral damage of no consequence to the war effort.
If there was indeed a "consensus" among these fine men...it was: "They threw us away."
Today, as then, our "leaders" are throwing our young men away for bullcorn instead of being able to point them at the crucial choke points of our enemies.
Look:
Shut down the import of refined oil products to Iran....they stop. Literally...we stop their whole country and their government control.
Number two: blockade their crude oil EXPORTS, and they run out of cash to build nukes.
DUH!
Sooner than later Iranian working men simply sit down and think...and decide..."nope".
During WWII the Germans' key shortage was FUEL. Fuel for everything including tanks AND jets. We missed it.
All we had to do was shut down their fuel supplies, and everything in Germany ground to a halt.
...fuel trains...fuel pipelines...fuel trucks...shut down that one thing...and the war was won.
We missed it.
So...
What are we missing today?
Where is the choke point to stop our enemies?
Mr. Baker
I will continue to move my apology forward till I hear from you. I hope you will accept it.
Willie Nelson| 6.3.09 @ 12:15AM
Personally, my favorite was an upbeat answer from a woman in Egg Harbor Township, Elizabeth Thomas: "On the road again like Willie Nelson or Dierks Bentley, free and easy down the road I go."
Ralph gets high? Go on, you badass.
Dumber than hair you are| 6.3.09 @ 12:21AM
"His wild romantic glory dreams intact , Bruce sang "Born to Run," just as he has at every concert since the '70s: "I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss." How sick!
I don't think much about the sunset years. "
Who said anything about sunset years, dumbass?
Rave!| 6.3.09 @ 12:24AM
C'mon, give him a break. He's getting old. And I bet you a thousand bucks all he thinks about is his sunset years. That and gay staffers, and crack.
megan| 6.26.09 @ 12:49AM
i agree!!!
FREE AND EASY DOWN THE ROAD I GO!!!