Between One and One Another by Jackson Michael

Author:Jackson, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER 8

It's Other People Who Are My Old Age

Since the lived is…never entirely comprehensible, what I understand never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never quite at one with myself.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In a series of interviews with Benny Levy in 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre—then seventy-five and in the last year of his life—asserted that he did not experience himself as an old man. Everyone treated him as an old man. But for himself, he was not old. “It's other people that are my old age,” he said.1

The moment is poignant, because in the eyes of others Sartre was old—blind, unable to write, unable to be alone, almost completely dependent, and not always lucid in speech or in thought. But those who spoke of Sartre in this way seem not to have realized that even in dying a person's humanity is still alive, and their remarks suggest how difficult it is for us to accommodate the view that a person's identity is as various as the people who encounter or purport to know that person, including herself or himself. “We live…lives based upon selected fictions,” writes Lawrence Durrell. “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time—not by our personalities as we like to think.”2

This relativity of viewpoints was complicated, in Sartre's case, by the quarrel that followed the publication of the Levy interviews—debates over whether Levy had imposed his own views on the older writer, over who knew Sartre best, the man and the thinker, and over who should be allowed the last word on what he thought in his dying days.

One of the arresting facts of growing old is that the young see us, as we in turn see them, as inhabiting absolutely different worlds. If aging is a process of forgetting, then the first symptom of this amnesia is forgetting what it was like to be young. The converse is more forgivable, for the young cannot be blamed for having little inkling of what it is like to be old. Still, I have been haunted for many years by my inability to see past the superficial appearance of age, and my failure to ask my elders to share with me the fruit of their accumulated experience. Did it remain true for Sartre to the end of his life that a human being “is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made”?3 Is it as true of the old as of the young, of men and of women, that one never simply conserves or straightforwardly reproduces the world in which one finds oneself thrown, that we surpass, in some small measure and in often indiscernible ways, the situation that is visited upon us as a result of the accident of our birth, our history, our biology? For Sartre, understanding a person or a life requires a double perspective—a regressive movement in which we examine the cards we are dealt; a progressive moment in which we see how we play our hand.

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