Teach Me to Let Go

THE terrible thing about growing old is that people take you seriously. I have been teaching now for a quarter of a century, and I have had the growing feeling that the students of late years have been believing me. In former years they took notes; they laughed at my wisecracks; they studied for their examinations; they politely recited when questioned; they even asked my advice about what they should read. But if they believed anything I said, they never showed it. Now there is something in their attitude which is very disquieting. They listen to my rambling sentences with an attention that is more than obedience to duty.

Some day one of them is going to come out bluntly and say, ‘What do you yourself believe?’ Then I shall have to lay aside the mantle of the prophet, the air of the impartial observer, and tell him. I shall no longer be able to say, ‘I am simply expounding, not propagandizing.’ For there will be a look in his eyes which will tell me that if I don’t speak the truth as I see it I shall be known either as a coward or as an ignoramus. Possibly as both.

It would be easy to say that I prefer Plato to Aristotle or Pomponazzi to Hobbes or Hume to Berkeley; it would be easy to say that I think French philosophers on the whole more profound than German in spite of the clarity of their language. Just as easy as telling him that I prefer to live in the country rather than in town and that I like Bach better than Beethoven. I could say these and similar things with a manner which might make him wonder just why my desires were so directed but would certainly quiet him down. Yet I know that he will not ask questions which can be answered out of book learning. He will want to know what I have learned from living for half a century. His eyes will say, ‘Here you have been meeting people, talking to people, teaching people, loving and hating people for all these years; what have you found out about them?’ He will want to know how a man who has had the privilege of associating with the best minds of the last twenty-five hundred years, who has traveled more than the average run of men, who has access to several languages, who has seen the greatest pictures, buildings, and sculptures of the Occident — he will want to know how such a man feels about the human race, and he will want a truthful answer, one which he can have confidence in as at least a sincere opinion.

The worst of it is that the one thing one learns is the pathetic complexity of human beings. In novels — no matter how ' realistic’ — people are at least understood by the novelists. He makes them up. He may not be a Theophrastus or La Bruyère, but the idea is the same. He may not have the sanguine, melancholy, bilious, and choleric types in minds, but he will have their modern counterparts — the extraverts, the introverts, extraverted introverts, and the introverted extraverts. But in life you learn that neither the first nor the last impression is trustworthy, for people change under your eyes and are what they are because you are what you are. Their fluid souls shift and squirm to escape your clutch; they dance about you and you try to escape them. They hide, and hiding they reveal themselves; they put on a brave and candid front and conceal their true natures. You know that when you can admit that frustration, ambiguity, complexity, rather than understanding, clarity, and simplicity, are the main characteristics of humanity you have achieved some beginning of wisdom.

Then there are all the little subterfuges people have to keep up their self-respect. The padding of academic bibliographies; the snaring of lions for tea and dinner; the bragging about genealogy and descendants; the announcing to all the world of who is coming to lunch; the constant depreciation of others’ reputations; knowing the right people, belonging to the right clubs, worshiping the right god. One gets to the point where all this seems more pathetic than degraded. The fervor of satirizing it dies down. If it gives them pleasure, let them enjoy themselves, one says, and hopes that one’s own little vanities are not too apparent. That could perhaps be admitted.

None of this is very substantial, but it is something. You could tell it to a student and still keep your self-respect. But suppose he then said, ‘All this is to the good; there is no periodic table for souls; but how is one to live?’ That will be more trying.

For in all candor it must be admitted that most schemes of life in the Occident have been failures. The great ethical systems are magnificent theoretical structures. Like beautiful pictures, they stir one with their inner harmony. Yet we all go on living by common sense and those subtle intuitions of good and evil which we unconsciously absorb from society. But no one ever tries to live the Christian life, or the Stoic, or the Platonic, or any other. Why not give them a chance? Is not the very fact that no one has seen fit to try them seriously their best refutation?

There is, however, one lesson that can be learned, and a life that is not too short will justify it. That is that most of the evils of human society come from our desperate effort to retain what we have acquired. Property, children, fame, mates, friendships, knowledge — all these things in the course of nature come and go, but we act as if they all ought to be enduring. We howl like dogs when our bones are lost, whether there be any meat on them or not. When the day comes of the fatal question, ‘What have you learned from life?’ I think that I know the answer. It will be, ‘This prayer — Lord, teach me to let go.’

GEORGE BOAS