The time of our lives, p.11
The Time of Our Lives, page 11
‘You put it very well,’ says Javier.
‘I’m a writer,’ Less replies, ‘I put things very well.’ He does, too, but he’s wrong. Quite a few of us have found a way to come back often.
Javier has bought a stake in a particular kind of gay world in which his worth depends on being sexually attractive to desirable men and not on much else. (Sound familiar?) It’s fun while it lasts, but it doesn’t last long. Once you start to sag in that world, la-la land just won’t let you in again. Some gay clubs in Paris start shutting you out at thirty-five for fear you might dishearten the clientele. Few straight men, however, seem to care if they’re attractive or not, once settled with their spouse and progeny, despite the herculean efforts of magazines like GQ to convince the world they do. Straight men seem to want to make an impression, it’s true, they like to catch the eye, but take it pretty much for granted that being desirable is just part of being a man. Straight men seem more interested in mattering.
In urban settings these days, many gay men have more play time and more play space than most men do to perform their inner lives in. If they’re astute enough, as they grow older they’ll find they have less need to outgrow the kid in themselves—the playful, theatrical, mischievous, curious, flirtatious, inventive, risk-taking, often silly kid. After all, they’re not headed anywhere. Life doesn’t need to be linear, and they can stand aside from the cavalcade of their fellow humans marching, marching, endlessly marching forwards from birth to death.
In recent years, in more and more Western democracies, gays have been rushing to join the cavalcade, eager to lead a life ‘like everyone else’s’—to get married, set up house, have children, work hard, relax a bit and then die, taking the odd gay cruise up the Danube to recharge their boyish or girlish batteries. To be different, but also the same, nestling inside the common symbolic system of marriage and family. Who can blame them? But there’s a script to be followed, if you want to be like everybody else. It has a beginning, a middle and an unbearable end.
Chichukking, chichukking. The day was deepening into evening now, and the geckos were appearing, murder on their minuscule minds. Brutal little beasts, geckos. Ruthless. Chichukking … zap! I sat and watched Sarah picking her way across the lawn past the pond towards her room for a snooze before dinner. The steep roofs of the old village houses making up the hotel were glowing a dying-rose brown, each tile a finely etched burst of pinkish earthiness. Sarah turned into a mauvish silhouette against the lamp-lit walls across from me and was then swallowed up in the shadows.
I fell to pondering, as the frogs started up in the lotus-pond across the road, the question of how women play at being kids again. Take Barbara, for instance, my old friend Barbara, who has been writing about Javanese performance for forty years, and growing old with great brio, I might add, the art of it coming naturally to her. The thing is this: Barbara, although all her life an academic who took her research and teaching very seriously indeed, doesn’t seem to take herself so seriously, having learnt how to play a little bit all the time. Many women, it seems to me, have this knack. (Like the flock of black cockatoos outside my window as I polish these lines: stripping bark off the tree by the front door, screeching joyfully, squabbling, mucking about for the sheer hell of it. The eagles circling outside the kitchen window never play. They watch and wait and then plummet earthwards for the kill.) And so Barbara has no need to overact outrageously on Fridays at the Flamingo, or be a kid again at the football once a week on Saturday afternoons, scrapping with all the other kids and stuffing herself with donuts and lukewarm mince pies. Like many other women, she doesn’t need an excuse to act up. She catches gold finches and builds kites and little ships every day, as it were, like Gainsborough. Where men try to seduce, women flirt.
‘Can I get you a beer, Mr Robert?’ Klemen, a Christian from Makassar, is rapier thin with a boyish smile. This is a small farce we go through every evening.
‘You know perfectly well I don’t drink, Klemen.’
‘But beer is not drink, sir.’ His smile is slicing straight through me. ‘I think gin is drink, no? Whiskey also.’
‘Meskipun demikian, mas Klemen—even so, you will have to tempt me with something else.’
‘The usual?’
I nod. Why not? I watch as he slowly prepares the usual concoction. There’s a courtliness to it here, as there would not be in a more time-bound society where we scurry to impress others. It’s slowness, not briskness, that is a sign of dignity here—even of worthiness. I study him with quiet pleasure. One day Klemen will be somebody’s undoing.
Barbara plays at being a kid again in another, very particular way, too: with her grandchildren. It’s an intimacy that quite a few of my friends are passionate about: a Danish friend of mine, Katrine; Jenny in Yogyakarta; thrice-married Suzy; and half a dozen others. Indeed, Suzy calls it ‘the greatest love affair of all’. I’d never paid any attention at all to grandchildren, barely knowing the names of even my closest friends’ grandchildren, until Barbara said one day as we sat talking about the advantages and disadvantages of old age over dishes of ice-cream in the Chocolate Monggo café near her hotel: ‘I think grandchildren are the best thing about growing old.’ I hardly knew what to say, and so spooned in more ice-cream. I always feel slightly irked when people with children or grandchildren tell me—and you’d be surprised how often it happens—that having children is the best thing about being alive. I’ll never know. It’s like telling a blind man that the only thing worth doing in life is looking back down at the world from the top of Kanchenjunga. But Barbara would not have spoken with the intention of hurting me. So I just said with mild surprise: ‘Really? The best thing?’ Since she’s known me for almost sixty years, she caught my tone.
‘Sorry, I only meant …’ (flustered, she giggled and toyed with her scoop) ‘… you know … for me it’s the best thing about being old. For you it’s probably … Actually, what is it?’
God knows. Not giving a damn, probably. ‘Are the grandchildren a stab at immortality, perhaps? A little bit of you going on forever.’
She thought for a moment, smiled to herself, and said: ‘Not exactly, no, not immortality. That sounds to me more like grandfathers than grandmothers.’ Barbara is very clear about what she thinks, but sometimes zigzags her way to putting it into words. ‘You’ll think I’ve gone soft in the head, but when I’m with my grandchildren I feel I’m being invited into their world as their equal …’
‘… for the day …’
‘… yes, for the day, or even just the afternoon. It’s magic.’
‘So you’re one of the gang. It sounds like Enid Blyton.’
‘Yes, I’m one of the gang, in league against the world, including Dad and Mum. We share lots of delicious secrets we never tell the grown-ups. I’m a little girl again, we’re all equal, I’m not necessarily even head girl. Best of all, though, they’re not my responsibility—that’s the thing! I love it, there’s nothing like it.’
No doubt. We sat and savoured this, doodling with our melting treats. For me it was as fantastical as Narnia. Silence. ‘What do you actually do when you’re together?’ I asked. ‘What do you play at?’
‘Oh, it could be sticking things in albums, or it could be building something with Lego or we might open a shop on the front verandah. Didn’t you like playing shop when you were little?’ (Well, I did, but had no siblings or grandparents, so I never had any customers.) ‘Sometimes we put on little plays together for their parents, especially if it’s someone’s birthday. We put on Harry Potter and … the something or other last time, all squeezed into twenty minutes. But best of all is playing school, with me as one of the naughty pupils.’ I was silently envious. This was play at its purest.
‘I can’t think how to put this without sounding a bit pompous,’ Barbara said, readying herself to zigzag closer to the target. ‘My grandchildren are no guarantee of immortality, but they do give me a chance to redeem myself, if that makes any sense. To start again. Well, not really, but it feels like that. They’ve taught me to wonder again at all the small things in the world—the shells and spiders and beetles and buttons and pebbles, all those things you find in rock pools and behind the back shed. I can sit in a tram the way they do and look at all the people around me—the faces and clothes and gestures and accents—with a kind of wonder. So it’s a reprieve, do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ I nodded, but only half did. I scraped at my bowl.
‘It’s not immortality, you see, but it is the feeling that I’ll be remembered well beyond my lifetime. I don’t like to think I might be thrown on some trash heap of memory when I die.’ There, I have to say, she quite lost me. Why would anyone give a fig about how they might be remembered? When he was asked in an interview what he’d like his legacy to be, Gore Vidal replied without hesitation: ‘I couldn’t care less.’ Still, people do care. At least Gore Vidal had the consolation of being remembered while he was still alive.
‘What about men?’ I asked. ‘Do you think many men would agree that being a grandfather is “the best thing about growing old”? I don’t know many men who would tell me honestly if they did or didn’t.’
‘At home I’m not sure, but here in Java grandpa’s job is to pass on the important stories to the grandchildren—or it used to be—the traditional ones everyone needs to know and take seriously in order to grow up. Repositories of ancient wisdom and so on: the older you are, the wiser you’re supposed to be.’ We both laughed, since that was obviously nonsense, and gazed out at the bustling street. ‘Even at home I think grandpa prepares kids for growing up. Grandma, on the other hand …’
‘Grandma learns from the grandchildren.’
‘Something like that, yes.’ We sat sucking lime juice out of long, cool glasses.
Nobody can play at being a kid again non-stop, obviously. Who would want to? Some things, especially at work, demand our solemn attention. I take those I love seriously (our lives are not just a Punch and Judy show) and the miracle of our planet very seriously indeed, but I suspect that over the years I have failed to take myself quite seriously enough to be like the man next door and the man next door to him. André Gide (who enjoyed being a kid again more often, probably, than he should have, especially in Morocco) also failed, and possibly for the same reason: he lacked a proper, grown-up sense of time, he wrote (his italics, not mine) in his final mischievous memoir, So Be It. Without this everyday sense of time, there is always a loss of seriousness, a swerve towards ‘untimeliness’ in your actions, ‘untimeliness’ being in Edward Said’s opinion right at the core of ‘comedy’. Not only that, Gide ‘never succeeded completely in believing in the outer world’. I know exactly what he meant: you are sensitive to the outer world, but floatingly, sometimes puzzling over who exactly is dreaming whom, because you lack the feeling of time. Clock-time is essential to growing up. And so Gide could be many ages every day, not just an adolescent, say, or a man of eighty. ‘It is only with great difficulty,’ he wrote in So Be It, ‘and very rarely, that I manage to be the same age every day.’ And that, I believe, is partly why he had such an astonishingly good, quite fiercely serene, old age. Bravo!
Yutori
A beautiful old age is impossible if you don’t clean up your clutter: clutter kills—cluttered time, cluttered space. Apart from anything else, it triggers cancer, Alzheimer’s and irritable bowel syndrome. I read it in a newspaper in a teahouse near the Sultan’s palace. Was it the Jakarta Post? I would swear by the Jakarta Post. The article was by an Englishwoman who’d read an article about how clutter kills by someone else in another newspaper altogether. Without a moment’s hesitation, this Englishwoman had hired a professional declutterer to empty out her house. Now she had not just no juicer or batik tablemats, but no books, no CDs, no bread-making machine, no Mother’s Day cards from her children and only one plate per family member.
It sounded pretty good to me (especially the bit about the bread-making machine), if a touch extreme. Was there a middle way? I’m partial, naturally, to middle ways. Couldn’t I ditch the Royal Doulton dinner-set, for instance, but keep the djellaba I bought in Fez? Just to bring back memories of the bazaar. And does Dostoyevsky have to go? I can’t imagine ever deciding to reread him, I don’t like being hectored, but a civilised bookshelf should have Crime and Punishment on it.
‘Of course there’s a middle way,’ said the man sitting across from me when I mentioned what I’d just been reading. Young but already gaunt. Appealing. German? ‘It’s called yutori. Have you heard of it?’ I hadn’t, of course. ‘Yutori is the new mindfulness but much more fun. You should try it.’ A smile I liked—not mindful at all.
‘Why? What is it?’ And, for that matter, I thought, why am I always the last person to hear about these things? I’d only just got a grasp on wabi-sabi, and now here was this new sensation from Japan that makes embracing imperfection old hat.
‘I doubt there’s a single word in English to cover it,’ he said, stabbing another prawn.
‘There often isn’t,’ I said, ‘look at “Blitzkrieg”, but we usually get the picture. Tell me more.’
‘This table,’ he said, ‘is an example of what it is not.’ I eyed the clutter crammed onto the table-top between us: cups, glasses, dishes of uneaten food, paper napkins, bottled water, tiny saucers of sambal as well as my copy of the Jakarta Post. ‘As is this whole warung, by the way, everyone jammed in cheek by jowl like this.’
‘Aha,’ I said.
‘Yutori means not being cramped.’ I could hardly remember not being cramped by something—desire, obligation, schedules, goodness. ‘It means having the time and space—and even the resources—to do, with a sense of ease, whatever it is you’d like to do. Plus a bit. That’s the important part: plus a bit.’
What flashed into my mind immediately was the sort of scene every episode of Grand Designs finishes with: a couple with children called Granville and Clementine, sitting in an aircraft-hangar-sized atrium, staring up at floor upon floor of bedrooms, boudoirs, bathrooms and walk-in closets reached by a hand-crafted spiral staircase, looking trapped. They have all that room, yet are strangely hemmed in. By debt, by deadlines, by the need to own an architectural masterpiece and at the same time love it. Plenty of space but still no real yutori.
‘Surely all anyone needs,’ said my companion, ‘is enough room, money and time, and enough knowledge as well, to be who we’d like to be. Enough plus a bit more to cushion us. Elbow-room.’
‘Aha,’ I said again. In a word, Lebensraum.
‘Do you agree?’ The faintest of five o’clock shadows.
‘Well, I … um …’ I said.
‘Enough room, enough money and enough time—above all enough time—plus a bit. But not empty time. We need to live lives that have a bit of Spielraum in them, a bit of looseness. Do you say “play-room” in English?’
‘I’ll certainly say it from now on.’
‘Our lives should not be too tight-fitting,’ he went on.
‘Japan is quite tight-fitting,’ I said. As was his T-shirt, in point of fact.
‘So I guess it’s the word for what they want but haven’t got yet.’
‘Do I have to take classes?’
‘No, you just do it.’
‘No need to meditate or buy a mat?’
‘No mats, no meditation.’
It sounded like just my sort of thing—a very middle kind of way indeed. I could feel my whole body relax at the mere idea of it. I resolved to start putting this yutori business into practice immediately, less (to be frank) in the case of our ceramics collection or our library than of my time.
At the airport the following afternoon, for instance, having got there a little earlier than I needed to—just fifteen minutes earlier, à la yutori—I simply sat and looked about me at what everyone else was doing. I looked across at the batik shop, the chocolate shop, the foot reflexology studio (a fixture at all Indonesian airports) and I noted the piles of Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck on a table outside the bookshop. (I was mildly surprised the local religious authorities didn’t give at least a small f*ck about the public display of books with F*ck in the title, but I’d read the book and, on reflection, didn’t give a f*ck myself whether they did or didn’t.) I let time pool around me, there amidst the clutter of the Departure Lounge (the carry-on bags, the backpacks, bottles, children, rubbish, the endless signs forbidding things, the scrolling screens and the truckloads of useless gewgaws crowding the souvenir-shop windows). I simply floated quietly, but not emptily, in my pool of awareness, exactly as Hans had encouraged me to do. (I think his name was Hans—it was hard to read his scrawl on the napkin from the warung.)
When you’re young, you have goals and rush headlong towards them, anxious to achieve, attain, take possession, be productive, win. Of course you do, it’s the same all over the industrialised world: you have to eat and pay off the mortgage. Ogden Nash summed it up nicely: ‘I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.’
At my time of life, however, you see little point in speeding anywhere: it’s rootedness that matters now, not speeding towards your target. Clock-time is gaining ground everywhere you look these days, even in Java, a market economy depends on it, but clock-time leads straight to the grave. You run out of it in a flash. Time exists objectively, of course it does, but we can inhabit it each in his or her own way. We can take up arms against it or work with it, but we don’t have to just hurtle forwards into the bottomless pit.
