MORE than wine, time improves talent. Filmmaker Frederick Wise, 84, is in complete denial about his age. He doesn’t have time to fret about it. “I just keep working intensely.” A lifetime—far from over in his view—of great filmmaking is distilled by him into this wry piece of practical for young filmmakers: Marry rich. The hardest part of filmmaking is raising the money.
Lewis Lapham, who interviewed the personalities here and wrote this piece for the New Yorker, asks why old people are better at what they do. The short answer is Samuel Johnson’s: “Depend upon it: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind.” Old age is a death sentence soon to be carried out.
The great Japanese painter Hokusai said at 75 that he was manic about drawing at the age of 6; by 50 he had painted and published more designs than he cared to count. He didn’t care to count them because, he said, “Everything I made before 70 is not worth counting. At 73, I began to understand the true structure of nature: grass, trees, fish and bugs. At 80, I shall know more. At a 100, I will be marvelous. At a 110, every point I make, every line I draw, will be instinct with life.” This observation of Hokusai was first pointed out by Herman Broch, author of the unreadable masterpiece The Death of Virgil, in his introduction to Rachel Bespaloff’s 20-page book On Force, which glorifies violence. So, you can imagine the Nazi origins of the observation that aging is distillation if, that is, the win is genius to start with. If it isn’t, then aging leads only to dementia, be it clinical or, what is worse, self-induced, as when rich men imagine they are sexually attractive to young tarts and feel a compulsion to impart wisdom to their young employees at annual get-togethers.
Lewis himself writes that he fell in love with writing at age 6 but started seeing progress only in his 50s, when it took only six or seven drafts to find the right words. He writes by hand. He says that printed words on a computer screen always look good when the writing could still be made better. At 79, writes Lewis. With hundreds of essays and 10 times that number of drafts, Lewis understands that failure is its own reward: In the effort to keep closing the gap “between imagination and achievement.” That’s deep but true; I leave it to you to figure out why.
Old man John D. Rockefeller was more obsessed with learning new things than making more money. Warren Buffet and Rupert Murdoch never stop asking, “What? What? Why? Why?” Sophocles wrote
Oedipus at Colonus at 90. The American journalist I.F. Stone trashed the American war in Vietnam in the mind of every thinking American using only a four-page mimeographed newspaper he put out himself. He had the entire US government at his feet, which rather made it easier for him to kick it in the teeth and which, of course, he did. He went on to study ancient Greek in his 70s. And, if I recall correctly, wrote about Plato and The Republic or Socrates, and asking the right questions. The Vietnam War was so long ago.
- Boone Pickens, 86, says, and I have distilled it better than Lewis, yes, at 86 he has more now of what he had less of when he was young: which is, to say, experience. He will retire in a coffin.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 81, celebrated in this week’s Time magazine, modestly says that the advantage of seniority is that she gets to speak sooner when a case comes up to the Court for oral
argument. She isn’t just a liberal; she is an unanswerable liberal that conservative justices prefer to sidestep than take on.
The moment she feels her mind slipping, she says, she will go.
Biologist E.O. Wilson, 85, says the older he gets, the bigger the questions he tackles. Advancing age just sharpens the mind. Carmen Herrera, 99, says she sold her first painting at 89 without a trace of
bitterness. What happened was that when she was young, she showed a painting to an expert and he said, “Madame, you have many beautiful paintings in this one work.” She thought about that, and started taking things out of her paintings. She hasn’t stopped. Because less is more?
But only if you have more of what’s good to start with can you strip down to the less, which is better if not great. Of course, if you have nothing to start with, don’t waste other people’s time.
And Tony Bennett at 88 released an album of duets with Lady Gaga. It is No. 1 on Billboard. “When you have a perfect show where
every song works,” he said, “pull out 15 minutes. Don’t stay onstage too much. Know when enough is enough. I’ve learned that less is more. And it’s not because of age. It’s just the right thing to do. Do not overstay your welcome.”
Let us all keep that in mind. And if you are not talented to start with, be it in painting or public service, don’t step up to the stage; or if you’re on stage and run out of ideas, it is never too soon to stop and go.