Being 97 has been an interesting experience.
I'll say that.
It's very difficult for people who have not reached a state of old age,
whatever that is. Very difficult for them to understand the psychology of it.
What is going on in the person?
How are you feeling?
Oh feeling okay, thank you. Prety good.
That's good. No grogginess?
No groginess. I think I'd wake up for all this excitement!
It's a loss of ability that you have had all your life.
And there's a tendency to act as if you still had it and then fail.
Or be embarrassed.
Or you have to accept that finally
that you can't do that anymore.
That's the rational thing to do. And it would be very nice if we just all did the
rational thing to do, but we don't.
You can't just decide rationally.
Well, this is the way it's got to be now, even though it was the other way then.
You can say that to yourself, but that doesn't mean you can do it.
These are lifelong habits.
I can do a lot of the usual things of life.
But now they are, most of them, done with effort and special care.
And often enough with help of somebody else.
And that's one of the challenges I have had is to come to terms with the need for help.
I was born in Brooklyn in 1921.
-Here's your coffee -Thank you.
I am 97 which is a big surprise to me.
At this age, naturally I think about death.
I taught philosophy in the University of California, about 40 years, I guess.
As a young philosopher I started out going deeply into psychoanalysis.
I have published books on self-deception and Chinese philosophy.
And I also was working in the theory of ethics and the law.
Problems of responsibility, in particular in connection with alcoholism and drug addiction.
and I also wrote a book about death.
That was about 20 years ago.
Breakfast!
-Thank you! -You're welcome.
Looks beautiful.
In the book about death
What I said was, in a nutshell, is there's no reason to be afraid or concerned or
anything about death because when you die, there's nothing.
You're not going to suffer.
You're not going to be unhappy.
You're not going to...
Well, you just... you are not going to be.
-The bacon is good. -Hm?
-The bacon. -It is good.
-I like this kind... -That's your favorite, right?
-Yeah! -It's good.
I mean, at a certain point, there's nothing.
So it's not rational to be afraid of death.
I now think that is not a good statement.
Because...
I think it's important to figure out
why it is then that people are afraid of death.
Why am I concerned about it?
My argument was there's no good reason for it.
My sense of realism tells me well, no good reason or not,
it is something that haunts me, the idea of dying soon.
I often walk around the house and I ask myself, often out loud,
What is the point of it all?
There must be something I'm missing in this argument.
I wish I knew.
So here I am, trying to work out where I am.
I still find that I am in many ways a puzzle to myself.
I do find it very interesting to try to figure it out.
What's going on?
And I've spent a lot of my life thinking about such issues.
But it's hard.
I don't know.
I just, usually, just drop the subject.
What is the point of it all?
I think I ask the question with the sense that
there isn't any good answer.
It's a kind of ironic question.
I think the answer may be...
The silent answer may be
there is no point.
It's a foolish question.
If I had to say...
if I had to say something...
I would say that loneliness and absence is an absolute part of my life.
And that has to do with my wife.
We were very close.
We were married for probably around 70 years.
And that is another dimension of this whole situation that I am preoccupied with at times.
Because she's gone
and she has been for several years.
And I feel that a part of me is gone.
We worked together and traveled together.
We were happy together.
I know how fortunate I have been to have had a happy life.
But half of me is gone.
Her absence has been to me
for a number of years now,
has been a presence.
An absence which was present to me.
I don't know, call it emptiness.
There's something missing.
and of course I realize right away that she is what's missing.
That's a very lonely thing.
I was with her even when she was dying.
That was a difficult experience.
At least we got to embrace at that time.
That's something I used to listen to with Leslie, righ here.
And we held hands.
Death.
it's a frightening thought.
It's something I don't want to happen.
Much as I think our life in this world is.
often a pretty messy affair, I still would like to hang around.
I don't know the basic reason why I should want to,
or the basic reason why I should be afraid of it.
What does it means that I'm going to leave?
As I sit out now on my deck of the house.
I look at the trees blowing a little in the breeze.
And I've seen them innumerable times.
But somehow seeing the trees this time is a transcendent experience.
I see how marvelous it is and I think to myself
I've had these here all along.
But have I really appreciated them?
And the fact is that I have not.
Until now.
And in a way, it makes the fact of death even more difficult to accept.
It just brings tears to my eyes.
I've written books on a number of other topics.
And in each case I felt that I had solved the problem.
But this is not resolvable.
It's not just a theoretical question for me, which so many things can be.
It's the one thing that is central to my existence
that I have tried to come to terms with...
and have failed.
So I just go on existing, that's the truth of it is existing.
And waiting.
Waiting until I have to say goodbye.