I had oysters for lunch with a friend. “This has been a good season for these bivalve
mollusks” he said. “With all the dangers we know about eating raw seafood, why
do we do it?”
“Sensual pleasure,” I said, “no other reason.”
And then we talked about pleasure as a guiding principle.
Not of the temporary types, but the pleasure as an art of celebrating life.
“We artists use canvas, photographic paper, computers,
sound, scream, words and silence to feed our art,” he thoughtfully stated, “yet
we die of tuberculosis, cirrhosis, depression, loneliness and forgotten. We age
if we are lucky, yet do we age with artfulness?”
Then we talked about the art of living, the art of
aging, and the art of dying.
… When I returned home, I parked my bicycle in its
usual place, scratched my dog behind the ears, and recalled a few ideas from
Simone de Beauvoir’s book La Vieillesse.
I do not have a copy anymore, so went to the Web and found an English
translation as “The Coming of Age”. So I read the first chapter, this time in
English.
A few passages reminded me of my original reading,
while others were a new discovery. I reread these few lines:
“Great
numbers of people, particularly old people, told me, kindly or angrily, but
always at great length and again and again, that old age simply did not exist! There
were some who were less young than others, and that was all it amounted to.”
My dog was sleeping under my desk and snoring. I
reached for his head and touched his face. He opened one eye but did not raise
his head. He knew it was me. That I was touching him to stop his snoring. Just
like old couples do. We have been together now for ten years.
I looked at him and saw an old dog. Yet, every
morning, the moment I put his leash on and open the front door, he jumps out
looking for squirrels. For an hour or so he is like a young puppy running after
every squirrel even if he had never caught one. It does not matter; it is the
pleasure of chasing. When we come back home, he drinks water from his bowl, eats breakfast, goes
to his favorite corner and sleeps for hours. And if I am around and writing, he
comes to sleep under my desk, put his head on my foot and snore while seemingly
dreaming of squirrels.
Is he, at some hours of the day, less old than other
dogs? Or at other times less young than he used to be?
I wanted to read more. So I checked a reference to
Seneca’s work. This passage, from his Letters from a Stoic written two
thousand years ago made me smile:
“We
should cherish old age and enjoy it. It is full of pleasure if you know how to
use it. Fruit tastes most delicious just when its season is ending. The charms of
youth are at their greatest at the time of its passing.”
What was my canvas? My dance, my photographic paper,
my silence?
After a few minutes I realized that the answer was
very apparent and simple: I was my own canvas, my secret dance, my own
photographic paper in a darkroom full of unprinted pictures, and that it was my
own silence that I share in my writings, my photos, and the whispers during
walks on promenades at the edge of the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the
Atlantic, the Irish Sea, the Pacific, Adriatic or China Sea.
… Do we age with artfulness? I do not know, but
after having oysters for lunch, I felt like reading Simone de Beauvoir and taking
my dog for a long walk on the promenade around the port of Baltimore.
September 17, 2014
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2104
PS/ The first picture was taken near a port celebrating the Atlantic Ocean. The second is from Prague on a rainy day.
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