Our answer to this question begins where we are and it extends to the time--forewarned by our retirement--when we shall not be at all. Let us reverently survey our remaining life and let us serenely contemplate our death. We have earned the right to be candid with ourselves, and we perhaps owe it as a duty to tell one another the truth. The larger truth is that retirement is prelude to what Crowfoot, leader of the Blackfoot Confederacy, described in these quiet but moving words:
A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
That truth we had better assume than unduly to presume upon increasing longevity. Certainly we will not live forever. And yet, mortality has given me no commission from either God or man to preach about it. But even a retiring teacher may think out loud about human destiny, letting his slips of speech fall where they may. I see that you are not only retiring but are also getting old; and I know what that eventually means. I can see it in you better than you can see it in yourselves. It is pervasive in men and women of our generation. I have never gone to but one of my college class reunions, and I'll never go to another. I was utterly embarrassed by the way classmates flaunted every sign of decay from arthritis to garrulity. I could not tell them without cruelty, but I can now say for truth's sake, that I was literally the only one of them whom the years had passed over and left young. But let us to the answer of our question, moralizing only in proper places as we go along. Whither our retirement?
Memory of the honorable estate from which we retire is the first treasure-trove to which we retire; for memories will go with us to the end of our days and will often, "in vacant or in pensive mood," as Wordsworth says,
. . . flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
More of solitude, and then more and more of it, we will have from here out. A dear friend, who is eighty-six, tells me that this is what has touched him closest about age: that be has outlived those who had a community of memories, and that communication becomes more and more difficult and thin. We shall all be further and further reduced to our own thoughts. Our legacy will probably grow richer for us in recall than it was in transaction.
Recall is, then, the first of our beads which we shall tell in retirement. With warm memories we have meat to eat that mere worldlings know not of; for, as Emily Dickinson says:
It may be wilderness without,
Far feet of failing men,
But holiday excludes the night
And it is bells within.
The next of our beads is a larger leisure in our second childhood than we have known since our first childhood. Little leisure have we known in fact, despite our limited hours of teaching. We have grown tired and yet worked on through passing days and well into many a night. And this has happened to us so continuously that on romantic rebound we have made a heaven of leisure, a heaven nobody could stand for a week once he got rested up. Mark Twain found this out through Captain Eli Stormfield's experience in the Hereafter, found out, I mean, that sittin' on a cloud-bank with a halo that got heavy, with wings he could not maneuver, and with a harp which he could not coax beyond a single tiresome tune--that such a heaven was no fit place for a grown man, who requires oscillation between the opposites which in his character he houses.
Next to forgetting the first law of imagination, that in the realm of fancy anything may mean anything, is a forgetting more fatal still to our happiness: namely, that satisfaction expands only into satiety--or back again to lack and want. It is clear to any thoughful man that leisure must be informed with appropriate endeavor. It itself is not enough to fill retirement to the full.
It is not enough, but it is something; and we shall now get our first full-sized dose of it for many a busy year. I, for one, mean to make the most of whatever leisure I actually find lurking around my trailer door. It will be good to loll at breakfast after having turned over for another snooze. It will be good to play a little at last, even to indulge in scrabble, for instance. I have never had time for it. An older friend has accused me, because of this lack, of what he calls "the great Un-American Inactivity." It will indeed be good to slow the pace and do a little plain and fancy sauntering, whatever form it take. Justice Holmes says, with his eye upon senescence, that "the riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill." This our new-found leisure will afford for each of us, "a little finishing canter" as the day dies away.
But what, after all, is leisure save unpressured work? Clearly idleness for such as we is odious. So I count as my third bead self-rewarding work that is freely chosen to fill the leisure hours. We will, of course, keep on doing what we have been doing, but not so much of it. And let us not kid ourselves, as we cannot kid each other, that the quality of our output will be proportioned to the quantity of leisure now at our disposal. If you have long spent more time dreading to write or grade papers or mend the leaking faucets at home than you have in doing the job; if you have made excuses all your life for not doing proudly what you were paid to do; if you have chronically waited to do your best until there was nothing else to do--then you will hardly bloom out now as editors' models, registrars' pets, or other Beau Brummels of senescent virtue.
That masterpiece of research you've put off to retirement you'll likely now in further easy stages put off to eternity. I'll not bet even on your stopping smoking now that you have nothing else to do, when you couldn't stop before this because you had everything else to do. Walter Mittys will be Walter Mittys.
Every year our accumulated character gets more and more the best of our resolutions, and surrender to habits of inefficiency or of selfexculpation becomes the visible stigmata of our fate. "There," said the sot from the gutter, as he watched the successful man whirl by in a Cadillac, "there but for me go I." This dominance of habit holds hardly less of virtue than of vice. When the normal lethargy of age has had its way with our dwindling resolution, we shall in our new-found leisure be mostly doing less and less of the more and more we have promised ourselves to do. This continuity of character is a small enough boon for retirement; but it is something to know that we can, and probably will keep on doing the same we have been doing, in diminishing degree. In that way we won't be slipping up on ourselves. Let us put it down, then, as a law of our nature and the arbiter of our fate, that we shall not do much which we have not been doing, and shall do less and less of what we have been doing. This reliance upon character I count as my third authentic bead.
Let it, however, be the fourth bead of our rosary for old age that we can and probably will do something, a little, of the different. Surely we have all promised ourselves that come retirement and leisure, we would do something "worthwhile"--and little doubt each has dreamed therewith of innovation. Seldom is the labor of our livelihood wholly self-rewarding, and retirement is a chance to even accounts with ourselves before we die. . . .
That is the fourth of my beads: our ability to do something of the different to bemuse our new-found leisure.
The fifth of my beads comes so close to branding me a "do-gooder" that at the expense of arousing suspicion I wish to forfend myself of the accusation. To be a do-gooder is, as you must know, something semiheinous in our generation. But to do more good than we have done is still a general aspiration, and one quite honorable. But do you know the difference here involved? The doer of good does something with people; the do-gooder does something to people. The do-gooder makes "easy simplicity of lives not his own." No do-gooder does so little good as an old do-gooder. When you have not saved the world in sixty-five years, you will hardly save it in the remaining years, not even if you redouble your effort to make up for bedimming goals.
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