The Pendulum's Inexorable Arc

One of the great pleasures of my life is reading Pete Hamill.  Better said, reading is one of the great pleasure of my life.  Pete Hamill is among my favorite writers to read.  

Hamill's genius (my word - not his) was that he was not merely an author of novels or non-fiction works (itself a difficult skill at which to develop proficiency) and he was not merely and old-school New York newspaperman (itself an equally difficult skill at which to develop proficiency) but that he was both.  His ability to infuse his words with vitality was not tied to a word limit or an inches of space restriction.  

This past weekend, while enjoying a simply beautiful early October Saturday afternoon at our little Paradise by the Sea with the Missus, I finished Hamill's Piece Work.  

It is a collection of columns and essays he wrote for various publications across a wide range of topics, including "Writings on Men and Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Friends, Small Pleasures, Large Calamities, and How the Weather Was".  I am not making up any of those subjects.  Each of them is mentioned on the book's front cover. 

The penultimate essay in the book is one Hamill wrote in 1988, shortly after his fifty-second birthday.  I am two-thirds of the way to my fifty-fourth birthday (although given how little I have been able to do in 2020 I am thinking of continuing to list my age as 53 even once my birthday comes and goes and perhaps including an explanatory footnote to clear up any confusion).  As I sat reading it, I was overcome by two thoughts:  I wish I possessed the talent to write what had been written and I am forever grateful to Hamill that he did. 

The essay begins: 

52

I have arrived at last in that peculiar zone 

where I am no longer young and not yet old. 

This stage of human life is called, of course, middle age.

Alas, even that familiar phrase is inaccurate; at fifty-two, 

 I am not in the middle of my life, for there is 

little chance that I will live to 104. 

But I am certainly in the middle of my adult life, 

and this sometimes causes personal astonishment...

That is to say, I have lived a life. 

I am far from finished with that splendid accident, 

but there is one enormous fact attached to the condition

called middle age:  I know now that the path is leading inexorably

through the evening to the barn. And not far away, up ahead,

perhaps over that next lavender hill, lies death. 

Towards its end, Hamill writes: 

But in middle age,

you learn to forgive yourself.

Faced with the enormous crimes of the world

(and particularly the horrors of this appalling century),

you acquire a sense of proportion about your own 

relative misdemeanors. You have slowly recognized the

cyclical nature of society's enthusiasms, from compassion

to indifference, from generosity to meanness, 

liberalism to conservatism and back, 

as the pendulum cuts its inexorable arc in the air...

And most often, we measure

our own triumphs and disasters, errors and illusions, 

against the experiences of others. In middle age, I know 

that it is already too late to agonize over my personal failings.

As Popeye once said, "I yam what I yam an' that's all I yam." 

The damage of the past is done; nothing can be done to avoid it

or to repair it; I hope to cause no more, and I'm comforted 

by remembering that to many people I was also kind. 

For good or ill, I remain human. 

That is to say, imperfect. 

I know not if there is a middle-aged person among us who reads those words and does not recognize the resemblance between the life described in those pages and the one we live in our day-to-day. I for one did. 

Whether I have granted myself absolution for my sins or simply recognized that I cannot undo what I have done is a question whose answer lies far closer to the latter than the former. Regardless, the air is cut by the pendulum's inexorable arc. 

-AK