Philip Roth went to Weequahic High School in Newark when I taught in Central High School in Newark. I never met him although one of my colleagues who taught religious school in Temple B’nai Jeshurun was his English teacher for a term or two. I have read almost very one of his books trying to recapture the rightness of his success in dealing with hormone pressures in Portnoy’s Complaint. None of his works since then have meant much to me except now in the excellent review in the NY Times Book Review review of Everyman by Nadine Gordimer.
What Gordimer has done is explore the themes of a number of giants of 20th Century writers who, facing their own mortality, have written about dealing with memories of early lusts and desires. I find such writing scary for it reminds me of how much I have survived and the limits of time survival has placed on me. The interesting emerging understanding is that Everyman is me, too. In aging, I am constantly accompanied by that earlier me who tried to understand the meaning of life and the changes that took commanding place in a body that was no longer a child but with the demands of an adult. Adulthood is not really understood for we are thrust into it too soon and are never allowed to deviate from it until inevitable infirmities cause you to resort to medication and canes in order to live yet another day.
I can trace each of my aches and pains to the moment I earned them. I can thank the doctors who finally found the skills to keep me alive through heart surgeries and that dreaded procedure that unmans Everyman.
Increasingly I have been dwelling on my own mortality while trying to make sense of the limits of life on our planet. Like my own excesses (what are these? I do not drink or carouse.) the planet is shuddering from the blows mankind gifts it with. My correspondents send me e-mails with reminders of the glory of “God’s” work. The most recent is a gorgeous panoply of colors of spring flowers decorating a once bare hillside. This rendition of a computer enhanced program does not dim the glory of nature but reminds those of us encased in city apartments that there is a natural world out there that we avoid (or cannot get to) because we are preoccupied with our navels, deterioration or exhaustion.
Everyman is in every one of us and Roth should be thanked for his sensitive treatment of this lachrymose subject. Yet, each morning I will get up with my aches and my pains and am glad that I do not automatically reach for my canes or my walker to get to the bathroom in time. Such is the reward of those of us who make it this far. Such is the fate of every one of us.