Unit 6  Section 1Exercise 2 The experience of aging
In the previous exercise, we encountered the experience of aging through the lens of dispassionate observers. Now we will hear a few voices reporting directly on their own experiences. Read the poem and the excerpt from Vladimir’s novel Ada. Answer the study questions.
Robert Pringle’s , “In the geriatric lane”
Stopped in traffic, the DynaFlow
Transmission of your life
Slips into reverse,
You depress the brake,
Already to the floor, pop
The imaginary clutch.
Still, you have the sensation
Of moving backward.
You tilt the rearview mirror
To retrograde identities that reassure.
You try to ignore the horns,
Epithets—the laughter.
You are successful.
Slowly, the wheels begin to turn.
In neutral, the steering wheel sways.
You realize you are being towed
From the intersection of present
And past. Your future,
Growing smaller
As you pick up speed, turns green.
Vladimir Nabokov, from “ Ada”
He now noticed that furtive, furcating cracks kept appearing in his physical well-being…A stuffed nose caused a stifling dream and, at the door of the slightest cold, intercostal neuralgia waited with its blunt spear. The more spacious his bedside table grew the more cluttered it became with such absolute necessities of the night as nose drops, eucalyptic pastilles, wax earplugs, gastric tablets, sleeping pills, mineral water, zinc ointment, a spare cap for its tube lest the original escape under the bed, and a large handkerchief to wipe the sweat accumulating between the right jaw and right clavicle, neither being accustomed to his new fleshiness and insistence to sleep on one side only…the pains of life affected him more than the tympanic rack, when a saxophone blared, or when a subhuman young moron let loose the thunder of an infernal motorcycle, The obstructive behavior of stupid, inimical things,--the wrong pocket, the ruptured shoestring, the idle hanger toppling with a shrug and a hingle-tingle in the darkness of a wardrobe—made him utter the Oedipian oath of his Russian ancestry…At seventy, he tried jogging before breakfast in a secluded lane, but the clacking and bouncing of his breasts reminded him too dreadfully that he was thirty kilograms heavier than in his youth….Normally, one or two sleeping pills helped him to hold at bay the monster of insomnia for three or four hours in one blessed blur, but sometimes, especially after he had completed a mental task, a night of excruciating restlessness would grade into morning migraine. No pill could cope with that torment.”
Study Questions
1. In the Pringle poem, what does the author say about the experience of aging? Interpret the following phrases/lines:
--Stopped in traffic
--you have the sensation
Of moving backward .
--You realize you are being towed
2. What do you make of the last line?
3. What kind of medical and quality-of-life problems does the narrator in the Nabokov excerpt list? Are these part of normal aging or not?
4. Compare and contrast the two authors’ representations of the experience of aging.
|
