Dear James: Never Too Old for a Barbaric Yawp

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.

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Dear James,

I turned 82 last Bastille Day, and I cannot figure out how I got here. I should be dead. I have emphysema, I’m basically immobile, and I no longer really go anywhere—I certainly don’t travel. Otherwise, I’m just fine!

Dear Reader,

I very much appreciate this letter: the grit, the pith, the doom-tastic defiance. Thank you for sharing all this with me. Obviously, you are not fine, but your spirit is strong, and—perhaps even more important—your sense of humor is intact. I salute you.

In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to salute, from the gentle-ish tumulus of middle age, all of my correspondents who are dangling so bravely and with such élan from the gnarly heights of their 70s and 80s and 90s. I’m 56 years old, clear on some things, monumentally confused about others, committed to not being a dickhead if I can help it, and continually astonished that people, especially older people, would seek my advice. You all know more about life than I do—about life and how to live it, as the R.E.M. song has it. Even if I’m the one with an advice column called “Dear James.”

Gratefully,

James

Dear James,

I’m 83 years old and widowed, and I live alone. I read a lot. For most of my life, I have been a devotee of the English language. I learned to read Shakespeare in seventh grade.

It breaks my heart to see how authors, newspeople, young people, and just about everybody massacre the language. It especially offends me when people like you, prominent businesspeople, actors, artists, TV commentators of note, etc., have forgotten basic grammar.

Now that I’m old enough to be an “old lady,” I find that younger people dismiss me, just as they have historically done to seniors. Please don’t. Just tell me that you’ll improve your own grammar. It will make me feel better.

Dear Reader,

Well, you furnish me with no examples, so it’s going to be hard for me to defend myself. I happen to think my grammar is pretty sound. Could it be my punctuation you’re objecting to? If the sentences beginning with and or but are a problem for you, I invite you to simply reimagine the preceding periods as semicolons.

Also, now and again, I’ll write a sentence like this: “Rustle of a hair shirt in the darkness.” A fragment, often with no verb. Is it these little lumps that are causing you pain in your grammar centers? They are not syntactically complete, it’s true. But neither are the images, emotions, and sensations that life is constantly throwing at us. I suppose it’s the fragmentary nature of experience, the splintery whoosh of it, that I’m trying to get at when I allow my sentence structure to break down like that.

Anyway, I’m not dismissing you. But I can’t promise you that I’ll improve my grammar. In that department, if in no other, I think I’m probably performing at my maximum.

Searching high and low for my copy of Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words,

James

Dear James,

Once, a long time ago, my mother told me a weird story: She said that when I was born, in November of 1940, she and my dad had to leave me in the hospital, in the care of nuns. I was there for 35 days, including over Christmas—the saddest Christmas of her life, she recalled. The reason I had to stay in the hospital was because I had what she called “boils” all over my body. Three times a day, the nuns would wash me in carbolic acid and scrub away the scabs, my mother said, and my crying was so pitiful and loud that my parents couldn’t bear it. They left me there until the boils had cleared.

Although I of course have no memory of all that, I know I must have experienced something of the sort, because my body and face were covered with tiny white scars for many years. (They’ve since disappeared.) But now, at age 84, I awake probably three mornings out of 10 filled with dread and fear and torment. After a few breaths and something like a short prayer, I’m okay. I’m also, despite plenty of sorrows in my life—a divorce, the death of my second-born child—a happy man. My second wife and I are content, and we delight in our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. We have warm friendships, interesting hobbies, and good health.

And yet, I’m still caught up by these feelings of pain and despair. Could they be the residue of a baby’s experience 84 years ago? Should I just say to myself, You are a lucky man; you came through the pain and did not die—and that is a cause for joy? Would it make a difference if I could somehow understand more clearly that sweet little baby’s awful suffering (if it was suffering)? Wordsworth’s line from his ode “Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood” has always moved me: “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

Dear Reader,

I’m sorry you’ve been having these dreadful awakenings. My own comings-to-consciousness, lucky for me, are generally too clogged and fogged with the sediment of the night before to be pierced so cleanly by any feeling, good or bad.

I do have a couple of thoughts. First: What happens to us when we’re little, powerless not only to ward off the experience but also to understand it—I suppose that’s always going to be with us, isn’t it? Deep in the filaments, big vowels of pain still reverberating. There’s even something rather beautiful in the idea that you, at 84, are connecting so purely with your own infant sorrow.

My second thought concerns the “something like a short prayer” with which you coach yourself through these acute moments. I would focus on this. Choose the words carefully, and let them be comforting and encouraging, because you did indeed come through that pain and a lot more besides, and you deserve to enjoy your life.

Rooting for you in the a.m.,

James

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