Colloquy Podcast: More Rules for Aging with Roger Rosenblatt

“Don’t.” That’s the first of Roger Rosenblatt’s More Rules for Aging, and the underpinning of many of the new book’s 114 others. Don’t try to catch that 20-something jogger who just left you in the dust on your morning walk. Don’t criticize. Don’t worry about awards or accolades—or, for that matter, regrets. And don’t retreat, especially to Vermont.

Embedded in these wry and often funny maxims is genuine, hard-won wisdom gathered from a life now in its ninth decade of reading, teaching, and perhaps above all, writing. Rosenblatt is here to share some of it with us today.

Roger Rosenblatt is a New York Times guest essayist whose work has been published in 15 languages, the author of five New York Times Notable Books and three bestsellers. He has received two George Polk Awards for journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy, and a Peabody. He held the Briggs-Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing at Harvard, has received seven honorary doctorates, the Kenyon Review Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, and a Fulbright to Ireland, where he played on the Irish international basketball team. He received his PhD in English and American literature and language from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 1968.

Let me get the most obvious and perfunctory question out of the way. Your 2001 book Rules for Aging was a bestseller, so why did you want to write a sequel? What have you learned in the intervening years that inspired you?

My wife, Ginny, always liked the original book and said, “You ought to do another.” And two dear friends—Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist and satirist, and Jane Pauley, the journalist—have been barking at me for years, saying, “You ought to do another one of these.”

When I started to do it, I thought, well, it’ll just be more highfalutin wisecracks. But the intervening years taught me much more sympathy for the very people I was addressing in the first book. So I came up with rules—those you’ve seen, and the ones in the book—that address the sadnesses of life and the capacity to be more sympathetic in every situation.

Let’s talk about some of those observations and lessons. As I said in the introduction, your observations range from the wry and very funny to the practical and, at least for me anyway, sometimes the quite profound—as someone who’s getting a little long in the tooth myself. So what can a Charlie Chaplin film, and also a story about a meeting between the writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, teach us about the value of being still?

That anecdote about Coleridge and Wordsworth is simply that they lived near each other in the Lake District, and Coleridge came over to Wordsworth’s cottage one day and didn’t say a word. He stayed three hours or more. He said nothing to Wordsworth; Wordsworth said nothing to him. At the end of the afternoon, they thanked each other for a perfect day.

Now and then, to be sure, they used their silence, as very few people have, in the creation of beautiful things. But they meant it. Silence meant more to them than chatter.

As for Charlie Chaplin, [the writer and critic] James Agee said that the last scene in City Lights is the best scene in any movie ever made. It’s this silent scene in which the Tramp comes up to the young woman from whom he has been getting flowers and whose sight he has helped restore. When she was blind, she didn’t know who he was, and when she is able to see, she still doesn’t recognize him. By this time, he has spent time in jail. He starts to walk away in that heartbreakingly sad way Chaplin could manage.

Then something tells her who it is. Nothing is said. There is no external evidence. But something tells her that this is the man who had been giving her money and buying her flowers, and who enabled her, in fact, to see by paying for the operation. Not a word is said. The music comes up, and that’s it. It shows you that in the silences of life, there is a kind of beauty that is untouchable by noise.

That’s why silent films are so effective. Everybody made such a fuss about sound—“Oh boy, we’ve got sound”—but if they had waited a little, they would have seen that they had two things at once, to be sure. Still, some of the silent movies are just wonderful masterpieces.

I’d love it if you could talk about what one of your Harvard mentors, many years ago, John Kelleher, taught you about not allowing learning—at Harvard, of all places—to get in the way of enjoyment.

Kelleher was so great. There was nothing fancy about him. He used to talk about “the Fed,” as in the Faculty Club. He didn’t even shout around campus, but he would mutter things to me. He was just a regular guy who knew more about Irish history and literature than anybody before him, and I’m sure anybody after him.

He had a terrible stammer, and the stammer drove away some students, which was lucky for those students, including me, who said, “Let me hang around a while and hear what he has to say.” And what he had to say was pure gold.

In his scholarship, he looked at Joyce’s famous story “The Dead” and found that it was, practically episode by episode, an Irish folktale. He traced the Irish folklore down and wrote—he didn’t write very much, one book of poems and a number of scholarly articles—and in one article, he showed that “The Dead” depended on these ancient Irish folktales. In other words, he found something nobody else had ever found.

And then he said at the end of it, “Of course, this has nothing to do with enjoying the story.” That was Kelleher. There was no nonsense about him at all. He said, essentially, now that I’ve shown you the fancy way to look at it, you can also just enjoy the story.

There’s another anecdote from More Rules for Aging that was really moving to me. I just finished reading, actually, in an Extension School class here, To the Lighthouse for the first time—Virginia Woolf’s novel. You’ve got a story in there about an essay. So let me ask you this: what can we learn about death, and also life, from a moth and Virginia Woolf?

She would have been enchanted with that question, because that’s exactly what I’m sure she meant us to ask. She sees this moth beating about a corner of a window, and the moth is dying, and the moth tries and tries to right itself. She uses the word right—as in putting something in the right position—but we hear the pun in writing, too.

She admires the moth so much and says, in effect, that nothing she knew had shown the kind of strength that it showed in fighting its own death.

Years ago, I wrote a piece—somewhere, I forget, maybe when I was writing for Time—about my regret at not having gone to Vietnam. I was of the age when I could have gone, but I was in Harvard Graduate School and married at the time, and I had deferments. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam because I cared about the war and hated it, and hated the thought of doing that. But I also hated the idea that there was a whole bunch of people in the country—a very large group of people—who weren’t protected by Harvard, who weren’t protected by any number of things, and who had to go to that war whether they liked it or not.

So I wrote that piece. I said I regretted not going, not because I wanted to fight in the war, but because I wanted to be beside the people who didn’t have a choice. A guy sent me a framed motto, and it said, “Life has such rewards for those who fight for it that the sheltered never know.” He said that he would welcome me to his corps.

That is the thing of the moth: fighting, fighting against mortality, which is an impossible fight, and yet still doing it.

I believe that all the things that argue against taking a chance, being brave in any number of ways, are usually worth resisting.

There’s another rule in there—partly from the original book—“Push the wheel forward.” It comes from a movie I saw when I was a kid about breaking the sound barrier. It showed all the test pilots going up and pulling back naturally on the controls when they hit the sound barrier and got buffeting, buffeting, buffeting. As soon as the plane started to shake, they pulled back to slow it up, the aircraft cracked apart, and the pilots died.

One pilot went up, and when the plane started buffeting, he pushed the wheel forward. I believe in that. I believe that all the things that argue against taking a chance, being brave in any number of ways, are usually worth resisting.

One of the reviews of Rules for Aging called it an antidote to positive thinking. Along those lines, one of your new rules is “Go ahead and curse the darkness.”

That’s another thing you were asking me about—the difference between the two books. In this one, there were so many things that occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought of before. For example: “Run if you hear, ‘We must do this again.’” They don’t mean it. You don’t mean it. Nobody means it.

And another one is the “three reallys” rule. If you hear three reallys from somebody—“I really like you,” “You’re really the smartest guy I ever knew,” “You really can run the show beautifully”—he’s lying through his teeth. The third really betrays him.

I also loved what you had to say about the joys of rereading. I’m at a point in my life where I feel like there are so many things I could spend the remainder of my years just going back through again and again, and you could never get to the bottom of them. You mentioned in the book that a couple of things you’ve been rereading are Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby. I wonder whether either or both of those books has shown you anything in particular about the joys of rereading.

Yes, absolutely. I have a feeling that when you and I first read these books, they were not meant for us—not really. We could do all the things our teachers did and the concentrations Harvard wanted us to learn, and we dutifully learned them, but there was no life experience that tested these things.

So I used to think of Ahab and Gatsby merely as two characters defined by their pursuits. Now, when you look at them again—particularly Gatsby—there’s one scene I never really talked about, yet to me, Fitzgerald was finding the essence of the man.

Stupid Daisy has already killed somebody with the car and gone back to Tom. Gatsby, poor fellow, is worried about Daisy. Daisy is sharing fried chicken with Tom, the brute she married. She couldn’t care less about having killed somebody. The two of them are in their home, and sitting outside the home to protect Daisy is poor Gatsby.

And in that scene, you know what true heartbreak is. All that he hoped for in life, and all that was never going to be, is right there.

The reason why he was worth more than the lot of them put together.

Exactly. Nick Carraway says that. And Nick didn’t help him. Nick was sympathetic after Gatsby died, but Nick could have been of help to him, too. Nobody was of help to Gatsby, who, for all his riches, was the one who needed the most help.

Maybe the funniest story in the book has to do with a picnic and a chicken leg on the Charles River.

Let me tell you another story about the Charles, and then I’ll tell you about the chicken leg.

Ginny and I went to a Bob Dylan concert at Brandeis, but he didn’t show up, so everybody was furious. The next day, the two of us went down to the Charles just to sit and take in the weather. It was very nice. And I see a skinny guy trying to get a Frisbee out of the river, and foolishly, he’s hitting something in front of the Frisbee, so naturally, it goes farther away.

So I, in my infinite wisdom, say to the skinny guy—who is Bob Dylan—“If you just let the tide carry it, it’ll carry to shore.” So overwhelmed was he by this bit of wisdom that he said, “Do you want to join us?” The us was Joan Baez. She was sitting alone, and Ginny and I joined her. He sang “Mr. Tambourine Man.” For all I know, it was the first time. That’s the story, and I can barely tell it because people think I’m making it up. I could not make this up. It was just great.

But on the chicken leg: Ginny and I were having a picnic with some friends, and I’m sure I was pontificating. I’m sure I was gesturing with the chicken leg, you know, like Toscanini, in order to make a point or two and show what a smart fellow I was. So I hold out the chicken leg, and a little boy walks by, grabs it, and walks away. Ginny said, “You know, he thinks life is a chicken leg.” And for him, it was.

[Dylan] said, “Do you want to join us?” The "us" was Joan Baez. She was sitting alone, and [my wife] Ginny and I joined her. He sang “Mr. Tambourine Man.” For all I know, it was the first time.

Sometimes you just have to grab it when it’s out there in front of you.

Just take it. It’s meant for you.

We’ve been talking a lot about your forthcoming book, but I also want to ask you about a column you wrote. I was reading a bunch of your recent New York Times columns, and you wrote one in which you were talking about Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and this idea that whatever you think impossible in life is possible. You wrote, “Life is stranger and more dangerous than anything you may ever imagine, and yet more forgiving too.”

When I read that, I couldn’t help but think of your essay for The New Yorker, “Making Toast,” and the story about the premature death of your daughter, Amy. I’d love it if you could talk about that musing on life, both in the Times article and in your New Yorker essay, and how those experiences of grief and joy overlap.

That’s a wonderful question, and it’s a wonderful image, because it’s exactly what I think they do. When I wrote the piece for The New Yorker, Ginny and I were all grief. I managed the grief by writing; it was the only way I knew how. So I wrote the piece, and then I wrote the book that followed it.

But it took a long, long time for me to begin to see that something positive—or twice positive—could be made of what was, to us, the worst thing in the world.

She was a pediatrician, as I remember you writing it, and the heart defect she had was one in a million or something like that?

A month, maybe more, after she died, I went around to various cardiologists just to try to understand it. They all said they had never even seen it. They don’t look for it. It is so rare.

But now all these years have passed, and while we still do weep and we talk of Amy—the daughter we miss—we also talk of the daughter we cherished, and whom we remember as so full of life and humor and brilliance and all the things you would want in a person, much less a child. And that is the way of salvation: to see the joy possible in grief.

A friend of ours had a son who died by suicide, which is the worst thing I could imagine. I practically wrote that essay for her, saying this is a third stage of grief: there is shock, and then there is mourning, and then there is a touch of joy.

Now all these years have passed, and while we still do weep and we talk of [our deceased daughter] Amy—the daughter we miss—we also talk of the daughter we cherished, and whom we remember as so full of life and humor and brilliance and all the things you would want in a person, much less a child. And that is the way of salvation: to see the joy possible in grief. 

We posted on our news site—I can’t remember whether it was last year or the year before—your piece for the Times after the passing of Helen Vendler, the poetry critic who was on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, your beloved teacher. I didn’t know at the time that you’d also been friends with Jules Feiffer, the political cartoonist and writer, the architect David Childs, and the essayist Lance Morrow, all of whom have died recently as well. I’d love it if you could talk about how, because you mention it in More Rules for Aging, you incorporate the reality—and the increasing frequency—of loss into what you’ve described as the October of your life, which is, at least up here in New England, maybe the most beautiful season.

It is. When I wrote that piece for the Times, I think I wrote the line, “October is a beautiful month, don’t you think?” The idea that it is a beautiful time of life—and that there is even beauty in recalling loss.

My study, which is a few feet away, has more than one Jules Feiffer drawing; a picture of Lance Morrow and me when we exchanged the essay slot at the Times; a picture of David Childs at a memorial service. I begin to think I have all these old friends with me and around me, and the memory of them is searchable.

But when you reach this time of life, you never think this is going to happen. These are the people who should be a phone call away, you know, or an email away. And now they’re just away.

I have to admit, selfishly, I can’t help but ask you some questions about storytelling and writing. As someone who’s a storyteller and a writer myself, having the opportunity to learn from you and hear what you have to say is a gift. You’ve been a storyteller for much of your life. I read what you wrote about maybe the first story you ever told, and I’d love it if you could tell that story and talk about how it set you on the path that turned out to be really a writing life.

My paternal grandfather, whom I called Patta, was stone broke. He was an artist in Berlin, but when he came over with that wave of immigrants at the turn of the century, he couldn’t find work as an artist, so he became a sign painter in the Bronx.

My family lived around Gramercy Park, on the East Side around Twentieth Street, and he lived on the Lower East Side. On the way home, he would always stop and tell me a story. He’d sit at the end of my bed.

One night, he sat there and didn’t say anything, and I said, “Patta, aren’t you going to tell me a story?” He said, “Why don’t you tell me a story?” I said, “A story? I don’t know any stories.” He said, “Well, what did you do today?”

A neighborhood mother, Mrs. Morris, had taken a bunch of kids to Palisades Amusement Park. I said, “We went to the park, and we did all the rides. Then we swam in the pond in the park.” And I could see that I was holding his interest. I could see his intent face. So I started to make some stuff up. I said, “And then a crocodile came into the pond and started to chase us kids. And I ran up the hill to a cave. Luckily, there was a polar bear there having cotton candy, and he shared it with me.”

I looked at my grandfather, who had the sweetest smile on his face, and I knew what it was to hold somebody’s attention with words. So I always trace my interest in telling stories—and in writing—to that moment.

I don’t know that I have the story with my grandfather asking me to tell him a story. I just have the one about my grandfather telling me stories, and he was so spellbinding.

Well, that’s it. You remember the feeling in yourself. My grandfather just made it easy for me by flipping it and saying, “You try this for a change.”

Finally, I’d love it if you could leave us with your take on the components of good writing and how they’ve carried you through 60 tumultuous years of being a writer.

I’ll start with one of them, which is true: the importance of the noun. People always say verbs are so important because you can see the action in them. But I ask you to concentrate on the noun, because the noun gives you the picture of the thing itself. Emerson had a quote—which I forget now—on the importance of the noun.

Along with that, don’t overload your description. If it takes you three adjectives to describe something, you have the wrong something. It should never take that much.

Writing is a grand mystery in which you and I and others who practice it are very lucky to participate. One of the mysteries is how something comes to you. Richard Wilbur, the great poet, said, “Things will come to you. The chair, the throne, will come to the queen as she is about to sit down. The binoculars will come to the general as he’s about to look over a field. And an inspiration will come to you as you are about to write.” And it’s true.

So when my students said, “I have writer’s block. I haven’t been able to write for weeks,” I said, “Don’t push it. Go for a kayak ride or a bike ride or a run or a long walk. Something will come to you.” And if nothing comes to you after that, I said, “Try something else to do.”

Precision goes with what we were saying before. If you have three adjectives, you have the wrong noun. But it’s very hard to remember that the reader is there for your embrace. You have a life, a thought, a plan, a poem, a story, and you think enough of this invisible reader that you want to share that.