Santa Fe, New Mexico
Year-end Letter December 2024
A NOTE ON THE QUOTATIONS BELOW
For a number of years now I have begun my Year-end letter with several quotes from books, articles, blogs and newsletters I have read during the past year that particularly struck me. In recent years they have usually been about the nature of love and the impact of losing it, or observations concerning what it means to be human. Why am I including so many quotations? It has to do with the fact that the older I get, the more the wisdom of others reverberates with me and it becomes so special that I want to make it available to my friends. The sense of shared experience amongst all of us intensifies with the passage of time and my life is incredibly enriched by the reflections of others.
One quotation that I repeat each year since I first used it in my 2019 letter is the excerpt from a Séamus Heaney poem, The Cure of Troy. Why? Because with each passing year I am struck with what a rare thing it is to achieve any true justice in this world, so that in those infrequent instances when it occurs, we must savor it, as a most precious treasure. This has become such a fixture in my mind that I think it bears constant repeating. The comforting statement that in the end justice always triumphs is simply a fantasy, in my opinion.
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The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse
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Life (I say) I’ve no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone’s clone.
I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order – gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.
I just don’t want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I’ve been trying
to appease you with my smile.
I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?
Wisława Szymborska, From poem Allegro Non Troppo
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Inasmuch as I no longer cling so hard to the good things of life when I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, I come to view death with much less frightened eyes.. When we are led by Nature’s hand down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit, one step at a time, she rolls us into this wretched state and makes us familiar with it.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
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All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up…It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die..
John Steinbeck, Letter to a friend, written during World War II
I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History. …. I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”
Oliver Sacks, Letters
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Once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme
Séamus Heaney, from The Cure of Troy
BOB
My marriage to Bob continues to be a source of immeasurable happiness to me. Sometimes I can almost believe we were intentionally put on this planet and brought into proximity so that we could meet each other and pull off that rarest of life’s blessings – a perfect match in almost all ways. We know we are getting into the upper reaches of human longevity and are willing to accept that whenever our time comes – first one, then the other – we have already had had an incredibly beautiful experience sharing our lives together. While we are both here, we remain a source of happiness, mutual insight, enrichment, and support through good times and right now, the challenging – dark – times we are living through.
GOOD READS
This year, the New York Times Book Review published a list of the 100 best books published in English so far in the 21st century. The list was developed based on input from approximately 500 notable people in the literary world. I was impressed that of the 100 books, I had read 26 of them, and that I read another 6 books written by authors listed - books were that closely related to those of the author that made it onto the list. So, depending how one wants to massage the statistics, I have read somewhere between ¼ and 1/3 of the top books written since 2000. Interestingly, readers of the Book Review were subsequently polled to form a top 100 list based on reader choice. On that list, I had read 21 of the 100 books, and 2 others by a listed author. So, I have now added a number more to my list of ones I want to read in the years ahead, and actually have begun already doing so. I recently finished three books on the list – An American Marriage, Sing, Unburied Sing, and The Looming Tower, with another one, Never Let Me Go, lined up on my Kindle.
As mentioned in the previous Year-End Letter about my plans, I did manage to read The Odyssey in the Emily Wilson translation, which brings a feminine perspective to what has always been seen as a very macho epic. It flowed smoothly in a very colloquial style. I then went on to read Daniel Mendelssohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, about a classical scholar who goes on a small boat excursion with his father to stop at places thought to be the basis of the places where Odysseus spent time in Homer’s narrative. Mendelssohn’s father is a difficult and demanding man, but through the journey they reach various insights and understandings, brought together by Odysseus’ journey – it is a wonderful addendum to the ancient classic. One other classic I read was the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu poem laying out a philosophy of how to conduct one’s life
LOCAL PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
Each year I continue to work on certain undertakings – this letter, which is a significant investment in time; the wall calendar I create each year based on my photographs (with some travel destination as the theme - for 2025 it is Florence, where we hung out in November 2023); maintaining on my Web site what is probably the most comprehensive listing of museums and non-commercial galleries in New York City. I continue to update and expand my Web-based comprehensive outline on everything one needs to know concerning Aging and Dying. Each year I give numerous travel programs at El Castillo and at our local travel bookstore, and in early 2024, I did a travel program for the Friends of Folk Art at the Museum of International Folk Art. I am part of a national Web-based precipitation tracking program where daily rainfall and snow reports are entered. A new and exciting development was that I was asked to join the Board of Directors of the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, and I have now begun to participate as one of the board members (terms are for 3 years).
In addition to joining the Board of the Festival, once again I led filled-to-capacity wildflower hikes during the Festival, with Bob continuing as my invaluable “sweep”, making sure no one got left behind. I remain active as a volunteer with a number of performing arts organizations, handling ushering, will call, ticket taking. I have made myself available to residents of El Castillo to help them with sticky computer and smartphone problems and regularly get calls for assistance, most of which, thankfully, are fairly straightforward and solvable.
My small garden in the back of my apartment takes more effort than one might think from late winter until I plant the spring blooming bulbs in the fall and “put it to bed.” But it continues to give me much pleasure and is an indescribably wonderful addition to my quality of life at El Castillo. Many of the perennials and shrubs are settling in and so it is taking on a well-established, comfortable look.
AGING
Like all years, this one meant a loss of friends and awareness of encroaching frailty for those I know. Several people who played an important role in my life passed away, so the circle gets smaller and smaller. Both Bob and I each lost a person who represented, respectively, one of our most fundamental relationships we formed in our earlier lives, so these losses have had a very profound impact on us. Fortunately, we have each other to share the experiences with.
Growing older has given me some insights which I find quite rewarding. While I am fully aware, and mostly accepting of, the decline in strength and reduction in a number of activities I used to enjoy – either I have had to eliminate or scale them back significantly -with that has emerged some real positives. I liken it to the sun’s setting and darkness coming on allowing the stars to fill the heaven. So what I am seeing is not so much loss as alternatives and these alternatives are enriching my life tremendously and making my later years quite rewarding.
I see this in two areas in particular. One is travel, including outdoor activities like hiking and camping. I’ve slowed down enormously so that travel involves seeing fewer places in a day and taking more breaks. The same with hiking – the distances are shorter and I go at a much slower pace. But with all that is the realization that taking my time brings an awareness of my surroundings, a depth of understanding that is extremely satisfying. Taking my time gives me opportunities I was missing before when I had a more competitive approach to my undertakings. The competition was self-imposed – it was not with anyone else. How good it feels to let go of that and let experiences just soak into me. One can see slowing down as a loss, but I see it, in many ways I could not have anticipated, as a gain.
The other dimension of my life where the same has happened – and I won’t go into much detail on this for obvious reasons – is my physical responses in a loving relationship, to wit, with Bob. The diminishing of certain physical capabilities has opened up whole new dimensions of connecting intimately with a love partner and I find this time in my life is perhaps more satisfying than I have ever known. I will leave it at that, but it has been an incredible personal revelation and enrichment that I never remotely imagined. A book I would strongly recommend, which captures beautifully the pleasures of aging and assessing one’s life at the point that you learn it will end soon, is Oliver Sacks’ Gratitude, the last book he wrote. It is a very quick read (less than 2 hours), comprised of four short essays on his thoughts on reaching 80 and then, a few years later, learning he had incurable cancer.
THE NATIONAL AND GLOBAL SCENE
When I consider the state of the national and the world it feels like this:
What is there to be said about the election outcome that hasn’t been said already? And that by the same reporters, commentators, politicos who got it wrong in the first place? There’s only one good thing I see: I never have to hear the expression “This isn’t who we are” again. It is who we are. It’s bad enough that someone like Trump and his sycophants exist but the worst part, really, is that a majority of the country (with increases in most minority groups as well) were willing to vote for such a totally disgusting human being. To me, this is such an act of colossal ignorance, stupidity and lack of responsibility as a citizen that the blame is squarely on the people of the country even more than on the leaders they elected.
I am no longer capable of analyzing what it all means except hatred and division will be triumphant in the country and I have a statistically significant chance of dying before the ugliness improves (and perhaps it won’t for a long, long time). So, I see my task in the months and years ahead as going into a state of, what some call, “internal emigration” – a focus on my own world, and cultivating friendships and caring, supportive relationships with like-minded people. I have stopped listening to news analysis podcasts, I skip reading much of the news and opinion columns in the New York Times that speculate on what might happen, whose appointment might or might not succeed – I even try to avoid the 5-minute NPR news updates.
I do think about the Founders of the country and how they designed a system of governance that did not envision that we would have both an authoritarian oligarchy and the countervailing power centers – namely the legislature and the judiciary – all giving up their responsibilities to check a completely irresponsible ruler. When the country and all the power centers cave, there is not much to be done and we will see cherished values crushed in a wave of criminality, corruption and cruelty that we have not known for a very long time. With the clowns being nominated (and likely appointed), it is going to be nothing short of a shit show. We are no longer a serious country. This a country that is to be run by the equivalent of a Mafia gang or the Soviet Politburo of old, with a leader having the impulse control (or lack thereof) of a badly behaved 2-year-old. It is almost impossible to imagine a country of 350,000,000 ruled by such a cast of characters. And the ass-licking we can expect from those who want to get in the good graces of Trump and his cronies should. be thoroughly nauseating.
Obviously there have been endless columns and essays on the results. I’ve avoided most. But I did read one in our local weekly paper, the Santa Fe Reporter, by Sasha Abramsky, a writer for The Nation, that captured my sense of loss but also my feeling of fury. You can read it at https://sfreporter.com/columns/election-results-have-america-on-the-reich-path/ and I recommend it to your attention. My sense is that the American citizenry has consciously decided to fly figurative jumbo jets into all our government institutions and intentionally smash them to bits, with some anarchic glee and conviction that this will make life better. Discovering that these bodies actually were important will be a painful learning experience.
I do take some comfort in listening to the podcast Fall of Civilizations to remind myself that in time this, too, shall pass. Each 2 – 3-hour episode focuses on a single great empire’s rise and fall. It is detailed, scholarly and endlessly fascinating and provides, along with art, music, philosophy a way to break out of the madness of the immediate and take a much broader perspective on human affairs over the course of many millennia.
Meanwhile, the political meme I heard this year that I can’t get out of my head goes like this: Universal health care is such a complex beast that only 32 or the world’s 33 developed nations have been able to make it work.
I am greatly saddened about the threat of climate change and the catastrophic impact it will have on our world. Despite the endless talk and hand-wringing, the picture gets worse and worse and there is no doubt in my mind that we as a species are committing collective suicide. Combined with the parlous state of the world and widespread suffering (Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti for starters) the dark future makes it hard for me to understand why anyone would want to bring children into this world, though I am always open to arguments to the contrary. It has become clear to me that the dire and obvious threat of climate change will only be dealt with when widespread disaster descends upon us, that is, unprecedented events in which millions die at once. And, of course, by the time that happens, it will be much too late to do anything about it.
TRAVELS
As was the case last year, this was a year of extensive travel, with three trips to destinations outside the U.S., plus some U.S. travel and two fabulous major camping trips.
It seems that lately we do one overseas trip to somewhere warm (or at least not particularly cold) in late winter, and this year it was Panama. One of Bob’s criteria for travel is to go to places that I have not been to on my own (or with David) so that we experience the place the first time together. I had been to Costa Rica twice, but never to Panama, which offers many of the same attractions, but is not quite as sought after as the former. We wanted to do a fair amount of birdwatching, but not exclusively. We wound up doing one partial trip with a small local birding outfitter and found a private guide for the two of us in the mountainous Western Highlands. We subsequently learned that this guide was widely considered the best birding guide in Panama, and indeed, we had an unforgettable experience with him. I’ve never had the luxury of a private guide and it made all the difference. We also visited a beautiful island archipelago in the Caribbean and explored Panama City and environs on our own.
In early June, after a week’s stop in New York, we went on to the Dolomites in northern Italy to do some hiking. We had heard people raving for years about how spectacular the Dolomites are and decided that it was finally time to explore this area. By going in June, we beat high season, yet with a few exceptions, most of the trails were snow-free and the exuberant explosion of wildflowers was in full gear. Culturally, the Dolomites is a little strange, as this area, called the Süd Tirol in German, had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I was “given” to Italy. (The Dolomites saw some of the most devastating fighting in that war and is the setting for Ernest Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms). So although we were in Italy, it felt much more like we were in Austria or Germany, and the first language remains German. All the same, we were blown away by the extravagant beauty of the mountains, forests and meadows. The trip also included three-day stays at the end on first Lake Garda and then Milan, which returned us to Italian speech, food, and style.
Then in October we went to the Azores (stopping before and after in the Washington, DC area), a set of nine islands spread over 300 miles and way out in the Atlantic Ocean, west of mainland Portugal (about 900 miles) and which are an “autonomous region” of Portugal and thus the westernmost component of the European Union. I had always wanted to visit these remote islands, and we were not disappointed. They are sub-tropical with every imaginable kind of plant growing. The land is a brilliant green, lapped on all sides by the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean. The islands are entirely volcanic and volcanism has shaped so much of their unusual life and culture. We made it to 4 of the 9 islands – being there in October, it was off-season in a place that does not get all that many visitors in the first place, so we had the delightful experience of having it largely to ourselves. As Bob pointed out, this is what Hawaii must have been like 100 years ago. The Azores has two designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites (one of which we explored) and many of the islands are in their entirety or in part, UNESCO Biosphere Reserves.
We did our share of domestic trips as well, including time in New York on the way to the Dolomites and time in the D.C. area on our way to the Azores. I continue doing two big camping trips with a good friend every spring and fall. This spring’s trip was one of our all-time best, to the Coast Redwoods on the California-Oregon border, which we caught at the peak of the wild rhododendron and azalea bloom. We had sufficient time to do many hikes in this awe-inspiring setting – when you walk amongst these giants, you cannot bring yourself to talk – it calls for silence and reverence. In September went camping in the Ozarks of northwestern Arkansas (we did spend a day at the beautiful Crystal Bridges Museum), and this, too, was a very satisfying trip, and a departure from most of our camping excursions, which focus on the magnificence of the Western U.S.
Right after Labor Day into the mountains of southern Colorado, and of course there were two extended stays in Crested Butte, Colorado in July for the Wildflower Festival, and then for a family visit, which always affords us time to spend in the Rocky Mountains at their most magnificent.
Another quite memorable adventure was a road trip to Texas for the total solar eclipse on April 8. We turned it into a combination of camping trip at various Texas state parks (despite the insanity of that state’s politics, its state parks are very attractive, well designed and beautifully maintained) and visits to friends and family in Austin, San Antonio and Dallas. We camped in the dramatic Davis Mountains of west Texas at the beginning and in the magnificent Caprock canyons of the Texas panhandle at the end and then at several parks in the heart of the Hill Country where the spring wildflowers were at their peak. We also visited the LBJ birthplace in Johnson City and the extensive LBJ Ranch a few miles outside of the town. Visits with friends also allowed us to spend time at some memorable historic sites (e.g., the San Antonio Missions, a UNESCO World Heritage site) and museums (The Kimbell in Ft. Worth plus the Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas). We were with friends in the Dallas suburbs for the actual eclipse, and though there were a few clouds, overall, it was a memorable experience when totality arrived and midnight darkness descended at 1:30 in the afternoon.
This definitely was one of our great travel years, though we have ambitious plans for 2025 as well. As long as we can keep doing these wonderful explorations, we will!
AND SO, IN SUM
At the personal level I am deeply grateful that Bob is in my life and offers me unstinting love, companionship and a considerably more positive outlook than is the norm for me. It is so good to have his bright optimism to contrast with my tendency to darkness and gloom. Though perhaps hard to believe, day to day, I enjoy my life and take pleasure in the little delights – sunshine, warmth, a good cup of coffee and freshly baked bread, and most of all, Bob’s presence! And with that, I close. Yours in the New Year, It won’t be easy getting through 2025 but we have friends and family and that is something to be grateful for.
Ken