The Social Animal

CHAPTER 21 THE OTHER EDUCATION

EVERY WINTER THE GREAT AND THE GOOD MEET IN DAVOS, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. And every night during that week at Davos, there are constellations of parties. The people in the outer-ring parties envy the people in the mid-ring parties, and the people in the mid ring wish they were invited to the ones in the inner ring. Each ring features a slightly more elevated guest list than the last—with economists and knowledgeable people on the outside and ascending levels of power, fame, and lack of expertise toward the center.

At the molten core of the party constellation, there is always one party that forms the social Holy of the Holies—where former presidents, cabinet secretaries, central bankers, global tycoons, and Angelina Jolie gather to mingle and schmooze. And this party is without question the dullest in the whole constellation. The Davos social universe, like social universes everywhere, consists of rings of interesting and insecure people desperately seeking entry into the realm of the placid and self-satisfied.

After a few decades of business success and eight years of ever more prominent public service—as deputy chief of staff during the first Grace term and commerce secretary in the second—Erica had gained entry to the Davos epicenter. She was the sort who got invited to all the most exclusive and boring parties.

In retirement, she now served on worthy commissions on intractable problems—deficit spending, nuclear proliferation, the trans-Atlantic alliance, and the future of global trade agreements. She was not one of those people whose face lights up at the sound of the words “plenary session,” but she had become a battle-hardened summiteer—able to withstand barrages of eminent tedium. She had become friends or acquaintances with the former world leaders who also sat on these commissions and who traveled during the year from Davos to Jackson Hole to Tokyo and beyond to express grave concern about the looming crises that people still in power were too shortsighted to solve.

At first, Erica had been anxious and self-conscious when chatting with former presidents and global celebrities. But the awe fell away pretty quickly, and now it was just like the same old knitting circle gathered once again at a different world resort. One former minister had resigned in disgrace, a president had been a complete flop in office, a former secretary of state had been gracelessly pushed from power. Everybody’s sore spots were avoided, and all was forgiven in the rough-and-tumble world they had endured.

And as for their conversation … well, it was a conspiracy buff’s worst nightmare. It transpires that when the people in charge of the world’s great institutions get together, what they really want to talk about is golf, jet-lag remedies, and gallstones. The days were consumed with portentous concern over the threat of rising protectionism, and the nights by intense stories about prostates. The meetings operated on what was called the Chatham House Rule, which meant that nobody was permitted to say anything interesting. The highlight of the nightly conversations was the occasional tale of backroom idiocy.

Former world leaders inevitably have a repertoire of backroom stories that they use to entertain people at dinner parties. One former president told the story of the time he made the mistake of bragging about his dog to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. During the next Moscow summit, Putin entered at lunch with four Rottweilers, and bragged, “Bigger, faster, and stronger than yours.” That led a former National Security Advisor to tell the story of the time Putin stole his ring. He’d been wearing his West Point graduation ring at a meeting. Putin asked to see it and put it on his own finger, and then deftly slipped it into his pocket while they were talking. The State Department raised a ruckus trying to get it back, but Putin wouldn’t give. Another prime minister told of the time he snuck out of a cocktail party at Buckingham Palace to snoop around the private quarters and got caught and screamed at by the queen. Stories like those were always delicious and left the impression that world affairs are controlled by third graders.

Erica nonetheless enjoyed this whirl. She thought the commissions did some good, despite their insipidness. And she enjoyed her continued glimpses into the inner workings of world affairs. She often would sit back in the middle of some long meeting and wonder how it was that these men and women had risen to the top of the global elite. They weren’t marked by exceptional genius. They did not have extraordinarily deep knowledge or creative opinions. If there was one trait the best of them possessed, it was a talent for simplification. They had the ability to take a complex situation and capture the heart of the matter in simple terms. A second after they located the core fact of any problem, their observation seemed blindingly obvious, but somehow nobody had simplified the issue in quite those terms beforehand. They took reality and made it manageable for busy people.

As for herself, Erica had reached a status plateau. She had reached a certain eminence. She was treated as a significant person wherever she went. Strangers would approach and say they were honored to meet her. This didn’t make her feel happy by itself, but it did mean that she was no longer gnawed by the sort of ambition anxiety that had driven her through much of her life. Recognition and wealth, she had learned, do not produce happiness, but they do liberate you from the worries that plague people who lack but desire these things.

In outer appearance, Erica still thought of herself as the pushy young girl. She experienced those moments of shock, when she came upon her own face unexpectedly in the mirror and was stunned to find it was not the face of a twenty-two-year-old woman. It was the face of an older woman.

Now, she had trouble hearing women with high voices, and she had trouble hearing anyone at loud parties. She sometimes could not get out of low chairs without pushing herself up with her arms. Her teeth were darker than before and her gums had shrunk, leaving more of her teeth exposed. She had shifted to softer foods (the muscles around the jaw lose 40 percent of their mass over the course of a normal life).

In addition, she had begun holding the handrails when she descended a staircase. She heard stories of more elderly friends who had fallen and broken hips (of those who do, 40 percent end up in a nursing home and 20 percent never walk again). She had also begun taking an array of pills each day, and had broken down and bought one of those pill organizers.

Culturally, Erica felt mildly out of it. There were now a couple of generations of young movie starlets who she could not tell apart. Pop music trends had come and gone without really attracting her notice.

On the other hand, Erica felt that in her later years she had arrived at a more realistic appraisal of herself. It was as if she had achieved such a level of worldly security that she now could look realistically at her shortcomings. In this way, success had brought a humility that she had never felt before.

She had read the books and plays that treated old age as a remorseless slide into decrepitude. In As You Like It, Shakespeare’s morose character, Jaques, calls old age “second childishness and mere oblivion.” In the middle of the twentieth century developmental psychologists, when they treated old age at all, often regarded it as a period of withdrawal. The elderly slowly separate themselves from the world, it was believed, in preparation for death. They cannot be expected to achieve new transformations. “About the age of fifty,” Freud wrote, “the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.”

But Erica did not feel any of that, and indeed more-recent research has shown that seniors are completely capable of learning and growth. The brain is capable of creating new connections, and even new neurons, all through life. While some mental processes—like working memory, the ability to ignore distractions, and the ability to quickly solve math problems—clearly deteriorate, others do not. While many neurons die and many connections between different regions of the brain wither, older people’s brains reorganize to help compensate for the effects of aging. Older brains might take longer to produce the same results, but they do tend to get the problems solved. One study of air traffic controllers found that thirty-year-olds had better memories than their older colleagues, but sixty-year-olds did just as well in emergency situations.

A series of longitudinal studies, begun decades ago, are producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development—and they are not even talking about über-oldsters who take their coming mortality as a sign they should start parachuting out of airplanes.

Most people report being happier as they get older. This could be because as people age they pay less attention to negative emotional stimuli. Laura Carstensen of Stanford has found that older people are better able to keep their emotions in balance, and bounce back more quickly from negative events. John Gabrieli of MIT has found that in older people’s brains the amygdala remains active when people are viewing positive images but is not active when people are viewing negative images. They’ve unconsciously learned the power of positive perception.

Gender roles begin to merge as people age. Many women get more assertive while many men get more emotionally attuned. Personalities often become more vivid, as people become more of what they already are. Norma Haan of Berkeley conducted a fifty-year follow-up of people who had been studied while young, and concluded that the subjects had become more outgoing, self-confident, and warm with age.

There’s no evidence to suggest that people get automatically wiser as they get older. The tests, such as they are, that try to assess “wisdom” (a combination of social, emotional, and informational knowledge) suggest a kind of plateau. People achieve a level of competence on these tests in middle age, which holds steady until about age seventy-five.

But wisdom is the sort of quality that eludes paper-and-pencil tests, and Erica felt that she possessed skills in pseudo-retirement that she did not possess even in middle age. She felt she had a better ability to look at problems from different perspectives. She felt she was better at observing a situation without leaping to conclusions. She felt she was better at being able to distinguish between tentative beliefs and firm conclusions. That is to say, she was better able to accurately see the ocean of her own mind.

There was one thing she didn’t experience much—a sense of being vividly alive. In the early days of her career, she’d be flown out to some Los Angeles hotel, put up in a suite by the client, and walk around the rooms giggling at the grandeur of it all. In those days, she would book an extra day in nearly every city she visited to experience the museums and the historic sights. She could remember those solitary walks around the Getty or the Frick, and the feeling of being transported by art. She remembered the special energy of her exalted moods—a night spent getting lost in Venice with a novel under her arm, or touring the old mansions in Charleston. Somehow that didn’t happen anymore. She no longer booked the extra sightseeing days at the end of her trips—there was no time.

As her career got more demanding, her cultural activities got less so. Her poetic, artistic, and theatrical tastes had dropped from highbrow to middlebrow and below. “By the time we reach age fifty,” University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Andrew B. Newburg has written, “we are less likely to elicit the kinds of peak or transcendent experiences that can occur when we are young. Instead, we are more inclined to have subtle spiritual experiences, and refinements of our basic belief.”

In addition, Erica’s work had dragged her in a prosaic direction. She had a great talent for organization and execution. This had pulled her, over the course of her life, to become a CEO and a government official. It had pulled her into the world of process.

The number of her acquaintances multiplied over the years as the number of her true friendships diminished. The Grant Longitudinal Study found that people who were neglected in childhood are much more likely to be friendless in old age (in this way the working models submerge and then surface through life). Erica was not solitary. But sometimes she felt she lived in crowded solitude. She was around a shifting mass of semi-friends, but was without a small circle of intimates.

Over the years, in other words, she had become more superficial. She had been publicly active but privately neglectful. She had, over the course of her career, reorganized her own brain in ways that were perhaps necessary to professional achievement, but which were not satisfying now that her drive for worldly achievement had been fulfilled.

She entered retirement beset by a feeling of general numbness. It was as if there was a great battle she had never noticed before, a battle between the forces of shallowness and the forces of profundity. Over the years the forces of shallowness had staged a steady advance.

And then of course the river Styx was coming into view—death, pegging out, the final frontier. Erica did not think this would happen to her or Harold anytime soon. (Surely not. They were too healthy. They each could point to relatives who had lived into their nineties, though of course in reality such comforting correlations mean almost nothing.)

Nonetheless, her older acquaintances were dying at a regular rate. She could, if she chose, go on the Internet and find her morbidity odds—one in five women her age gets cancer; one in six gets heart disease; one in seven diabetes. It was a little like living in wartime; every few weeks another member of her social platoon was gone.

The effect was both terrorizing and energizing. (She seemed to live permanently in a state of mixed emotions.) The rushing presence of death changed her perception of time. Slowly a challenge formed in Erica’s mind. Retirement would liberate her from the forces of shallowness. She could design her own neural diet, the influences and things that would flow into her brain. She could turn to deeper things. Now she could embark on a glorious lark.

Being Erica, she had to write out a business plan for herself. In the final chapter of her life, she wanted to live more vividly. She took out a legal pad and wrote a list of different spheres of her life: reflection, creativity, community, intimacy, and service. Under each category she wrote down a list of activities she could pursue.

She would like to write a short memoir. She’d like to master some new art form, to do something difficult and achieve some competence. She’d like to be a member of a circle of girlfriends who could come together every year to laugh and drink and share. She would like to find some way to teach the young. She’d like to learn the names of the trees so that when she walked through a forest she would know what she was seeing. She’d like to strip away the bullshit and find out whether or not she believed in God.

Mindfulness

In the first months of retirement, she had an urge to reconnect with old friends. She had not kept in touch with anyone from the Academy, and almost all of her friends from college had fallen away as well. But Facebook allowed her to remedy all that, and within weeks she was happily exchanging e-mails with friends from decades gone by.

Renewing these old friendships gave her pleasure beyond all reckoning. These contacts aroused parts of her own nature that had lain dormant. She discovered that one of her old college roommates, a southern woman named Missy, lived not twenty-five miles away from her, and one day they arranged to have lunch. Erica and Missy had lived together in their junior year, and though they shared a room, they had not grown particularly close. Erica was frantically busy in those days, and Missy, a premed student, had spent all her time in the library.

Missy was still thin and tiny. Her hair had gone gray, but her skin was still smooth. She’d become an eye surgeon, had a family, recovered from a double mastectomy, and had retired a few years ahead of Erica.

During lunch Missy excitedly described the passion that had transformed her life over the past few years: mindfulness meditation. Erica felt her stomach drop, expecting to hear stories of yogis, spiritual retreats at ashrams in India, and Missy resplendently getting in touch with her inner core—the normal New Age rigmarole. Missy had been the hardened scientist at school, and now she’d apparently gone to mush. But Missy talked about her meditations the way she used to talk about her homework assignments, with the same cool rigor.

“I sit cross-legged and upright on the floor,” Missy was saying. “At first I concentrate on my breathing, anticipating the exhaling and inhaling, and then feeling my body fulfilling my anticipations. I feel my nostrils open and close, and my chest rise and fall. Then I center my thoughts on a word or phrase. I don’t repeat it over and over again, I just keep it in the front of my mind, and if I find my thoughts wandering, I bring them back. Some people pick ‘Jesus’ or ‘God’ or ‘Buddha’ or ‘Adonai,’ but I just picked ‘Diving within.’

“Then I watch to see what feelings and perceptions and images flow into my brain, letting the experience unfold naturally. It’s like sitting still as various thoughts emerge into consciousness. Often in the beginning, I lose focus. I find myself thinking about my chores or the e-mails I have to answer. That’s when I repeat my phrase. After a little while, most of the time, the outside world begins to fade back into the shadows. I don’t even have to repeat the phrase anymore. I don’t know how to describe it. I begin to be aware of awareness.

“My identity, my ‘I-ness’ fades away and I enter the sensations and feelings that are bubbling up from down below. The object is to welcome them nonjudgmentally, without interpreting them. Just welcome them as friends. Welcome them with a smile. One of my teachers compares it to watching clouds drift into a valley. These puffs of awareness float by, and they are replaced by other puffs and other mental states. It’s like having access to processes that are there all along, but are usually unseen.

“I’m not doing a good job of putting it into words, because the whole point is that it is beneath words. When I try to describe it, it seems so stale and conceptual. But when I’m in that state there is no narrator. There’s no interpreter. There are no words. I’m not really aware of time. I’m not telling myself a story about myself—the play-by-play announcer is gone. It’s all sensations happening. Does that make any sense?”

Apparently Missy had found a way to directly perceive Level 1.

“When I come out of the state, I’m changed. I see the world differently. Daniel Siegel says it’s like you’ve been walking through a forest at night, shining a flashlight to light your way. Suddenly you turn off the flashlight. You lose the bright beam of light on the narrow spot. But gradually your eyes start to adjust to the darkness, and you can suddenly see the whole scene.

“I used to assume that my emotions were me. But now I sort of observe them rising and floating through me. You realize that things you thought were your identity are really just experiences. They are sensations that flow through you. You begin to see that your ordinary ways of perceiving are only a few vantage points among many. There are other ways of seeing. You develop what the Buddhists call ‘beginner’s mind.’ You see the world as a baby sees it, aware of everything all at once, without conscious selection and interpretation.”

Missy said all this briskly over a salad, spearing her asparagus. Her description of mindfulness meditation suggested that in fact it is possible, with the right training, to peer beneath the waterline of consciousness, into the hidden kingdom. The normal conscious mind might see only colors in a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, but perhaps it was possible to widen the view and suddenly be able to see the rest of the actual world.

In fact, neuroscientists—who are generally a hardheaded lot—have profound respect for these sorts of meditative practices. They’ve hosted the Dalai Lama at their conferences, and some of them make their way to monasteries in Tibet precisely because there is an overlap between the findings of the science and the practices of the monks.

It’s now clear that the visions and transcendent experiences that religious ecstatics have long described are not just fantasies. They are not just the misfirings caused by an epileptic seizure. Instead, humans seem to be equipped to experience the sacred, to have elevated moments when they transcend the normal boundaries of perceptions.

Andrew Newberg found that when Tibetan monks or Catholic nuns enter a period of deep meditation or prayer, their parietal lobes, the region of the brain that helps define the boundaries of our bodies, becomes less active. They experience a sensation of infinite space. Subsequent research found that Pentecostal worshipers undergo a different, though no less remarkable, brain transformation when they are speaking in tongues. Pentecostals do not have a sense of losing themselves in the universe. Their parietal lobes do not go dark. On the other hand, they do experience a decrease in memory functions and an increase in emotional and sensory activation. As Newberg writes, “In the Pentecostal tradition, the goal is to be transformed by the experience. Rather than making old beliefs stronger, the individual is opening the mind in order to make new experiences more real.” The different religious practices produce different brain states, each of which are consistent with the different theologies.

Brain scans don’t settle whether God exists or not, because they don’t tell you who designed these structures. They don’t solve the great mystery, which is the mystery of consciousness—how emotion reshapes the matter in the brain and how the matter in the brain creates spirit and emotion. But they do show that people who become expert at meditation and prayer rewire their brains. It is possible, by shifting attention inward, to peer deep into the traffic of the unconscious, achieving an integration of conscious and unconscious processes, which some people call wisdom.

Missy glanced up from her salad from time to time, just to make sure Erica wasn’t looking at her as if she were nuts. She was matter-of-fact, but also made clear how much these experiences meant to her. She kept apologizing for the inadequacies of her descriptions, her inability to really put into words what it felt like to perceive things holistically instead of deductively, and the feeling of expanded awareness. She wasn’t sipping on some organic carrot shake while she was talking about all this. She hadn’t gone all Yoko Ono. She was a surgeon, who still practiced part-time, who drove a gas-guzzling SUV and drank white wine with lunch. It’s just that she had found a scientifically plausible way to access a deeper level of cognition.

Toward the end of lunch she asked Erica if she would like to come to her next session and try out this mindfulness-meditation stuff. Erica heard her mouth saying, “No thanks, it’s not really for me.” She didn’t know why she answered this way. The idea of peering directly inside herself filled her with a deep aversion. All her life she had been looking outward and trying to observe the world. Hers had been a life of motion, not tranquility. The fact is she was afraid of looking directly inside. It was a pool of dark water she did not want to plunge into. If she was going to live more vividly, she’d have to find another way.

The Second Education

Over the next several months, Erica became something of a culture vulture—diving into the world of the arts with a voracious hunger and her characteristic drive. She read some books on the history of Western painting. She bought some poetry anthologies and found herself reading them in bed before she drifted off to sleep. She bought a CD course in classical music and listened to it while driving in her car. She began going to museums again with friends.

Like most people, life had given her one sort of education. She had gone to school. She had taken such and such management courses, worked her way through various jobs, and learned such and such skills. She had come to possess a certain professional expertise.

But now she was beginning her second education. This education was an emotional one, about how and what to feel. This second education did not work like the first one. In the first education, the information to be mastered walked through the front door and announced itself by light of day. It was direct. There were teachers to describe the material to be covered, and then everybody worked through it.

In the second education, there was no set curriculum or set of skills to be covered. Erica just wandered around looking for things she enjoyed. Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure. The information came to her indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards, and through the vents of her mind.

Erica read Sense and Sensibility, The Good Soldier, or Anna Karenina and she would find herself moving with the characters, imitating their states of mind, and discovering new emotional flavors. The novels, poems, paintings, and symphonies she consumed never applied directly to her life. Nobody was writing poems about retired CEOs. But what mattered most were the emotional sensations portrayed in them.

In his book Culture Counts, the philosopher Roger Scruton writes that “the reader of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ learns how to animate the natural world with pure hopes of his own; the spectator of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ learns of the pride of corporations, and the benign sadness of civic life; the listener to Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”

Even at her age, Erica was learning to perceive in new ways. Just as living in New York or China or Africa gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so, too, spending time in the world of a novelist inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.

Through trial and error, Erica discovered her tastes. She thought she loved the Impressionists, but now they left her strangely unmoved. Maybe their stuff was too familiar. On the other hand, she became enraptured by the color schemes of the Florentine Renaissance and Rembrandt’s homely, knowing faces. Each of them tuned her mind, the instrument with a million strings. She had some moments of pure pleasure, when she could feel her heart beating faster and a quiver in her stomach—standing in front of a painting, or discovering a new installation or poem. There was a time, reading Anthony Trollope of all people, when she could feel the emotions of the story in her own body, and was alive to the sensations produced there. “Mine is no callous shell,” Walt Whitman wrote about his body, and Erica was beginning to appreciate what he meant.

The Dancing Scouts

Erica’s experience with art is a microcosm of all the different kinds of perception we have seen in this story. Seeing and hearing were thick, creative processes, not just a passive taking in.

When you listen to a piece of music, for example, sound waves travel through the air at 1,100 feet per second and collide with your eardrums, setting off a chain of vibrations through the tiny bones of the ear, against the membrane of the cochlea; producing tiny electrical charges that reverberate all across the brain. Maybe you don’t know anything about music in the formal sense, but all your life—from the time when you were nursing in rhythm with your mother—you have been unconsciously constructing working models of how music works. You have been learning how to detect timed patterns and anticipate what will come next.

Listening to music involves making a series of sophisticated calculations about the future. If the last few notes have had pattern Y, then the next few notes will probably have pattern Z. As Jonah Lehrer writes in his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, “While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music. From the three-minute pop song to the five-hour Wagner opera, the creations of our culture teach us to expect certain musical patterns, which over time are wired into our brain.”

When the music conforms to our anticipations, we feel a soothing drip of pleasure. Some scientists believe that the more fluently a person can process a piece of information, the more pleasure it produces. When a song or a story or an argument achieves limerence with the internal models of the brain, then that synchronicity produces a warm swelling of happiness.

But the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them. As Daniel Levitin observes in This Is Your Brain on Music, the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” arrest our attention with the jarring octave-gap between them, then the rest of the song eases us into a more conventional, soothing groove. In his book Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard Meyer showed how Beethoven would establish a clear rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then manipulate it, never quite repeating it. Life is change, and the happy life is a series of gentle, stimulating, melodic changes.

Perceiving a painting follows a similar process. First the mind creates the painting. That is to say, each eye makes a series of fast, complex saccades across the surface of the picture, which then get blended and re-created inside the cortex, producing a single image. There are parts of each view the mind cannot see, because of the blindspot in the middle of each eye where the optic nerve connects to the retina. The brain fills in the holes based on its own predictions. Simultaneously, the mind imposes its concepts upon the painting. For example, it imposes color. Depending on lighting and other factors, there are huge fluctuations in the wavelength energy of light bouncing off a painting, and yet the mind uses internal models to give the impression that the color on the surface is remaining constant. If the mind couldn’t assign constant color to things, the world would be in chaotic flux and it would be hard to deduce any useful information from the environment.

How it creates this illusion of constant color is not well understood, but it seems to involve ratios. Imagine a green surface surrounded by yellows and blues and purples. The brain understands there is a constant ratio between the wavelengths bouncing off green and the wavelengths bouncing off yellow. It can assign constant qualities to each even amidst changing conditions. As Chris Frith of the University College, London, has written, “Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality.”

As it is creating the painting, the mind is also evaluating it. A wide body of research has found that there are certain tastes that most people share. As Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct, people everywhere gravitate to a similar sort of painting—landscapes with open spaces, water, roads, animals, and a few people. A cottage industry has grown up to investigate this preference. Evolutionary psychologists argue that people everywhere prefer paintings of landscapes that correspond to the African savanna, where humanity emerged. People generally don’t like looking at dense vegetation, which is forbidding, or spare desert, which has no food. They like lush open grasses, with thickets of trees and bushes, a water source, diversity of vegetation including flowering and fruiting plants and an unimpeded view of the horizon in at least one direction. Some critics have noted that Kenyans prefer pictures of the Hudson River School to pictures of their own native landscape. That’s because, the critics argue, the landscape near the Hudson River in New York state more closely resembles the African savanna back in the Pleistocene era than does the present, and much drier, Kenya.

More broadly, people like fractals, patterns that recur at greater levels of magnification. Nature is full of fractals: mountain ranges with peaks that gently echo one another, the leaves and branches on trees, a copse of aspens, rivers with their tributaries. People like the fractals that are gently flowing but not too complicated. Scientists even have a way to measure fractal density. Michael Gazzaniga illustrates the process in this example: Imagine that you were asked to draw a tree on a piece of paper. If you left the paper entirely blank, that would have a D (fractal density) of 1. If you drew a tree with so many branches the paper was entirely black, that would have a D of 2. Humans generally prefer patterns with a fractal density of 1.3—some complexity, but not too much.

Erica didn’t have to think about fractals as she was looking at Vermeers or van Eycks or Botticellis. That’s the point; her action was unconscious. She just stood there savoring the pleasure.

Creativity

After a while, Erica decided to create her own art. She tried photography and watercolors, but she found that she was unengaged and untalented. Then one day she found a beautiful piece of wood, and she fashioned it into a small cutting board. Having it around the house and using it every day gave her immense satisfaction, and for the next few years, as long as her hands could perform the tasks, she made simple household items out of wood.

She’d exercise in the pool in the morning and go for a walk, and then in the afternoons she would return to the little workshop she had built. Gene Cohen, founding chief of the Center on Aging at the National Institute of Mental Health has argued that the duration of an activity is more important than the activity itself: “In other words, a book club that meets on a regular basis over a course of months or years contributes a great deal more to a person’s well-being than the same number of one-shot activities, such as movies, lectures or outings.”

As she continued to carve, Erica found that she was building a repertoire of knowledge and skills. She had to observe the wood she had in front of her—not the generic concept of wood, but the specific piece. She had to divine what household item—napkin holder, a bookstand, or even a piece of a table—lay in its grain.

At first she moved forward clumsily. But she’d walk through stores and crafts fairs, observing how craftsmen worked. She didn’t like the whole “authenticity” atmosphere of the crafts movement. But she liked the objects themselves and how they fit together. As she observed and worked, she got better. She developed a set of hunches that guided her along, a repertoire of feels and gestures. She was astonished to find that she had her own style. She didn’t know how she got it. She just fiddled around with things until they seemed right.

Over and over again, Erica tried to do too much. This late in life she still underestimated how long any project was likely to take her. But she found herself enjoyably dissatisfied by her work. She got a glimpse of some ideal thing she would want to create, and then she’d tinker and tinker with it, never quite eliminating the tension between the reality and the perfection she felt inside. But still she chased it. She understood what Marcel Proust might have been feeling when he dictated new passages of a novel from his deathbed. He wanted to change a section in which a character was dying, because now he knew how it really felt.

The muses came and went. After working for a few hours, she felt her brain running dry, as if little carbonated bubbles in her brain had been used up and everything had gone flat. She became clumsy, lazy and stale. Then other times she would awake in the middle of the night, absolutely sure of what she should do to solve a problem. The mathematician Henri Poincaré solved one of the most difficult problems of his life while stepping onto a bus. The answer just came to him. “I went on with the conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty,” he later wrote. Erica sometimes had little revelations like that, too, while she was parking the car or making a cup of tea.

Like all artists and craftsmen, she was a plaything of the muses. Creativity seemed to happen in a hidden world beyond her control. The poet Amy Lowell wrote, “An idea will come into my head for no apparent reason; ‘The Bronze Horses,’ for instance. I register the horses as a good subject for a poem; and, having so registered them, I consciously thought no more about the matter. But what I had really done was to drop my subject into the subconscious, much as one drops a letter into the mailbox. Six months later, the words of the poem began to come into my head, the poem—to use my private vocabulary—was ‘there.’”

Erica learned little tricks to stoke the unreachable furnace. Art, as Wordsworth put it, is emotion recollected in tranquility. Erica had to put herself in a state in which her emotions bubbled to the surface. She had to go see a thrilling play, or climb a mountain, or read a tragedy. Then, her heart a-tingle, she had to be relaxed enough to express the feelings welling up inside.

As she had gotten older, she found she needed long periods of uninterrupted solitude for her conscious mind to slowly relax and surrender itself to the pulses generated inside. One interruption could ruin her mind-set for an entire day.

She found that this creative mind-set was most likely to come late in the morning or early in the evening. She would work with her headphones on, playing soft classical music to loosen her thoughts. She needed to be near windows, with a view of distant horizons. For some reason she worked best in her dining room, which faced south, not in her studio.

She also learned that when you are trying something new, it is best to do it quickly and wrong, and then go back and do it over and over again. And at rare and precious moments, she even got a sense of what athletes and artists must have meant when they talked about being in the flow. The narrative voice in her head went silent. She lost track of time. The tool seemed to guide her. She integrated with her task.

What did she get out of all this? Did it improve her brain? Well, there is some evidence that children who participate in arts education experience a small IQ boost, just as there is some evidence that participating in music and drama classes seems to improve social skills. But these results are sketchy, and it is not true that just listening to Mozart or going to a museum will make you smarter.

Did Erica’s creativity help her live longer? A bit. There is substantial evidence to suggest that mental stimulation improves longevity. People with college degrees live longer than people without, even after controlling for other factors. Nuns with college degrees live longer, even though their lifestyles through adulthood are the same as nuns without them. People with larger vocabularies in adolescence are less likely to suffer dementia in old age. According to one California study, seniors who participate in arts programs require fewer doctor visits, use fewer medications, and generally experience better health than seniors who don’t.

But the real rewards were spiritual. It’s said that people who go into therapy do it either because they need tightening (their behavior is too erratic) or because they need loosening (they are too repressed). Erica needed loosening. Reading poetry, visiting museums, and carving seemed to help her do it.

As she relaxed she became more patient, more of a wandering explorer. Summarizing a body of recent research, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that artists who succeed in their youth tend to be conceptual. Like Picasso, they start with a concept of what they want to achieve and then execute it. Those that thrive near the end of life tend to be exploratory. Like Cezanne, they don’t start with clear conceptions, but go through a process of trial and error that eventually leads them to a destination.

This is not always a passive, gentle process. In 1972 the great art historian Kenneth Clark wrote an essay on what he called the “old-age style.” Looking across the arts, and especially at Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Donatello, Turner, and Cezanne, he believed he could detect a common pattern that many great elderly artists shared: “A sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct…. If we consider old-age art from a more narrowly stylistic point of view, we find a retreat from realism, an impatience with established technique and a craving for complete unity of treatment, as if the picture were an organism in which every member shared in the life of the whole.”

Erica obviously did not have these masters’ genius, nor their inner turbulence. But she did have a desire to push hard through her final years and create surprises for herself. Erica found that the arts gave her access to her deeper regions. Artists take the sentiments that are buried in inchoate form across many minds and bring them to the surface for all to see. They express the collective emotional wisdom of the race. They keep alive and transmit states of mind from one generation to the next. “We pass on culture, therefore,” Roger Scruton has written, “as we pass on science and skill: not to benefit the individual, but to benefit our kind, by conserving a form of knowledge that would otherwise vanish from the world.”

You Are There

One summer, a couple of years after retirement, Harold and Erica took the best vacation of their lives. They traveled around France looking at cathedrals. Harold prepared for the trip for a few months, reading up on cathedral construction and medieval history, just as he had back at school. He put different passages of the books he was reading on his computer tablet, to take with him, and he planned an itinerary and outlined a narration for their entire voyage. His narration would be just like the old presentations he used to give at work, except this time he’d be talking about architecture and chivalry, and they’d be walking through towns and churches as he spoke.

Harold didn’t spend a lot of time memorizing the names of the kings and the processions of battles. He operated under the assumption that each group and each age inadvertently produce their own symbolic system—buildings, organizations, teachings, practices, and stories—and then people live within the moral and intellectual structure of those symbols, without really thinking about it. So when Harold talked about medieval life, he was just trying to capture what it felt like to be the sort of person who lived at that time. As he put it, he wasn’t describing the fish; he was describing the water they swam in.

Harold loved this sort of educational travel. He could touch and feel the past—the darkness of an old building in daytime, the mildew of a castle keep, the glimpse of a forest through the slit of a castle lookout. With these prompts flooding his mind, he could imaginatively enter into other ages.

They traveled through Caen and Reims and Chartres. They’d walk side by side, Harold whispering information from the books he had read, speaking as much for his own pleasure as for hers. “Life was more extreme then,” he said at one point. “There were extremes of summer heat and winter cold, with few conveniences to temper them. There were extremes of light and darkness, health and sickness. Political boundaries were arbitrary and changed with the death of a king or lord. Government was hodgepodge with different mixtures of custom and Roman and Church law. One year could produce plenty and the next, famine, and it was possible to walk from one town where times were good to another where people were starving. One in three people were under fourteen and the life expectancy was forty, so there was no great throng of people in their forties, fifties, or sixties to sort of calm things down.

“As a result, their life was more emotionally intense than ours is today. On festival days, they celebrated with a drunken joy that we scarcely seem to know. On the other hand, they could succumb to mind-grabbing terror that we only remember from childhood. They were capable of enjoying tender love stories one moment and then cheering as a beggar was dismembered the next. Their perception of tears and suffering and color itself seems to have been more vivid. There were certain modulating ideas that we take for granted that they did not have in their mental toolbox. They didn’t have a concept for diminished capacity, the idea that a mentally disabled person might not be fully responsible for his actions. They didn’t have a concept for judicial fallibility, or for the idea that criminals should be rehabilitated instead of simply being made to suffer. For them it was all extremes—guilt or innocence, salvation or damnation.”

Harold and Erica were walking through the village of Chartres as he said this, and crossing toward the cathedral. They walked across a square with coffee shops, and Harold described how the medieval Frenchmen of the twelfth century lived in squalor and filth, and yet yearned for an ideal world. They constructed elaborate codes of chivalry and courtly love. He described the intricate rules of courtesy that governed everyday court life, the profusion of rituals, the many organizations that required oaths and other sacred rites, the stately procession in which each participant in the social order had his or her own socially approved fabric, color scheme, and place.

“It was almost as if they were putting on a play for themselves. It was almost as if they were turning their short, squalid lives into a dream,” Harold continued. He said that tournaments were supposed to be stylized, though in reality they were often shambolic brawls. Love was supposed to be stylized, though often it was just brutal rape. In imagination everything was turned into a mythical ideal version of itself, though in reality there was degradation and stench all around.

“They had a great yearning for beauty and a great faith in God and the ideal world. And somehow that great faith produced this,” Harold said, gesturing up at the Chartres cathedral. He described how nobles and peasants would volunteer their labor to build the great church, how whole villages would move close to the cathedral town so they could help create these great edifices soaring above the normal hovels of wood and grass.

He described the intricate recurring patterns of tracery, the recursive rhythm of arches, the countless replicating folds of stone, each reflecting and magnifying the last. They spent an hour before the west front, tracing the symbols of the Trinity carved into the central door, the way Christ’s body is connected to the signs of the zodiac and the labors of the month on the ascension door. As much as he could, Harold described the great bombardment of symbols and meaning that would have rained down on the illiterate pilgrims, setting off strings of associations and awe in their minds.

Inside, he described the revolutionary splendor of the design. Through most of history until the twelfth century, men had constructed buildings to be heavy and formidable. Now here they constructed buildings to be light and weightless. They used stones to create a feeling for the spiritual. “Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine through the senses,” Abbot Suger wrote.

Harold loved teaching. He loved being a tour guide more than anything he had ever done. On odd occasions, talking about this or that historical scene, he’d find himself strangely moved. People in centuries past, he came to believe, devoted more energy to the sacred. They spent more time building sacred spaces, and practicing sacred rituals. They built gateways to a purer mode of existence. Harold was drawn to these ancient places and gateways—to ruins, cathedrals, palaces, and holy grounds—more than to any modern place or living city. In Europe especially, he divided cities between those that were living, like Frankfurt, and those that were dead, like Bruges and Venice. He liked the dead cities best.

After an hour or so inside the cathedral, Harold and Erica left and began walking back to dinner. As they did, they passed the west portals, and saw a range of statues arrayed about the doorways. Harold knew nothing about them. They were church elders of some sort. Or maybe donors, or scholars or heroes from the ancient past. Erica paused unexpectedly to look at them. Their bodies were elongated cylinders, with gracefully carved draping robes. Their gestures mimicked one another, one hand down around the waist and the other clutching something by the neck. But it was the faces that caught Harold’s attention.

Some of the statues they had seen on the trip were generic and impersonal. The artists had tried to symbolize a person’s face rather than represent a particular one. But these sculptures depicted real people, idiosyncratic and ensouled. Their faces held different expressions of selflessness, detachment, patience, and acquiescence. They were the product of a specific set of personal experiences and reflected a unique set of hopes and ideals. Though he was tired after a long day, Harold actually experienced a chill looking into those faces and eyes. He had the sensation that they saw him; that they sympathized with him and gazed at him gazing at them. Historians sometimes speak of moments of historical ecstasy, the feeling that magically comes over them when the distance of the centuries disappears, and they have the astonishing sensation of direct contact with the past. Harold felt something like that now, and Erica could see a glow on his cheeks.

It was a wonderful day, and an exhausting one. At nightfall they went to a restaurant and had a long, happy meal. Erica was struck by how enchanted the world seemed to people in the Middle Ages. For us, the night sky is filled with distant balls of fire and vast empty space. But for them, it was alive with creatures and magic. The stones of the church and the trees in the woods resonated with spirits, ghosts, and divine presences. The cathedrals were not just buildings—they were like spiritual powerhouses, places where heaven and earth met. People back then seemed voracious for mythology, she observed. They blended Greek, Roman, Christian, and pagan myths together, regardless of internal logic, and made everything alive. Even the bones of saints had magical powers. It was as if every material thing was crystallized with a spiritual presence; every aesthetic thing was also a sacred thing. Our world seems disenchanted in comparison, she thought with a sigh.

Harold mentioned how much fun he was having. Somehow knowledge only came alive to him when he was teaching it to somebody, and at the end he mused that maybe he’d missed his calling as a tour guide. Erica gave him an energized look. “Would you like to be?”

That night they hatched a plan. Harold would lead tours for small groups of cultivated travelers. Maybe they’d conduct three a year. He’d study a period for a few months, just as he had with the Middle Ages, and then take a group to France or Turkey or the Holy Land. They’d contract with a tour company so they wouldn’t have to worry too much about the travel arrangements. Erica could run the rest of the operation. It would be their postretirement small business. Erica figured they could compete with the alumni groups that run these sort of tours, because theirs would be more intimate. They’d rely mostly on friends, so the travelers would pretty much know one another before they signed up.

And that’s pretty much what happened for the next eight years. They created a company called You Are There Tours, which was like a traveling course in human civilization, with nice hotels and wine. They’d be at home for a few months and Harold would bury himself in his books, preparing. And then they’d take two weeks off with a group, getting an all-expenses-paid educational vacation in Greece or some other spot on the itinerary of human accomplishment. Harold loved it. For Harold, the preparation for the trips was actually better than the trips themselves. Three times a year, Erica got to experience intense bursts of learning. When she was on those trips, time would slow down. She’d notice a thousand novel things. It was like feeling the pores of her skin open.

Erica never got to the point in her life when she could really relax. She always had to be moving and doing and achieving. But this was a delicious sort of exertion. For someone who’d spent her life struggling and climbing, these trips were pure joy.