All at once and much to my surprise, I am old. I did not expect it, and it is not what I expected. The world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did even ten years ago. Abruptly, I’m one in a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.
From the point of view of children, adolescents, and adults in general, I am no longer completely part of the world on the go. I am no longer a part of social groups in which I had a place. People dear to me decline precipitously and die. Familiar coffee shops, stores, parks, landmarks are gone.
We now know we are subjects completely of time and change. Customs, fashions, beliefs, truths, even the future, all these have changed. It becomes clear in old age that we will not be establishing a stable way of existing in space or time. Navigating this altered world requires circumspection. By aging, it seems, we become exiles.
And this is not simply an outer experience. I now find myself estranged from the person I was accustomed to being. My body and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. My world is marked by loss and uncertainty.
My thinking, feeling, responding, imagining seem somehow unfamiliar. This is not how I thought of myself or my future. Things are no longer in my control. My life has become strangely unrecognizable. My world, my self are less stable, less secure. I have, even to myself, become somewhat “other.”
by Douglas J. Penick, LitHub | Read more:
From the point of view of children, adolescents, and adults in general, I am no longer completely part of the world on the go. I am no longer a part of social groups in which I had a place. People dear to me decline precipitously and die. Familiar coffee shops, stores, parks, landmarks are gone.
And this is not simply an outer experience. I now find myself estranged from the person I was accustomed to being. My body and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. My world is marked by loss and uncertainty.
My thinking, feeling, responding, imagining seem somehow unfamiliar. This is not how I thought of myself or my future. Things are no longer in my control. My life has become strangely unrecognizable. My world, my self are less stable, less secure. I have, even to myself, become somewhat “other.”
Everything is more intensely transitory. But as the world becomes more distant and out of control, I begin to see patterns I had never imagined or only dimly sensed. Situations, objects, places, people become, moment by moment, very deeply to be cherished, valued; loved, not in spite of being impermanent, but because we are only together for this moment.
It is like watching clouds move across the sky. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells more intense, sudden sounds abrupt. Temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. Other worlds, it seems, are waiting to show themselves.
Beethoven wrote this music when he was fifty years old; he was completely deaf, often very sick, and would die five years later. The order by which the sonata progressed was familiar, but its inner impulse was strangely austere, full of unfamiliar longing, searching, finding unsuspected ways forward, touching on new and unique kinds of resolution.
Emotional changes and shifts of keys moved in ways both surprising and deeply moving. In the third and final movement, the grammar contained elements one could never have anticipated (a single note repeated eighteen times, a chord repeated ten times); the sorrow and resolution seemed to emanate from a vast and unfamiliar expanse on the edge of silence.
It was not just the notes, but the space from which they emerged, where they reverberated and in which finally they ended that was transformative. Nothing has ever erased the shock of being drawn into a terrain of such intensity, depth, possibility, and loss. Looking at Beethoven’s life when he wrote this may provide some context for the piece but does not explain how he achieved this.
Beethoven was an almost unbearable person: willful, extravagantly self-absorbed, angry, inconsiderate, demanding, harsh, often close to feral. As Lewis Lockwood has put it: “Two elements of Beethoven’s domestic life run through his last ten years like persistent motives from one of his major works: isolation and obsessiveness.” (...)
His hearing had deteriorated almost completely. Deafness constricts our sense of ambient space; putting one’s fingers in one’s ears makes this loss evident. Space behind and to the sides pulls in. This creates a compressed dimension of inner space and could only have intensified Beethoven’s retreat into himself and the inwardness of his music. Lockwood writes:
The further decline in Beethoven’s health moved in tandem with his increasing psychological withdrawal and deepening anxiety. Here the emotional and intellectual demands that he made on himself expanded and deepened as he composed the last piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last quartets.
Throughout the 1820s, Beethoven’s health became even more unstable. He was afflicted by rheumatic fever, bowel complaints, jaundice, and inflammations in his eyes. Newspapers reported that his closest friends were concerned for his survival. There were times when he was barely recognizable.
In early 1820, at the same time when he was composing Piano Sonata, Op. 110, he went for a long walk along a canal towpath outside of Vienna and made his way to a canal basin at Ungerthor. He had eaten nothing, was exhausted, confused, and disoriented; he began to look through the windows of houses near the path.
He was so erratic and so shabbily dressed that the residents became alarmed and called the police. He proclaimed loudly to the officers that he was Beethoven, but he looked so much more like a beggar that he was not believed.
They locked him up and held him until a nearby music teacher named Herzog, hearing about the unfortunate prisoner, came to look. He told the officers that this was indeed the famous composer. They gave him some clean clothing, food and ordered a cab to take him home.
It is like watching clouds move across the sky. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells more intense, sudden sounds abrupt. Temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. Other worlds, it seems, are waiting to show themselves.
***
My long-suffering piano teacher, Mr. Klaus Goetze, would sometimes play for his students, and one afternoon he performed Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat, No. 31, Op. 110. I was 17 and had already heard many of Beethoven’s more popular sonatas in concert and on recordings, but nothing prepared me for what I heard him play. It changed my life in a subtle way, and now, some sixty years later, it has returned to inspire how I think about growing older.Beethoven wrote this music when he was fifty years old; he was completely deaf, often very sick, and would die five years later. The order by which the sonata progressed was familiar, but its inner impulse was strangely austere, full of unfamiliar longing, searching, finding unsuspected ways forward, touching on new and unique kinds of resolution.
Emotional changes and shifts of keys moved in ways both surprising and deeply moving. In the third and final movement, the grammar contained elements one could never have anticipated (a single note repeated eighteen times, a chord repeated ten times); the sorrow and resolution seemed to emanate from a vast and unfamiliar expanse on the edge of silence.
It was not just the notes, but the space from which they emerged, where they reverberated and in which finally they ended that was transformative. Nothing has ever erased the shock of being drawn into a terrain of such intensity, depth, possibility, and loss. Looking at Beethoven’s life when he wrote this may provide some context for the piece but does not explain how he achieved this.
Beethoven was an almost unbearable person: willful, extravagantly self-absorbed, angry, inconsiderate, demanding, harsh, often close to feral. As Lewis Lockwood has put it: “Two elements of Beethoven’s domestic life run through his last ten years like persistent motives from one of his major works: isolation and obsessiveness.” (...)
His hearing had deteriorated almost completely. Deafness constricts our sense of ambient space; putting one’s fingers in one’s ears makes this loss evident. Space behind and to the sides pulls in. This creates a compressed dimension of inner space and could only have intensified Beethoven’s retreat into himself and the inwardness of his music. Lockwood writes:
The further decline in Beethoven’s health moved in tandem with his increasing psychological withdrawal and deepening anxiety. Here the emotional and intellectual demands that he made on himself expanded and deepened as he composed the last piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last quartets.
Throughout the 1820s, Beethoven’s health became even more unstable. He was afflicted by rheumatic fever, bowel complaints, jaundice, and inflammations in his eyes. Newspapers reported that his closest friends were concerned for his survival. There were times when he was barely recognizable.
In early 1820, at the same time when he was composing Piano Sonata, Op. 110, he went for a long walk along a canal towpath outside of Vienna and made his way to a canal basin at Ungerthor. He had eaten nothing, was exhausted, confused, and disoriented; he began to look through the windows of houses near the path.
He was so erratic and so shabbily dressed that the residents became alarmed and called the police. He proclaimed loudly to the officers that he was Beethoven, but he looked so much more like a beggar that he was not believed.
They locked him up and held him until a nearby music teacher named Herzog, hearing about the unfortunate prisoner, came to look. He told the officers that this was indeed the famous composer. They gave him some clean clothing, food and ordered a cab to take him home.
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