Toscanini

December 27, 2009

Going Out on Top: the Difficulty of Making a Graceful Exit

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/The_Photographer.jpg/256px-The_Photographer.jpg

Athletes know, perhaps better than the rest of us, the difficulty of a graceful exit. They must leave the playing field one last time while most of them are still reasonably young. It has been said that an athlete dies twice — once when his career ends and, of course, a second time when his life ends. Not an easy thing. As A.E. Housman put it in his poem To An Athlete Dying Young,

“…Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honors out,

Runners whom renown outran,

And the name died before the man…”

The loss of that renown, the fortune and fame, the heady access to everyone and everything, and especially to the cheers — that must be a very tough thing indeed for the famous person to give up. Lots of names come to mind, the names of those who stayed on stage too long.

Start with Willie Mays, a meer shadow of his youthful speed and grace when he played his last games for the NY Mets at age 42, hitting .211 in his final season, well below his .302 lifetime average. Or Frank Sinatra, croaking out the oldies well past his prime.

Then there were the twin titans of symphonic conducting in the first half of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Furtwångler and Arturo Toscanini. The former continued to direct symphonic concerts even though he knew his hearing was failing, while the latter famously went blank and stared into space during his very last concert with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1954 at age 87.

But every so often we have a different sort of model, someone who walks off stage with his head held high, at or near the peak of his performance, and so our memories of him in his youthful prime stay in tact.

Think of Sandy Koufax, the great Dodger lefty, who won 27 games in his last season of play, deciding at age 30 no longer to endure the pain that his left arm exacted as the price of pitching excellence. Or Ted Williams, who hit .316 for Boston in his final season and hit a home run in his final at bat at age 42. Or Joe DiMaggio, hobbled by injuries and not at his best in his last year, ending his career before he embarrassed himself and let down his teammates.

It is always difficult to give up something you love, all the more if you are paid handsomely (in adulation and dollars) to do it. Indeed, we are at risk of holding on to lots of things too long: our children, a dead love affair, a common stock, a job, perhaps even a hair style or an old suit, and sometimes (a few would say) life itself.

They also say that timing is everything and, whoever they are, “they” are often right. “Going out on a high note,” or “knowing when to quit” — there are lots of phrases that emphasize the same point. And now the Baby Boomers, especially the teenagers of the 1960s who were advised not to trust anyone over 30 and thought they were the universe’s center, find themselves about to collect Social Security.

When I’m Sixty-Four is no longer just a song title, but a place just around the chronological corner for a bunch of aging flower-children. And even though most of them are not great athletes, heros, or symphony conductors, the timing of the retirement process may still be full of challenges — leaving with enough money, while you can still do the job, before you lose that ability and risk the humiliation that comes with letting down your colleagues.

I suppose it is easier if you realize at some early time that nothing is permanent, except perhaps, the Earth itself — at least if we don’t screw it up. In a sense, an occupation or even a life is a little bit like an apartment — something you rent, according to the late violinist Nathan Milstein, who, by the way, was still playing wonderfully at his very last public concert when he was 82.

Seneca said it a little bit differently, suggesting that a man should live “as one who is on loan to himself and intends to return everything without complaint when the debt is recalled.”

Clearly, the way to leave the stage is with a smile and a bow — saying, in effect, “thanks for your attention, your applause, and the chance to perform for you, to do something I love.” We all have our share of chances to do this, whether it is quitting a job or a relationship or any other time when there is an ending and we say “goodbye.”

So, if  “practice makes perfect,” perhaps there is hope to do it right.

Good luck for those times when it is, inevitably, your turn.

—

The above image is The Photographer by Joaquim Alves Gaspar sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

 

July 2, 2009

A Few Good Books

You won’t be looking at this unless you are a reader. So here are a few brief recommendations of books that have made a lasting impression on me. Most are not new and I suspect that some are out of print, but are likely to be obtainable by a search on the Internet. In no particular order:

1. Frauen by Allison Owings. Owings comes as close as anyone to answering the question, “How did the Holocaust Happen.” An American journalist who studied in Germany, she returned there to interview mostly gentile women who had lived through the period of the Third Reich. Owings summary does an extraordinary job of describing the psychology of the bystanding German population.

2.  A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Irving gives away the plot of his novel early on: Owen Meany will die an unusual death. But rather than destroying the tension of the book, this puts the reader in Owen’s shoes as a man who knows that he will come to an untimely end, but doesn’t know exactly how. As the book progresses and that end comes closer, the terror is almost unbearable.

3.  Agitato by Jerome Toobin. The story of Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra in the one decade that it attempted to survive after his retirement. If you enjoy anecdotes about famous musicians, this book is for you. The tale Toobin tells is both funny and sad, since the orchestra did not last. Jerome Toobin, by the way, is the father of Jeffrey Toobin, the legal scholar and public intellectual.

4.  Regret: the Persistence of the Possible by Janet Landman. A book about the title emotion, viewed from literary, psychological, and other perspectives.

5.  What is the Good Life? by Luc Ferry. A very good attempt to answer the biggest question of all: what is the meaning of life?

6.  The Long Walk by Slavomir Ramicz. The author tells the true story of his escape from a Siberian prison camp. He and his compatriots, with almost no equipment, food, or appropriate clothing, attempted to walk to freedom and Western Civilization, which took them as far as India. As you can imagine, not all of them made it. That anyone at all did is astonishing.

7.  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. This story of an unhappily married Russian woman touches on almost all that is important in life: love, friendship, obligation, children, religion, the value (or lack) of value to be found in work and education, death, and the meaning of life. None of that would matter much without the author’s gift of telling his story and allowing these issues to flow out of the human relationships and events he describes.

8.  The Boys of  Summer by Roger Kahn. Kahn’s classic tribute to the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team of the 1950s, the team that had Jackie Robinson as its central figure and leader.

9.  War Without Mercy by John Dower. Dower describes the racism that underpinned the Pacific theater of World War II. Unlike the war in Europe, each side viewed the other as less than human and treated the enemy with a brutality consistent with that view.

10.  The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch. Although the book is now a few decades old, the writer’s message is still spot on. He looks at the empty pursuit of happiness in material things and acquisitions, driven by the increasingly disconnected nature of social relationships in this country, and the promise of the media that happiness lies, not in fulfilling human contact, but in the goods that come with “success.”

11.  The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. A fantastic and touching creation about a man unstuck in time, thrown forward and back, and the woman who loves him. Its being made into a movie, I’m told.

12. Patrimony by Philip Roth. Roth’s account of the illness and death of his father.

13.  The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker . More than one person has told me that this is the finest nonfiction book they have ever read. It is a meditation on what it means to be mortal, and how the knowledge we all have of our inevitable demise influences how we live, in both conscious and unconscious ways. Becker’s book has lead to an entire area of psychological research called “Terror Management Theory.”

14.  For Your Own Good by Alice Miller. Miller is a controversial Swiss psychiatrist who looks at the effect of harsh upbringing on the welfare of children. If you believe that children should be seen and not heard, this book might make you think twice.

15.  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. A story of self sacrifice and heroism set in the French Revolution. If you can read the last few pages without tears, you have a firmer grip on your emotions that I have on mine.

16.  The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter. Ritter was a college professor when he began to travel around the country in the 1960s, tape recorder in tow, to obtain the first hand stories of the great baseball players of the first two decades of the 20th century, who were by then very old men. Probably as great an oral history as any of those written by Studs Terkel, and perhaps the greatest baseball book ever.

17.  American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Oppenheimer is the man who brought the Manhattan Project to fruition, that is, helped create the bomb we used to end World War II in 1945. But more than that, this book is a wonderful biography of a complex, peculiar, and brilliant man, who was brought low by those who wished to discredit his opposition to nuclear proliferation in the period after the war.

18.  The Mascot by Mark Kurzem. A story that is beyond belief, but turns out to be true. The central figure of the story, when he was a little boy, was adopted as a mascot by a Latvian SS troop after surviving the murder of his family. Why beyond belief? Because he was Jewish. The book reads like the most extraordinary mystery.

19.  All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. The most famous anti-war novel ever written. The book is told from the standpoint of a young German infantryman during World War I.