Retirement as Re-invention

After thirty years of college teaching and having undergone hearing loss, I officially retired in 1997 at age sixty-two. In lieu of those embarrassing tributes at the end-of-semester faculty meeting, I suggested the Dean play Cole Porter’s “It Was Just One of Those Things” as I made my exit—which he did. Teaching isn’t show business, but it’s still good policy to always leave them laughing.

In the previous fall, while poll-watching on the Democratic side, I chatted with a faculty wife on the Republican side. Unlike today’s wide political gulf, we were well within speaking range and chatted away. At my mention of retirement, she mentioned a tax-accountant friend who was soon moving out of her office in an old wedge-shaped office building in town. It offered a cockpit for a word-processor, ample walls for books, and space for a coffee table. There was also a central divider, allowing a section for my wife, Kate, who still works part-time as a psychiatric social-worker, to set up an easel for her artwork. We rented the space.

The onerous task of cleaning out an office which had accumulated more strata than an archaeological site became tolerable. Trips to the dump were interspersed with transfers to the new office. Ad-hoc decisions were based on jettisoning stuff I no longer identified with or saw any future in pursuing. Other projects were transferred with minimal breaks in continuity.

The prospect of year-round biking off to work had always offered bracing fresh air and exercise, but now it sealed off a clearly focused workspace, a much more restricted one than the convivial ambience of colleagues, students, and staff. If the new space meant that I hadn’t really retired—which I hadn’t intended anyway—and that I could concentrate more single-mindedly than before, the resounding sounds of silence took a bit of getting used to. The regressive pull of a comfy-cozy home along with the usual claims of yard work, the siren calls of CNN News and the Internet were all safely circumvented. There was also the prospect of an indefinite number of days stretching out with no other recourse than to “prime the pump” with a bit of reading and then eyeball the blank blue space of the computer monitor with its quizzical “what now?” The monitor served as both an unpaid therapist, receptive to whatever I might produce, and a demanding but patient editor extracting countless revisions.

Providing I tolerated the extended isolation, I could wean myself from academic habits, which too narrowly focused on sowing new seeds for the biannual “crops” (courses), and not thinking too far outside the box. Here I can hardly complain since from a teaching base in Modernism I strayed all over the compound from special courses in psychoanalysis and psychohistory to a stimulating master’s colloquium in human evolution with a biologist. But every new course is ultimately a commitment and confinement. Even on vacations and sabbaticals, I have found one is still on a leash.

Retiring from fulltime work in reasonably good health certainly offers one the opportunity for continuity in pursuing tasks and projects proven to be

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rewarding, but it also presents the possibility of more profound reconfigurations. Self-re-invention, anyone? Such a notion probably derails most lifecycle schemata that consider mature years a period of synthesis and slacking off. But as Gail Sheehy and others insist, we’re not as old as we used to be; whether we decide to start over or merely to shift gears, we can look forward to added years of productivity.

Along with ongoing psychohistorical projects, I have become more receptive to purely creative pursuits. These two strains briefly fused one day in late January 1998 when I was tapping away at a laptop while staying with friends out West. What came up on the screen, from where in my imagination I know not, was the statement that on June 16, 1944, Mr. Leopold Bloom of Dublin, while having an espresso and roll with a relative in Budapest, was arrested by the Gestapo and shipped off to Auschwitz. At that point, forty years after the original Bloomsday during which Ulysses takes place, Leopold Bloom, the Homeric hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, left Art and entered History thanks to my creative leap. Ever since, I have been engaged in rewriting Joyce’s classic itself a rewriting of the Odyssey. In short, it aspires to be a Nulysses for our time, an ongoing project which has taken me in unimagined directions with all sorts of new writing problems and that may prove an impossible enterprise in the end. But it will be fun getting there.

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