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Five Reasons to Retire

I’ve been retired for a year and a half now and I have learned five reasons to retire.

1. You need more excitement.

When you are working, when there is an emergency, you call someone to fix it. When you are retired, you try to fix it yourself. Need I say more?

2. You need more to do.

While I was working, I thought I worked independently, but I was deluded. I always had a portfolio, the stuff my boss and I decided that I should do. If the portfolio got too large, or too small, between the two of us, we would work out the priorities and shove some stuff off the dock. Retirement is different. There is no business. You have no portfolio. There is no dock to shove stuff off. The days and weeks go by and list of things to be done piles up like dust in a Martian valley. Nothing is ever crossed off.

3. You need more exercise.

When you work, you are on a schedule. You go to the gym before or after work on schedule. When you retire, you don’t exercise on schedule; you fix the lawn mower, catch the dog, patch the roof, and charge the car battery. Instead of gently relieving the work’s built-up tension with smooth motions on the elliptical machine, you beat your brains and throw your back out lifting a 700-pound riding lawn mower and developing an awareness of muscles you never wanted to have and you may have to have removed by an out-of-network surgeon.

4. You need more stress.

At work, when a former employee threatens to bring an assault rifle to the office and an executive sales manager threatens mass layoffs if the product doesn’t ship next week, what do you do? With thirty years experience, you calmly try whatever worked the last time. After three decades, there’s always a last time. At worst, you can hide in the supply closet. But retirement is a new world. There’s never a time before. You have to think this stuff up and you have no idea if it will work. And your gray beard and scraggy eye brows shout that youthful ignorance is not an excuse for this geezer.

5. You need to restart your education.

As you age, neural connections grow in your brain and new capacities develop. In your twenties and thirties, you have a wealth of facts at your fingertips: where you parked, where you left your keys, the names of your children, where you work, what you are doing at this moment. It comes so easily. From nursery school to graduate school, you have learned to acquire and use these ready facts to navigate through life. The day you retire, all of these ready facts head for outer space. With your facts mutely peering down from the interstellar chill, you have sixty years or so of education to replace with a navigation system that does not depend on knowing, for example, that Perry Mason is in reruns or that your area code changed in 1972. A retired person can live a normal life with the aid of a tablet computer chained to his wrist and instructions for using Wikipedia tattooed on his forearm, but it takes more fortitude than I can muster without a nap.

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Dictionaries

I was yelled at in the fourth grade for spending too much time at the back of the room reading the copy of Webster’s 2nd Edition that was strapped to a bookstand in a corner.

I use a lot of dictionaries. On my laptop, I use the OED and Merriam-Webster Unabridged online editions, which I subscribe to. I also have dated copies of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary installed on my laptop hard disk in case I am disconnected from the Internet.

In my workroom, I have a treasured copy of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged 2nd Edition, the flyspeck print two volume of the OED, and several other old dictionaries, including one my father got when he was in high school in the 1930s.

This is overkill. Aside from my early predilection for dictionaries, in college I received advice from two obscure but great writers: Herrlee Creel and Edwin McClellan. Creel, whom I have blogged about before, was a historian of early China. McClellan translated and wrote about 20th Century Japanese novels. Both, in their time, were noted for their clear and elegant style. Both told me that they used a dictionary constantly. Both had copies of Webster’s Unabridged, 3rd Edition, next to their desks. Both said that writers who use thesauri are illiterate. They both emanated a whiff of arrogant martinet, but I still think they gave good advice.

I do know that poking around in a dictionary, especially the OED with its historic quotations and etymologies, consistently leads me to the exact word I am looking for. My online dictionaries have thesauri and lists of synonyms and antonyms and I have an old copy of Roget, but nothing works better for me than reading definitions and quotations.

Webster’s 2nd Edition was the last prescriptive dictionary published by Merriam-Webster. If I had to take a side, I would declare myself a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. Generally, I think it is most important to know how language is used. Prescriptivists expect a dictionary to be a rulebook for language usage and want to be told what a word should mean, not what people mean when they use it. For example, a prescriptivist expects to be told that “hopefully” is an adverb that must never modify an entire sentence, as in “Hopefully, George will not anger Hephzibah.” A descriptivist will note that “hopefully” is often used in that manner, although some speakers avoid it.

When the 3rd edition came out, the prescriptivists declared both the ruin of the English language and the end of civilization. Nero Wolfe burned the 3rd edition in his fireplace and high school English teachers wept in despair. For a while, condemning the 3rd edition was the rage among folks who hadn’t looked in a dictionary since the last time they read Homer. Nevertheless, serious writers and students of the language rejoiced. After its initial spike in popularity from the histrionics, the 3rd edition has continued to be a standard reference.

Why do I keep a copy of the 2nd edition around? Because its pages are a door to a lost world. The authors and editors of 2nd edition were sure of their place in the world as the arbiters of crisp distinctions between correct and incorrect. Reading it, you catch a glimpse of a world where platonic ideal words hold all true knowledge. A wonderful world, but it never did exist and never will exist, but fascinates me nonetheless.

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Anatomy of Melancholy

I’ve been taking medication for bipolar disorder for over thirty years. In my case, medication has been useful. It has made it possible for me to pursue a moderately successful career and a life without too much destructive drama. Psychiatrists have prescribed for me nearly every anti-depressant and anti-manic drug available. Some have been more useful than others have and their efficacy has changed as I have aged and my circumstances have changed. What worked thirty years ago works today, but didn’t work for an intervening decade. I would never consider rejecting medication, but it also has never been the complete answer for me.

Over the years, I have collected a bag of tricks for dealing with depression and hypomania. None of them is a cure or guaranteed to work, but all of them have been helpful to me at various times. One of the strangest is a book written in the early seventeenth century Oxford don: The Anatomy of Melancholy. It is an odd book. Robert Burton, writing under the pen name Democritus Jr., undertook to describe melancholy and its cures, what we call depression today, in expansive detail. Since he was a scholastic, this included cataloging and analyzing every reference to melancholy in every fragment of preceding literature. Oxford had a large library and the Anatomy is a big book.

You might think this is a recipe for the most boring, depressing book ever written. Even Burton himself warned against reading it. I agreed until about fifteen years ago when I read an essay by Robertson Davies, the Canadian author, critic, and educator after hearing a tribute to Davies on the CBC and stumbling on a collection of his essays at Munro’s in Victoria. The essay I happened to read mentioned that Anatomy of Melancholy was a favorite of Samuel Johnson and sometimes called the greatest work of prose in the English language. That piqued my interest. I had picked up a library copy of the Anatomy long before, but could not make heads or tails of it and returned it to the shelves quickly. Now, I was ready to try again.

I ordered the New York Review of Books paperback edition. The fact that the Anatomy was among the small collection of books the NYRB published at the time hinted that the book is something special. When the book arrived, it was a brick, the equivalent of four or five typical paperbacks in a single binding, hard to open, and tricky to hold. I started reading from the beginning, but found no magic: lists of people I had never heard of, places that are no longer on maps, and words I had never seen before. But after reading for an hour or so, I felt strangely uplifted. Burton, I think, satirizes melancholy, mocks it, and renders it absurd. I say ‘I think’ because I am not sure. He uses so many words, so many allusions, it is hard for me to tell what he is talking about, but whatever it is, it can turn the black dog, as Winston Churchill called depression, into a puppy.

I carry a copy of the Anatomy with me at all times and dip into it when I notice the drab tones of depression seeping into my landscape. Sometimes it chases the black dog away, other times it only delays the dog’s arrival or blunts its tooth, but reading the Anatomy is always good for a little cheer in a dreary time.

My NYRB brick is gathering dust on the shelf because I have switched to an eBook version. The brick is too awkward and heavy to mess with, especially when you can get an electronic version free from the Gutenberg Project. The Anatomy is an example of the good qualities of eBooks—travelling with a brick is a pain and my arthritic hands cannot hold it comfortably for long but the eBook weighs nothing and it is easy to hold.

Since the Anatomy costs nothing from Project Gutenberg, does not require a prescription, and is wholly non-toxic, I suggest to anyone who is chronically depressed to try the Anatomy. Not a cure, no guarantees, but it can help.