Does Wisdom Really Come from Experience?
In March of 1995, Mitch Albom, a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press, was up late channel surfing when he saw a familiar face on the screen. Morris (Morrie) Schwartz, his Brandeis sociology professor, was suffering from A.L.S., and talking sagely on “Nightline” about his impending death. Albom, who had promised Schwartz that he would keep in touch but hadn’t written to him in sixteen years, saw this as a cosmic sign—or a journalistic opportunity—and visited Schwartz more than a dozen times in the next few months. He recorded their conversations about life and love, hoping to sell the transcript and pay off Schwartz’s medical bills, but he struggled to find a buyer, and Schwartz died a few weeks after Doubleday agreed to take the project. The rest is the stuff of book-business legend: “Tuesdays with Morrie,” which came out in 1997, became one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, moving more than fifteen million copies in more than forty-one languages.
What made the thoughts of this seventy-eight-year-old so popular? Schwartz’s axioms—such as “Love each other or perish” and “Money is not a substitute for tenderness”—were not particularly revelatory. It was his proximity to death, and his nearly eight decades of experience, that turned his platitudes into a pop-cultural phenomenon. Eager not to waste our lives, we tend to devour lessons from people approaching the end of theirs. There’s something macabre about this appetite, the way it turns an aging mind into a consumable product. It can feel especially rapacious given the otherwise blithe dismissal of the elderly in the U.S., where millions of people are aging without savings, safety nets, or affordable care options. When it comes to senior citizens, most people are happy to engage with a seasoned mind; it is the body, breaking down and beginning to wither, that becomes inconvenient.
I’ve wondered, then, how the genre of old-people wisdom might translate to podcasting, a form that specializes in the disembodied voice. A few shows have tried to capture the “Morrie” magic over the years, but none has done so more thoroughly—or more successfully—than “70 Over 70,” a Pineapple Street Studios series, hosted by Max Linsky and produced by Jess Hackel. The show began in May, with the aim, as its name implies, of featuring seventy people who had passed their seventieth birthday. Most episodes are divided into two parts: a monologue from an elderly person who isn’t famous, and Linsky’s conversation with one who is. The final installment, featuring Linsky’s eighty-one-year-old father, aired earlier this month.
Linsky is a warm and gifted interviewer. For the past decade, he’s been one of the hosts of the “Longform” podcast, which features dense, process-heavy talks with authors and journalists about their craft. (I was a guest on the podcast in 2015, though I spoke with Linsky’s co-host Aaron Lammer.) But “70 Over 70,” which Linsky developed after visiting his father in the hospital, following a heart surgery, is a very different show, one that requires unique interlocutory verve. Linsky shines on “Longform” because he’s as wonky as his subjects, obsessed with journalistic ethics, backroom media lore, and magazine gossip. In “70 Over 70,” he has to be more of a generalist, one whose animating questions are necessarily broad: How do you live well? or How well are you prepared to die? Such questions can yield illuminating answers, but their vagueness risks playing into the old-people-must-be-enlightened trap. It’s a fine line, and Linsky wobbles on top of it like a tightrope artist.
As with any interview show, the strength of each episode depends on the guest. It’s not enough that someone is simply long in the tooth; he or she must also be self-aware about what being “old” means, attuned to the delicate interplay between aging and regret, mortality and joy, irrelevance and freedom. The long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who is seventy-two, is remarkably frank about physical decline. “You don’t know this yet, because you’re so young,” she says, but time “actually speeds up as you get older. It speeds up exponentially every month, every day, every hour.” Dolores Huerta, the ninety-one-year-old activist who worked with Cesar Chavez, recounts organizing the fruit boycott for farmworkers’ rights in the sixties: “The American public gave up eating grapes, and that is what brought the growers to the table. One simple little thing: Don’t eat grapes.” And the news anchor Dan Rather, now ninety years old, talks about how his wife, Jean, pushed him toward humility. “Several times,” he says, she “just took me aside and said, ‘Dan, you are becoming a version of the sun-powered, perpetual-motion, all-American bullshit machine.’ ”
Perhaps the strongest episode features André De Shields, the veteran Broadway actor who won his first Tony Award in 2019, at the age of seventy-three, for playing the messenger god Hermes in “Hadestown.” De Shields discusses his viral acceptance speech for the award, in which he offered up three pieces of advice to live by, describing them, a bit sarcastically, as his “wisdom bomb.” (“Surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you coming”; “Slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be”; “The top of one mountain is the bottom of the next, so keep climbing.”) At first, Linsky seems to want De Shields to be a font of such aphorisms, and he asks the actor when he last listened to the speech. “I spoke it,” De Shields says in a gravelly tone. “I know what it was. You think I sit at home and eat chocolates and listen to myself?” When Linsky asks De Shields how he has gained “clarity about living with purpose,” you can hear the sigh in De Shields’s response. “I’ve always been a Black man,” he says. “Come on, let’s tell the truth. I come to this thing called life from a different perspective.” De Shields insists on being comprehended without the gauzy scrim of reverence or fame, and he keeps asserting that he’s a vessel, not an oracle. “The ego is a virus, and there is no inoculation against it,” he says. “However, it does have an opponent that can take it down. And that is the small voice that lives at the core of our being. There is a small voice that lives there. And, by small, I don’t mean ineffectual.”
About ten minutes into each interview, Linsky and his subjects tend to loosen up, relieved of the burden of representing their respective generations. Linsky starts to treat his company less like museum curios, and the guests begin to trust that they have something to offer beyond comforting mantras from the edge of existence. When the conversations reach escape velocity, it’s not because the guests start spouting wisdom; it’s because they’re being, for lack of a more eloquent term, total weirdos, or endearingly awkward. The singer-songwriter David Crosby calls himself “one of the luckiest motherfuckers alive” after gingerly asking if he can swear on a podcast. Nyad emphatically declares, “I am an atheist, and I don’t even have hopes of going to Heaven!” The children’s entertainer Raffi staunchly refuses to fall into cynicism about how many times he’s had to sing “Baby Beluga,” his big hit. “You don’t know the feeling onstage when two thousand people join you,” he says, in a moony reverie. “You launch into it and there’s just such a strong feeling of love, joy, delight, and there you are, immersed in it. How beautiful.”
Such moments conjure up a remarkable portrait, with the elderly appearing just as petty, reckless, lusty, zealous, difficult, vulnerable, and, perhaps most of all, scared to grow up as anyone else. (In fact, they have more of these feelings to draw on, deeper chasms of hurt and strangeness and wild enthusiasm.) And yet age remains a cultural threshold. It changes how people are seen, and what they have to do in order to remain visible. In an episode featuring the seventy-two-year-old illustrator Maira Kalman, who drew the show’s logo and who often contributes to this magazine, Linsky suggests that aging is like being moved from the dance floor of life to the balcony. Kalman agrees: “You can be so out of it. You can feel so excluded. . . . You’re not just on the balcony, you’re on the roof. You’re in a different building completely.” If there’s a whiff of “Morrie” to the show, it’s because these conversations, despite their intentions, can never be fully equitable. One person is young, and one is old, and each needs something from the other. In focussing on aging voices—and, tacitly, on the idea that if you hear enough of them you might be transformed—“70 Over 70” subtly reëmphasizes the gaps between the young and the elderly, even as it strains to ignore or invert them.
Listening to the show, I found myself thinking of another podcast, now in its second season, called “The Last Bohemians,” in which the British journalist Kate Hutchinson speaks to women who’ve lived chaotic lives: band groupies, outsider artists, club mavens, psychedelic activists, erotic novelists. There’s little risk of these subjects being milked for maxims; the women refuse to look back or summarize, or even to make sense. In one episode, Molly Parkin, an eighty-seven-year-old Welsh painter and fashion editor, explains how she had “three constant lovers” through the years, but learned to masturbate only after they died, when she read an article about how a woman’s clitoris remains sensitive until her death. “For a chapel girl, you know, to touch what’s inside your knickers was absolutely out of order,” she says. Now, we’re told, her orgasms have a “spiritual quality.” She’s not telling us how to live—most listeners, we can assume, aren’t chapel girls—but she is telling us that we’re all works in progress, up to the very last moment. That, in the end, may be what we really want to hear. ♦
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December 27, 2021 at 06:00PM
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Does Wisdom Really Come from Experience? - The New Yorker
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