Late in Life, Here’s What I Know

Opinion|Late in Life, Here’s What I Know

Here, in the still-dark mornings on the East River, the first thing I see from my apartment window is a tugboat, dressed in white and yellow lights, prepared to tow and push the tonnage of garbage from a sanitation plant. Patient, stoic little dockworker. I often think it waits for me, as if it were captained by Charon at the entrance to the River Styx.

I follow the tides and welts as the river flows uptown, past New York’s big-city mixture of rich apartments and tenements, schools, hospitals, past the treacherous channel of Hell Gate near Randall’s and Wards Islands, out to realize its true estuary identity, where it disappears. Unseen by me, the river becomes Long Island Sound, then the Atlantic. It grows from the small known to the magnificent invisible.

Have I made a ripple with my life? The question every old person asks. Family, yes. Wife, children, grandchildren. Friends, yes. Work? As a writer, who knows? You send things out to an unseen public, like paper boats on water. Do you change a mind, a heart? Abdul El-Sayed, the senator-elect from Michigan, says that his religion teaches that saving one life is like saving all of humanity. The same thought is in the Talmud. That’s the writer’s creed as well.

When I was a writing teacher, I hoped to help my students see the world generously and to be available to all experiences. Open your eyes and your arms to embrace everything, dark and light. And don’t worry about a lack of inspiration. “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind,” writes the poet Richard Wilbur. “Something will come to you.”

To have been of use to others. That would constitute more than a ripple. In the 1990s I was writing an essay for The Times on Lewis Thomas, the great physician-philosopher and the author of “The Lives of a Cell” and other books connecting science, the arts and life. Lewis, a friend, was dying, and I wanted to ask him about that. He said he’d prefer to talk about living. He said he thought the purpose of living was to be useful. Me, too.

There is a special kind of usefulness in the extension of empathy toward others, especially those who may feel deserted and alone. Every week or so, I write to one or another friend who recently lost a partner. The usefulness comes from making others feel worthy of your time and attention. In the cold isolations of modern life, to help them feel love or something akin to it.