Monthly Archives: June 2024

🌟The Last Time🌟

Last time I saw Chaplin, all he said was,
"Stay warm. Stay warm.”

(Groucho Marx in conversation with Woody Allen)

   Last chance, last minute, last round, last inning, last exit, last
ditch. Last rites, Last Supper, last days, Last Judgment. Last
words, last breath. Last word, last laugh, last dance, last rose of
summer, last good-bye. What an enormously weighty word!
Why does it give such importance to the words it qualifies? And
how does "last" bear on character? We shall have to find out.

   Already I can tell you this: Our inquiry will aim deeper than
the evident meaning of "the last time"
" as the end and therefore
death. If that were all, the inquiry could stop here, satisfied with
this banal result. Remember, we are eluding death all through
this book, trying to prevent death from swallowing into its im-
penetrable darkness the light of intelligent inquiry. Death is a
single stupefying generality that puts an end to our thinking
about life. The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vi
lality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to
the predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already
know the answer?

   If a pair of socks helped us in the previous chapter, the fic-
ton of a couple may help in this one.

“She just got into her car and drove off. That was the last time I saw her." How casually the moment slips by, blurring
into the everyday. But when the simple action is marked by
"last." the event becomes an indelible image.
"Last" makes an
event eventful, elevates it beyond the everyday, leaves a lasting
impression. Last words become "famous,"
" last moments enig-
matic emblems to ponder for years to come.

      Why? Because what happens at the end of a sequence stamps
its closure, gives it finality. Reverberations of fate. The events
that composed the marriage, the love affair, the life together be-
come essentialized into the last scene. She gets into her car and
drives off. To her death in an accident? To another city and a
new start? To another lover? Home to Mother? Back to her
husband and children? Where she drives to belongs more to the
next story than to the last scene of this fiction of a jointly at-
tempted life.

      Had she returned later as on any other day, the image of her
getting into her car would have no significance and therefore
would not last. But now it tells of character: the abiding char-
acter of the relationship-
-its commitment to casualness; its
apparent openness, which conceals truth. Or it reveals her re-
bellious independence; or her adventurous courage; or her fail-
ure of nerve; or her diffident coldness. ..
. It says something
about his character, too.
the unspoken feelings; the dulled
sensitivity that cannot perceive and does not foresee. Their
character together, his, hers-
last, as she drives off.

     So the last time is more than information for a detective's re-
port. "Just the facts." She does, in fact, just get into her car and
drive away. But the last time transforms the facts into an image.
The impression of her at the curb as the ignition catches lasts
because it is compressed into a significant image, a poetic mo-
ment. Other times are held captive by the last time and ever-
lastingly signified.

      Poetry depends on compression for its impact. The word for
poet in German is Dichter, one who makes things dicht (thick,
dense, compact). A poetic image compresses into a snapshot a
particular moment characteristic of a larger whole, capturing its depth, complexity, and importance. By putting closure to a se-
ries of events that otherwise could run on and on, the last time
is outside serial time, transcendent.

      This kind of moment is hard to bear and hard to relinquish.
It feeds nostalgia, coming back to mind, a refrain that will not
let go. Older age makes room for what T. S. Eliot refers to as
"the evening with the photograph album," snapshots that bring
back a world. ' Gerontology names these evenings "life review"
and claims that they are the main calling of later years. Since
anyone at any age can slip into nostalgic reverie, "later years"
can be taken less literally, to mean a poetic state of soul favored
by the old but not exclusive to them.

     The last time turns love, pain, despair, and habit into poetry.
It puts a stop to, arrests forward motion, and lifts life out of it-
self. This is transcendence. We feel shaken to the bones, as if the
gods had stepped into the middle of our lives.

      Transcendence of the daily does not occur until the epiphany
of the last time. She got into her car every day. The last time be-
comes utterly different. In no succession of events do we imag-
in any one moment to be the last. We can always come back
another time, do this again.
"The last time"
says there is no
"again." The last time is unique, singular, fateful. Pop lyrics
play on this poetic moment:
"The days dwindle down to a pre-
cious few, September. .. " (Maxwell Anderson);
"The last time
we saw you .
" (Leonard Cohen);
"The last time I saw Paris"
(Oscar Hammerstein), "Last time I saw him" (Pamela Sawyer);
"This could be the last time ..." (Jagger and Richards), "The
last time I saw George alive •
(Rod Stewart).
"Again, this
couldn't happen again. "; etc. Each scene of life may be a last
time, like the morning she drove off in her car.

 To call the last time unique, singular, and fateful makes it
sound inevitable and necessary, as if she drove off because it was
determined by her character. If character is fate, as Heraclitus
sald, then this was her day to die. Or she had to cut out, because
*that's just the kind of freewheeling person she was; we should
have expected it " Yet it might have been a spontancous impulse
to which her character gave in: "Enough is enough; I'm out of here.”  A whim, seemingly out of character. We can't know. For
us the story stops as the car pulls away.

    Right here, we have to be careful. Character could become
an iron law, permitting only those acts that are "in character."In
that case, the idea of character engenders little waves of repres-
sion. "It's not my nature to do this, think that, want those, be-
have like this." Is there no room for the spontaneous, for
moments of speaking, thinking, and feeling quite "out of char.
acter"? The answer depends on how we think about character.

    I would claim that nothing is out of character. Character is
inescapable; if anything were truly out of character, what would
its source be? What stands behind a whim? Who pushes the
urge and ignites an impulse? Whence do stray thoughts arise?
Whims emerge from the same soul as choices and are as much
part of your character as any habit. That last time belonged to
her just as all the other times did. Belonged to her? Which
"her"?

    Her character must consist in several characters-
"partial
personalities," as psychology calls these figures who stir your
impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what
you would not, who push and pull you off the beaten track,
whose truth breaks through after a carafe of wine in a strange
town. Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity,
a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve.
That's why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and
set things straight.

    I like to imagine a person's psyche to be like a boardinghouse
full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who
habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-
term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only ap-
pear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room
for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for
all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts.
They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically ab-
surd.

   Fitting them in is called by Jungian psychologists integration
of the shadow personalities. Fitting them in, however, means
first of all finding them fitting, suitable to your idea of your character. The Jungian ideal calls for a more integrated charac-
ter, for the full boardinghouse with no exclusions. This may re-
quire conversion of the more disreputable and obstreperous to
the morals of the majorin, an integration leading to the in
tegrity of the matured character.

    These noble ideals are better in the recipe than on the table.
for old people, as Yeats wrote and Pound demonstrated, are
often disheveled, intemperate, whimsical, and closer to chaos
than to the sober well-honed wisdom that the idea of integra-
ton suggests. The integrity of character is probably not so unitary
, rather, the full company is onstage as at the end of the
opera, when the chorus, the dancers, the leads, and the con
ductor take their uncoordinated bows. Life wants the whole
ensemble. in fagrante delicto. Even the cover-ups belong to the
character.

   The study of how each of these characters belongs is a main
activity of later years, when
"life review'
consumes more and
more of our hours. Whether going through piles of papers and
closets of things, or regaling grandchildren with stories, or at-
tempting to write autobiography, obituary, and history, we try to
compress life's meanders and accidents into a
"character study.
That's why we need so many later years and why, as the days
shorten, more and more evenings are absorbed in the photo-
graph album. Regardless of whether contrition, nostalgia, or
vindictiveness marks our feeling as we turn the pages, we are as
engrossed in study as if for a final exam.

     We study our character and others' for revelation of essence,
and we read actions such as her driving away as compressed ex-
pressions of this essence. She, at the curb, opening the car door,
getting in and going off for the last time has become an in-
delible image, an objective shot corresponding to her character.
We study this poetic particular for descriptive predicates that
might lead to predictions about her behavior. Other images
come to mind--other times when her eyes shone with a wild
light while she sat behind the wheel; casual words of envy at
a friend's freedom; her collection of lightweight, thin-soled
shoes; a girlhood story of a dangerous hike. This cluster of im-
ages shows qualities that constitute her character: freedom, danger, movement, surprise. As these belong to her character
so they can be predicted. Her driving off should be no surprise-
providing we compact her character into only these compatible
images, arrange them into a coherent story, and omit all that
does not fit in.

   What does not fit in demands all the more scrutiny and a
widening notion of character. All we need to do is stick with the
image, allow its complications to puzzle us, and abandon such
superficial ideas of character as habits, virtues, vices, ideals. Ac-
cess to character comes through the study of images, not the
examination of morals.

 The daily world is notoriously poor in this kind of study.
The little schoolboy killer was such a quiet nice kid; the serial
murderer was hardly noticeable and seemed like anybody else;
the baby-sitter who abused her charges was so prompt and tidy
and polite. Our restricted notion of character restricts what we
are able to see in people. If people are prompt and polite, nice
and quiet; if they lack noticeable quirks, we expect them to be
tidy in character. Unless we have a trained eye for the signifi-
cant discrepancy, our predictions will invariably be wrong. The
crime comes as a shocking surprise, an act altogether out of
character. A culture blind to the complexities of character al-
lows the psychopath his heyday of mayhem. No one noticed
any oddity because no one had an eye for it. So after the horror
he is sent to be "seen" by the psychologists who now, post facto,
know what to look for and will, of course, find it.

   We are as we appear, yes, but only when appearances are read
imaginatively, only when the perceiving eye studies what it sees
as a lasting image. This eye looks at the facts for the significant
gesture, the characteristic style, the verbal phrasings and
rhythms. This eye is trained by the visibilities of human nature.
It learns from
"people-watching,
" from movie close-ups, dance
postures and dinner parties, body language, and the street. It
sees an image, which Ezra Pound defined as "that which pre-
sents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of
time."2 Especially, I would add, in that instant we see as "the last
time." The older we get the longer we look, and want to look.

A woman of one hundred and three, living in Nevada, de-
scribed her desire:

I want to start a wedding chapel. ……. I would just sit in a nice
chair and let ... whoever I hire do the strenuous work. The
reason I'd like a wedding chapel is that I could study the peo-
ple. I could see what kind of man she's going to marry, and
what kind of woman or girl she is. I can tell, I can tell.

Al Hirschfeld, artist and caricaturist, at ninety-five declares:

What's a man to do? Sit around some sun-soaked beach all
day? Watching the waves? Or playing golf? Human beings
fascinate me. People. I used to love just sitting in the window
of the Howard Johnson's at Forty-sixth and Broadway, draw-
ing the constant parade of people passing by. . .. Ill draw a
bow tie, or a cane, or jot down one word or make a sketch that
brings back an entire scene.

The eye for the image cuts to the essential.

     In our overpsychologized culture, psychological testing sub-
stitutes for this seasoned eye and prevents its development. In-
stead of looking, we test; instead of imaginative insight, we read
write-ups; instead of interviews, inventories; instead of stories,
scores. Psychology assumes it can get at character by probing
motivations, reaction responses, choices, and projections. It
uses concepts and numbers to assess the soul, rather than rely-
ing on the anomalous eye of a practiced observer.

    The anomalous eye is the old eye. The older soul, aged into
its own peculiarity, cannot, in fact, see straight at all; it favors
the odd. Love of the odd may appear early in life, with the af
fectionate nicknames children give one another and that single
Out a particular feature or trait of character. But usually youth
prefers conformity, trying to adjust or smother what does not
fit in. In late life, having now become studies in uniqueness, we
look for companions as odd in their ways as we are in ours.
Similarities in daily routines, similar past experiences, parallel symptoms, common backgrounds are not comforting enough
The fun, the love comes with companions in uniqueness. The
odd couple: a couple of oddball characters.

   The term
"gerontology" should more rightly refer to the
kind of study we do with our old eye than to the study of old
age by young psychologists. Our studying does not aim to un-
cover why she got in the car and drove off. The cause is already
given: It was necessary because it was in her character. No use
laying out the reason--she felt trapped; she had a secret; it was
her time; she went schizoid and fled from love, or was a para-
noid and fled from demons, or a sociopath and took the money
and ran. We have little interest in exculpatory causes, such as
her mother, her childhood, her horoscope, her awakened femi-
nism. Conventional generalities explain nothing to the old ob-
server. The anomalous eye just likes to watch, to sink deeper
into the puzzle of human character which increases tolerance
for human oddity.

   Instead of coming up with reasons and diagnoses, we study
the image. Our curiosity focuses upon the image of the last
time, on her behavior as a phenomenon, on the image as an
epiphany, for it is the image that lasts and can be reflected again
and again in a variety of stories, exhibiting character in action.
She was performing a drama, in which, as Aristotle said, char-
acter is revealed through action.

    Her last scene is also dreamlike, a tableau: the curb, the car,
the key in the switch. In a dream we never know the motive for
anyone's action or the diagnosis of anyone's problem. Psychol-
ogy begins in the morning. We do not know the reasons for
what dream people do, how they were treated in childhood, or
even why they are there at all. The more the dream strikes us
as an image- and each dream is a one-and-only, last-time
dream- the less we can formulate it, yet the more we can re-
turn to it and draw from it. Everything we look upon seems
odd, as if seen for the first time, or the last. Something re-
demptive happens.
"We are blest by everything, / Everything
we look upon is blest," writes Yeats- the last, and lasting, lines
of one of his reflective poems on aging published when he was sixty-eight.

   Blessing is the one gift we want from the old, and the one
great gift only they can bestow. Anyone can applaud above-
average achievements and award the outstanding. The old,
however, are able to recognize the beauty that is hidden from
usual sight, not because they have seen so much through the
vears, but because the years have forced them to see so oddly.
What one needs blessed are the oddities of character specific to
our solitary uniqueness and therefore so hard to bear. I can
bless my own virtues, but I need a well-trained, long-suffering
eye to bless the virtues concealed in my vices.

   A culture is preserved by the old. This cliché usually means
that they guard the old ways, the old knowledge, the old stories;
they are wise and give prudent counsel. Rather, I think, culture
is preserved by the old because they enjoy the odd, study oth-
ers for it, and locate the essence of character in what is peculiar
to each phenomenon. A culture that does not appreciate the
character of anything eccentric to its model tends to homoge-
nize and to standardize its definition of the good citizen. The
old preserve culture by means of the stubborn sameness of
their unsuitable peculiarities.

   The increasing importance of oddity as we age shifts the idea
of character from the constitutive center of a human being out
to the edges. The character truest to itself becomes eccentric
rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble
character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives
way. We are more subject to invasion, less able to mobilize de-
fenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be per-
ceived by others as a person of character. This dislocation of self
trom center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world,
so that we can feel "blest by everything."

   C. G. Jung spent his more than eighty years following the
Delphic maxim Know thyself" Self-examination and inquiry
into the self of others was his lifework and formed his theory.
Yet, amazingly, this is what he writes on the very last page of his
autobiographical memoir:

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am dis-
tressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about my-
self and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about.
   When Lao-tzu says: "All are clear, I alone am clouded," he
is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age. ... Yet there
is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night.
and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about
myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship
with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which
so long separated me from the world has become transferred
into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unex-
pected unfamiliarity with myself.

  Let us review for the last time her departure. That image
offers one more allegory for imagining character. Her move
exposed a dimension that he at the door had never been able to
perceive, owing to the assumptions he made about her charac-
ter. What he could not see before, he sees only too clearly now,
in his imagination. Perhaps, until she turned the key, she, too,
was ignorant of this depth of potential, this eccentricity. Nor
had either of them a foreboding of sudden death--if that is
where she went.

    We come to realize that character dissolves into stories about
character. We become characters in these fictions; this implies
that the very idea of character also becomes a fiction--and
therefore vastly important, for it generates imagination much
as her image in this chapter provoked our imagination to invent
fictions about her character and about the idea of character.

    This is why the idea of character is so needed in a culture: It
nourishes imagination. Without the idea we have no perplex=
ing, comprehensive, and long-lasting framework to ponder; In=
stead we have mere collections of people whose quirks have no
depth, whose images have no resonance, and who are distin-
guishable only in terms of collective categories: occupation,
age, gender, religion, nationality, income, IQ, diagnosis. The
sum of these adds up to a faceless Nobody, not a qualified Each.
Without the idea of character, no single person has a lasting value. If each is replaceable, each is also disposable. The social
order becomes like a battalion under fire; we are all replace-
ments, filler for empty slots.

    Character itself dissolves into fiction, as she does in our
imaginings about her character, but the idea of character makes
the fiction lasting. The idea keeps us inquiring, makes us look
more closely at the snapshots. Her image spurs our imagina-
tions. We want to know her better, see who she really is. Yet
"who she really is,
" her literal character, is only literary, only a
figure in the stories in which she is the main character, and that
is what lasts even when she has gone.

    We, too, last as fictional images, whether in the reminis-
cences of family, the gossip of detractors, or the reports of
obituarists. Our character becomes the fertile source of fictions
that add another dimension of life to our lives even as we fade
as actualities. Jung realized this truth in his very late years, find-
ing that he had become unfamiliar with the character he had as-
sumed himself to be. His self-same reality became porous,
indefinite, susceptible. As he wholly loosens into the world of
"plants, animals, clouds"
and is assimilated by the natural
World, his character in the imagination of the human world
continues to last, and goes on generating stories of who he really was. 

James Hillman, the Force of Character
Ch.2🌟