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Learning by Heart (continued from preceding page) other painkillers, slog through life without hope.
I never knew my maternal grandmother, she died before her time. Gramp did not remarry, his sisters helped him raise the children, Fromm might have thought him deluded by the myth that love comes only once. But his was, in many ways, a good life, he was successful in business, generous to the church, cherished at home, the model of a decent man, not faultless, but better than most, someone I’d have done well to emulate more faithfully. Sipping sherry one evening, in his seventies (as I am now), he quoted the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, in the FitzGerald translation that was popular in his day:
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness— Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
He was reaching back half a century; the first line of the quatrain (“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough”) slipped his memory. Perhaps he thought it inessential. I did not correct him, just delighted in the moment. I was not given to declaiming poetry, would not, in any case, have chosen that particular verse, but I nodded, thought of someone far away, silently recalled the opening lines of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It is good to have memorized the poems that speak to us. Provender, so to speak, for old age.
The luckiest ones recognize, with Fromm, that love is also an act of will, that erotic love requires commit- ment as well as chemistry, that, given an attraction between two unique people, love is an available op- tion. We can grieve the end of a passionate relation- ship, reproach ourselves, with good reason, yet sur- vive, find or rediscover someone compatible, and, in the fullness of time, choose to love again—provided we love ourselves. Of course, that proviso may be the hardest part: coming to see ourselves as worthy of love, deserving of care. “Paradoxically,” Fromm says, “the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” But the point is that love is not merely fate, it is equally a decision.
What I find most striking, reading The Art of Loving again, is the way Fromm treats the practice of love.
He reviews the general requirements for the practice of any art: discipline, concentration, patience, and a supreme concern with becoming a master rather than remaining a dilettante. These are habits I tried to cul- tivate in my working life, traits I try to bring, in retire- ment, to my writing and acting. Yet I did not reflect that an amorous relationship calls for the very same attention, that it, too, requires the conscientiousness
we routinely dedicate to things like making a living, writing an essay, performing a rôle, things that are, in the end, so much less important than loving an incomparable person from the essence of our being. Like any other simple truth, this one—love takes care—is utterly obvious once it has been said, would be trivial if it were not so vital.
In “Unknown,” I play the lifelong friend of an old Scotsman who is slipping into senility. The setting is a timeworn house on a brick street in an old sec-
tion of Lynchburg, we can see the James River from the front yard. Inside, while the camera rolls—it’s a one-camera production—we have a chess match, it’s a weekly event, but today my friend’s mind wanders, he thinks of his late wife, grows anxious. I’m on top of my lines, the other actor is a pro, we’re both fully in character, the shoot goes well, half a dozen takes to get different camera angles.
On a break, the screenwriter and director tells me about watching his mother descend into dementia. It was a long, hard goodbye, he says, it lasted over three years, and she seemed to lose her recollec- tions in reverse chronological order, he could see
it happening, oblivion progressively extending into the distant past, ultimately touching her childhood. Cicero writes, “...the most desirable end of life is that which comes while the mind is clear and the faculties are unimpaired, when Nature herself takes apart the work which she has put together.” I fer- vently pray to be spared my mind, memory, identity. But if life clings to me too long, if I grow addled, be- come a burden, finally fall into that drainpipe spiral of confusion and forgetfulness, then one of the last images I will hold in memory is a boy shivering in
a city schoolyard, wanting shelter, wishing the bell would ring.
First a philosophy teacher and then an investment professional at major insurance companies and commercial banks, Lawton now writes narrative nonfiction in Albemarle County, VA. He earned the bachelor’s, licentiate, and doctorate degrees in philosophy in the French-speaking section of the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), an MBA degree in Finance at Northeastern University (Boston, MA), and, in December 2019, a graduate certificate in international economic relations at American University (Washing- ton, DC).His personal essays and memoir pieces have appeared in Cagibi, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, The Bookends Review, Streetlight Magazine, and the Bangalore Review, among others.
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