Why It's OK to Let Legacy Writers Go When They Are Past Their Prime

First, they don't add anything anymore to intelligent discussion. Second, if someone is telling you they do not retain what they read, they are not the best advocates for... anything. They are telling you they do not grow, do not alter their views or gain anything long-term from education.  Third, they are likely nostalgia-bearers, remembering childhoods past as the "best times".

Adults need to be lifelong learners. They need to adapt, or try their best, to the tools today, including technology.  They need to learn to winnow:  sort the bad from the good.  Take television, something so many Boomers were the full generation to experience as children.  There is good, there is bad.  There are documentaries, dramas, comedies that can broaden your mind.  There is also a lot of... well, crap.  A person needs to learn to choose from all the options offered, and find something that grows their brain. It need not be PBS.  You can learn a lot from... Hill Street Blues reruns, say, as much as you can from the cable-tv dramas being produced today.  You need to learn to discriminate in your choices, in a positive way.

Beware the person who tells you:  computers or media is no good for you.  It's all in what you select.

Beware the list makers:  who pop up a familiar format, and key in their "points" sometimes even listing them numerically, to keep their thoughts organized. That's fine for basics, but it doesn't work to make engaging copy. (I am mocking this writing style in my opening paragraph).

Like with exercise, people need to incorporate the arts into their everyday lives for maximum gain.  I pity those who have to workout at a gym, because their daily lives do not incorporate freedom of movement and heavy lifting into their daily routines.  REACH for the item on the top shelves when you do your grocery shopping, and squat to look at the pricing of the products on the lower shelves.  Lift and carry the groceries you have bagged for yourself, double bagging the heavy ones to carry up, even up or down flights of stairs if you live on levels. Try pushups, situps, isometrics or hand weights to keep joints and bones strong.

See the beauty in the everyday, look at art daily without "saving up" for trips to the museum to pursue this skill only so often.  Read, read, read. And if your memory is failing you, read some more and practice trying to retain what you've read, not by re-reading so much or even taking notes, but stopping to think and apply what you have read to your own life, and what you already know.

Don't be so busy teaching and putting on a show that you miss the innate goodness of learning for its own sake.  When you learn, you grow and change your views, often.  That's why students coming up today should have no fear they will be judged at 20 for the thoughts and beliefs they held at 16, say.  It's not limited to children either.

How many adults would not recognize -- or would recognize, but not affirm -- the thoughts they held 20 years ago, much less five.  We all have fears, and thoughts we think -- even cling to -- up until the moment we gain further experience and education and grow into accepting or seeing the wisdom of another viewpoint.  We need consistency in thinking, sure, but imagine a plant:  ever growing, throwing off new shoots and leaves.  It's just not the same with time. It's the same plant, sure, but because of growth, it has become something still recognizable but bigger.  Leaves drop, branches break, that's natural.

Growth is why so many people support lifelong education, and like with the tortoise and the hare story:  the "fastest" does not always win the race if he slumbers or stumbles.  We need to realize that learning is a lifelong journey, and everyone has their own path with different starting lines.

Some of our best use all of the tools available to them, and overcome and catch up to those who had a finer head start but refuse or do not have the natural abilities to grow naturally in the course of their daily lives.

First, you need to recognize what creativity and free thinking are not:  listicles of books read but forgotten, say, or places travelled to that tick off an itinerary, but leave a person no richer for the journey.  Second, you need to expose yourself to other viewpoints, not stick with the familiar for its own sake. We see this with our aging entertainers and writers.  For example, Stephen King books today are not the same quality as his earlier works:  he is churning out copy for pay, and it shows in the result. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but why bother with the lesser when -- with technology -- you have access to the better work? Third, you need to break out of the formatting that bores and does not challenge, as this paragraph of poor writing demonstrates.

By being open, you can hear and seize new excitement.  Like I pity those who think exercise only comes from "workouts", I am saddened to think that excitement from music or pictures only ends in childhood. God bless the man who hears new music in middle age and feels joy. Adulthood does not mean mental or physical death.  Run, play, lose the pounds.  If your keep your body fit, your mind often works better in retaining thoughts, which allows you to follow them onto new ways of thinking. Again, it is like plant growth daily.

I'm not a lecturer, as am I advising here. This is not my natural style, nor would I ever have the ego to think myself more comfortable in the teaching than the learning mode.  Education, education, education means continually seizing what is before you in life, and growing from it. Putting two and two together, and thinking independently. Don't be so busy making lists, collecting paychecks, checking off boxes that you miss out on life.

* This column is dedicated to David Brooks.  Here's his latest offering in the NYT, where he has collected a paycheck for a long long time, and is a familiar face to older readers who buy the paper, but not so favored by new readers eager to grow their minds:I sometimes feel I’m in a daily struggle not to become a shallower version of myself. The first driver of shallowization is technology, the way it shrinks attention span, fills the day with tempting distractions. The second driver is the politicization of everything. Like a lot of people, I spend too much of my time enmeshed in politics — the predictable partisan outrages, the campaign horse race analysis, the Trump scandal du jour.

So I’m trying to take countermeasures. I flee to the arts.

I’m looking for those experiences we all had as a kid: becoming so enveloped by an adventure story that you refuse to put it down to go have dinner; getting so exuberantly swept up in some piece of music that you feel primeval passions thumping within you; encountering a painting so beautiful it feels like you’ve walked right into its alternative world.

The normal thing to say about such experiences is that you’ve lost yourself in a book or song — lost track of space and time. But it’s more accurate to say that a piece of art has quieted the self-conscious ego voice that is normally yapping away within. A piece of art has served as a portal to a deeper realm of the mind. It has opened up that hidden, semiconscious kingdom within us from which emotions emerge, where our moral sentiments are found — those instant, esthetic-like reactions that cause us to feel disgust in the presence of cruelty and admiration in the presence of generosity.

The arts work on us at that deep level, the level that really matters. You give me somebody who disagrees with me on every issue, but who has a good heart — who has the ability to sympathize with others, participate in their woes, longings and dreams — well, I want to stay with that person all day. You give me a person who agrees with me on every particular, but who has a cold, resentful heart — well, I want nothing to do with him or her.

Artists generally don’t set out to improve other people; they just want to create a perfect expression of their experience. But their art has the potential to humanize the beholder. How does it do this?

First, beauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In “The Sovereignty of Good,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

Second, artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you haven’t learned a new fact, but you’ve had a new experience. The British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “The listener to Mozart’s Jupiter symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”

These experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge — how to feel and how to express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.

Third, art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person who sees more deeply than you do. Sure, Picasso’s “Guernica” is a political piece of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it doesn’t represent, documentarylike, an exact scene in that war. It goes deeper to give us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering, and the reality of human bloodlust that leads to it.

Of course “Invisible Man” is a political novel about racial injustice, but as Ralph Ellison later wrote, he was trying to write not just a novel of racial protest, but also a “dramatic study in comparative humanity which I felt any worthwhile novel should be.”

I haul myself off to museums and such with the fear that in a political and technological age, the arts have become less central to public life, that we don’t seem to debate novels and artistic breakthroughs the way people did in other times, that the artistic and literary worlds have themselves become stultified by insular groupthink, and this has contributed to the dehumanization of American culture.

But we can still stage our mini-rebellions, kick our political addictions from time to time, and enjoy the free play of mind, the undogmatic spirit and the heightened and adrenalized states of awareness that the best art still provides. Earlier this year I visited the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney a couple of times, and I got to see New York through that man’s eyes — the spare rooms on side streets, and the isolated people inside. I forget most of what I read, but those images stay vivid in the mind.