John Muir in Yosemite.
I’ve been going through old papers and found my final transcript of courses and grades.
First off, I’m amazed to see a number of courses I’ve completely forgotten about over the years. I see that I took a course in comparative and French lit. in the first year. Now I faintly recall the teacher, a young, dark haired French woman whose interest was decadent literature of the late nineteenth century. She was a punk five years ahead of her time in looks and attitude. She had our small class over to her house for a party just before the course ended, and a large, male French poodle that jumped up and made sexual overtures to several girls in our class as they sat down on her couch. It made me suspect she lived the books she taught, Maldoror and his like.
Then there are some second-year courses I’ve totally forgotten, namely a biology course, one in paleontology and another in Greek-Roman civilization. My interests were all over the map that year. But these courses and their teachers must have been so mediocre I put them out of mind. By the middle of that year I decided English would be my major.
When you started your English major, besides a bonehead writing course, you began at the beginning with ten weeks of Chaucer, then Spencer’s Fairy Queen, then two quarters of Shakespeare, Milton next, then Dryden and Addison and Pope grouped together, then Johnson and Boswell and the rest of the eighteenth-century crew. I loved all these courses because the literature, the poetry, the writing was so fine. But when I got to the Johnson and Boswell ‘selections’, a ‘Viking’ paperback edition, some four hundred pages long, I struck pure gold. I was assigned to read only forty pages in it before moving on to other authors, but something exploded in my head, like an epiphany. I couldn’t put it down. I read every page, staying up till three I the morning often, to the exclusion of all else, reading while eating, between classes, or skipping them. This took me a week in my slow manner. Then I had an irresistible urge to read the entire biography, which I did, and at the same time Johnson’s biographies and especially his essays. Just a week or so before that quarter ended, I was assigned some pages of Gibbon. That history also captivated me. I flew home to Niagara Falls for Christmas for ten days and spent every day there reading him eight hours a day, laying on the carpet floor in the den, in front of the lit fireplace.
This happened in the first quarter of my third year. It made me decide to learn Latin and Greek right away, which I did with an intensive Latin course that winter quarter, taught by a brilliant young woman named Tizzy Block and the Greek intensive course four months later in the Summer quarter. I aced both with flying colors, getting the second highest score in the Greek intensive which was so hard that about a third of the students dropped out. They were all graduate students from all over the country, from Harvard and Yale, because it was a new concept and offered only here, at Berkeley. I was the only undergrad in it and told my excellent teacher, Andrew Millar, I didn’t need to study the night before the final. I got a 98 on it, not reviewing a thing, reading some other book in English that night. A girl named Andrea scored a 99. I found that ‘intensive’ courses somehow matched my mind.
But another important development happened at the beginning of my second year of school, which radically improved my study habits. I lived alone that year, the first months in a cockroach infested apartment on Ashby Avenue, some fifteen blocks from campus. I was trying to save money and being new at apartment hunting made a very bad choice. I quickly grew sick of the sordid place. The ugly, little pests were everywhere, in my clothes drawers, my shoes, and the last straw, in my precious Stamp album. After six weeks there I made a desperate call to my parents to help me out.
They found me a place through a neighbor up their street. I moved in with his uncle, an old man, 93, Mr. Rother, into his nice home in Albany on a hill, with an excellent view of the bay. He had the spare bedroom and an old, black, obese housekeeper who came each day to cook and clean for him. But he was now at such a stage of decrepitude that his nephew (a friend of my father who lived on our street) convinced him he needed someone there at night, in case of emergency. And he did. I lived there for free, went to classes on my bicycle each day and spent the nights with him. On my own initiative I set up a button by his bedside which would ring a bell in my bedroom in case he needed something. It saved his life later that winter when he caught a flu and his breathing late one night became so labored he pushed the button and I called the ambulance, which took him to a hospital for a week and an oxygen tent. His nephew, my father’s age, thanked me profusely.
But he never did. He treated me distantly, like an intruder. He was a diehard (in more senses than one), staunch Republican. I remember him watching T.V. the night Richard Nixon publicly resigned, and he cried and cried like a baby, like the senile, speechless idiot he was. He could barely talk to me in broken English, often losing his train of thought mid-sentence. I think he somehow gleaned I was a socialist youth, and never liked me for it. He did have an interesting collection of books, not his, but his wife’s, now twenty years dead. That’s old age for you. To him it probably seemed like she died just a month earlier, the way he once mentioned her cooking something for him as better tasting than the maid’s. To me it was exactly my age, my whole lifespan and I wondered how swiftly time was moving in his dull, turtle-like perception of the world, years passing by hardly noticed.
She was one of the first members of the Sierra club, a friend of John Muir’s. There was a photo of her standing beside him on some mountaintop in 1905, she maybe twenty-five and he an old man with a long white beard. She was pretty in her youth. Mr. Rother had a complete collection of John Muir’s books in glass cases, autographed, many of which I read. He’d lived in this house since 1900 and had to take in a homeless family for six months after the great quake of San Francisco in 1906. That’s how old he was, hard to fathom.
One night sitting at his dining room table, where I sometimes did my homework, he walked up to me to try to see what I was doing. He had very poor eyesight and worse hearing. I was cutting into squares a sheet of blotter acid I’d bought that day. He bent over and looked curiously at it. I told him I was doing a homework project and he shuffled away. I hope I never get that old and debilitated. He was a sliver of a man in every way, skinny to scariness, slow as a snail in every movement he could still make. At dinner, after the maid served us and left, sitting across from him, I could jab my fork from my plate into his and steal a piece of meat, (the maid always chopped his into bites for him, as he couldn’t handle a knife, his hands shook so bad) and he didn’t see it, so fast was the motion of my hand and so slow his vision. I did this as a test, several times, not to steal the piece but just amazed at the decrepitude he’d fallen into with extreme old age. Every sense, every faculty, was down to ten percent and it made me wonder how, and for what reason he kept on living. I concluded there was none, his brain had stopped reasoning. He had no pleasure in life. He just kept puttering on like the energizer bunny, slower and slower, until the battery ran completely dead.
When spring came I stayed out later and later, visiting friends. He was angry at this and a few times tried to speak as if to reprimand me, waving his cane as if it was some kind of threat. I laughed the second time this happened and left within the hour, collecting my clothes and books, stealing an especially fine edition of Shakespeare of his which I’d been using for that still ongoing course, got on my bicycle and rode off down the hill without even a ‘Goodbye’, but a great sigh of relief, and the parting he deserved.
He was a sad spectacle to live with, always walking around the house with his cane, in circles to no purpose. Maybe this exercise kept him alive that long. He’d do it till he was tired then sit down and doze off right away, wake up an hour later and begin the shuffling around again. His mind was gone. After dinner he’d sit in his chair in front of the T.V. and I’d turn it on for him. He couldn’t find the knobs. I’d play the news, but I could tell by his looks he was often confused, not knowing what was going on or where. He was too embarrassed or perhaps incapable of asking me questions, so he just sat and stared.
The maid handled all his needs, thank god, dressing and bathing him, making his meals, tidying the house, walking him to the bathroom and going in with him. I think he wore diapers at night. I didn’t want to know. But with what little mind he had left he was mean to her, showing dislike for some of the food she made him, pushing pieces off his plate or making faces of disgust, or showing impatience when she was trying to help him in some little thing. That was enough for me. I knew Doug and Phil would offer me their couch for the remaining three weeks of school. I stayed there and had a partying time, not what I wanted but a welcome change from the morgue of Mr. Rother’s house.
He taught me the lesson that there is a time to call it quits, with dignity, and that those who don’t, make utter fools of themselves, with no positive use to anybody else or themselves in any way, dotards, stumbling around awkwardly in circles, in a pair of soiled diapers they can’t change, pathetic, drooling relics of what was once a human being. You can see I am a proponent of assisted dying.
