Prime Time - Jane Fonda [6]
Slowing Down, Going Deeper
Over breakfast at a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I interviewed Dr. Marion Perlmutter, who is with the Center for Human Growth and Development and the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Expanding on Professor Arnheim’s point, she told me, “It may be that it is only by suppression of certain things that we can actually get to higher levels. Was it that Monet had cataracts and couldn’t see well or was it that because of the suppression of that detail of vision he was able to get to the deeper level of the Impressionist essence? Cézanne had macular degeneration when he did his later pastels. Beethoven was deaf when he composed his Ninth Symphony. In late life we talk about slowing down as this horrible thing, but we also know that cognition is time-bound; the longer you take, the deeper you get to conceptualization. I think physiology helps us get there. It may be that only by slowing down can we really get more of a global perspective.”3
The poem “Monet Refuses the Operation,” by Lisel Mueller, explains so artfully how age and infirmities can bring deeper insights. Here is an excerpt:
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart are the same state of being.…
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three dimensional space.
33 VARIATIONS
Right after my seventy-first birthday, I was working on this book when I was asked to star on Broadway in 33 Variations, a new play by Moisés Kaufman. My character was a contemporary music scholar trying to understand why Beethoven spent three of his later years, when he was deaf and very ill, writing thirty-three variations on what was generally considered to be a mediocre waltz composed by Anton Diabelli, a well-known music publisher of the time. Imagine my surprise and pleasure when I discovered that my character’s final monologue touches upon this very theme: how the exigencies of late life that cause us to slow down also permit a different, deeper kind of seeing.
A scene in 33 Variations, with my character leaning against Beethoven.
CRAIG SCHWARTZ
The character I play explains how at first she had assumed that Beethoven had written the thirty-three variations in order to show mid-eighteenth-century Vienna what a grand masterpiece he could make out of a mediocre waltz. What she learned, however, was very different: She realized that Beethoven knew that the waltz was a simple, popular waltz that people danced to in beer halls. In delving to its depths, Beethoven pierced and dissected it in his thirty-three variations, turning a fifty-second waltz into a brilliant fifty-minute composition. He was sick and deaf, but he was showing us how, when we allow ourselves (or are forced) to slow down and see, what may appear banal on the surface can flower into magnificence.
Ripening Consciousness
We’re not all Monet, Cézanne, or Beethoven, but we all have the potential to achieve the flowering of consciousness—to learn to really see—and this can occur later in life, even in the presence of terrible physical infirmities.
The day of my final performance in 33 Variations, I read an article