KS Culbreth

The Turning Leaf

They were the last hours of my thirties. As midnight approached, I couldn’t help but recall the last hours of my twenties. I was bartending and a saxophone player who frequented the bar knew it was my birthday and asked me what age I was turning. I told him and must have looked forlorn.

Thirty? That’s nothing, he said. You’re still a kid. I’m turning forty this week. Now that’s old.

It seemed like a long way off. I breathed a sigh of relief that I was indeed still young.

As I went through my thirties, my studies and writing intensified with a greater intensity than I’d ever experienced. The hunger for learning that I thought would wane after college shifted to analyzing what I had learned in college to determine how much of it was truth and how much was opinion. That hunger grew sharper until it seemed insatiable.

I’d become practically addicted to what one professor called the Enlightened A-ha, the ecstasy of intellectual discovery, that thrill that begins in our childhood – discovering how blue and red combine to make purple, which knot holds two sticks together, how two notes combine to make a chord – that joy of discovery that is so much a part of youthfulness and the loss of which can become the stagnation of aging.

I’d been playing the violin since childhood, but now I began to study in earnest music written for the violin, its history and development and the contributions to the art by its most noted performers. Classical music became a new poetry separate from literature. The more I played, the greater depth I found in classical music, in its phrases and composition, the greater the music I heard in its silent spaces. Through my thirties the thrill of listening to Paganini’s Caprices gave way to awe for Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.

If we take to its logical extension one of Socrates’ most quoted maxims, the unexamined life is not worth living (which practically all students of the liberal arts are inspired by at some point in their freshman year), we can infer that what is most worth living is the fully examined life. To those of any spiritual or intellectual depth, the more we examine life the more rewarding and valuable it becomes.

It’s easy to misinterpret Socrates’ maxim to mean that we merely need to educate ourselves, to continue to learn. But the Socratic method – his method of analytical inquiry (that became the basis of Aristotle’s approach to critical analysis), that dialectic of constantly questioning back to the root of issues and definitions and beliefs – leads us to an understanding that exceeds mere education. The design of the Socratic method is to nourish the soul of the examined life, to sort out opinion, bias, and emotion and to determine truth as nearly as possible while acknowledging that our imperfect minds are incapable of perfect truth.

Unfortunately, much of our contemporary education in the humanities has become the antithesis of the examined life. Instead of critiquing our own beliefs and understanding to sort out falsehoods and bias our education is little more than a compiling of information that we can cite to prove that what we already believe is true enough. Too often the examined life goes no deeper than debating the same points over and over, trying to convince others that we are right and they are wrong and refusing to weigh evidence that contradicts our own. This brings to mind two related maxims, one by Plato (a student of Socrates), Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil and another by Goethe, Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

Objectively seeking truth requires not only setting aside what we believe to be true. It also requires looking objectively at what others, especially our elders, have found to be true and weighing that knowledge honestly, especially if it contradicts our understanding. In our youth, especially after graduating college, we feel that we are well educated and worldly, and we are easily offended when someone questions what we believe. After analyzing what we have learned and sorting out truth from falsehood, the examined life requires that we determine what we don’t know but should. It takes more than a bit of humility to acknowledge that we have a lot to learn, especially with a college degree placed freshly in our hands.

An oft-praised trait associated with youth is the passion of our emotions, but it is one that can lead us astray from living the examined life. When we are young, most of what we believe comes from the heart, not the mind. And we sometimes look at the elderly with an almost accusatory eye that they have grown cold. Tempering our purely emotional reactions with the intellectual reflection of our studies and our experience is not a coldness of heart but the balance between feeling and thinking that the examined life requires. As long as we maintain our faculties, it is this balance that calms our fear that tomorrow is just another day growing older and replaces that fear with the anticipation that each tomorrow is another day becoming wiser. It is this tempering of our purely subjective emotions that has evolved in most cultures a respect for the elderly as the resource of a more vast and more objective accumulation of knowledge.

Unfortunately, contemporary Western culture, and academe and pop-culture in America in particular has instilled over the last half century a distrust and disrespect for the elderly. One of the maxims of the counterculture was, Don’t trust anyone over 30. This change in philosophy was instilled in our culture by those who demanded to be the center of attention and the instruments of change. As the baby boomers become our senior citizens, notice how those who occupy positions of authority now demand that the young respect their elders.

Contrary to the mischaracterization that those who are crossing the bridge from rule of the heart to rule of mind are cold or callous, those who employ critical analysis are not heartless and unfeeling. We listen to our hearts but govern from our minds. The two complement one another as two divergent opinions often yield to the middleground of greater truth.

The danger of actively ignoring our elders is that we sever the current generation of younger people from what Shelby Steele refers to as the Community of Memory, that long train of wisdom that comes from the examined life and that is inherited by each generation when the older generation takes this responsibility seriously.

When the radical baby boomers isolated the elderly and cut off that continuum of generational wisdom, they created a vacuum for those who did seek the examined life. And as all revolutionaries must do, they had to fill the void they created.

The replacement that the radicals offered was moral relativism. By replacing the Socratic dialectic What is truth? with that of the relativistic No truth is greater than any other truth, they implicitly denied the Socratic and Platonic premise that truth exists somewhere in some form and replaced it not with a premise but with the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth, that anyone’s truth is true enough.

Thus moral relativism enabled radicals to isolate not only the elderly but anyone, especially the religious, for daring to maintain the premise that truth exists and to claim that they’d found some clues that led them home. By replacing a starting premise with a conclusion, they snuffed the Socratic ideal of the examined life.

To those who savor the Enlightened A-ha, the moral relativists and the philosophically inevitable nihilism they promote is one of the saddest conditions of contemporary thought. They lock themselves in a dark closet and from there preach to the rest of the world that there is no light.

And while they claim to be progressive, they are the most severely restricted because they are so very limited by Time. For in promoting their cultural revolution, they chose to see only the ills of the past and to use that to condemn the present. By shifting attention from what our culture has traditionally accepted as good and true to the differing views of the good and true in other cultures, the end result was not what they claimed it would be: an acceptance of all cultures. By saying that one is as good as any other and that there is no difference between them, what the result has been is a culture that actively ignores the good and true of all cultures, from the earliest history to the present. This is what happens when your philosophy begins not with a premise but with the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth. The path they pave is through a dim corridor of the horrors of Man and follows no guiding light.

Midway through my thirties, I was more than content to leave my twenties behind. I saw how much had been wasted on vain pursuits, on thrills that flared and fizzled, how many friends had been buried by seeking a tingling of the nerves (as James Joyce described throwing away a life for brief thrills), and how much I’d risked with that vulgar sense of invincibility common to the young. I had not deteriorated physically as I’d feared. New worlds were opening to me.

These worlds made me all the more grateful for what Santayana called the Sense of Beauty (discussed in depth by his book of that title) – that ability to sense and appreciate beauty – that is the better part of the blueprint of humanity and that is unique to mankind and that is, unfortunately, too often discarded by the relativists.

Having my youthful ego humbled, I was able to learn humility rather than rage through those misfortunes and changes and mistakes that tend to clip so many wings, those changes that inevitably open our eyes and our hearts and diminish the dangerous portion of our pride.

Through those few years I noticed that my poetry and fiction changed. Perhaps I did not write the volume upon volume of poetry as I had in my twenties. I thought this was the product of a prolific poet, but it was little more than a rush of emotions and a grappling with the minutia of each day in search of meaning.

What I wrote was becoming more condensed and, I hope, of greater substance. I noticed that I was not writing about myself, but using experience as a sort of weather vane to determine how like the many my particular had been. I began to use my own experiences merely as inspiration and source to try to grasp those universal truths that those who examine life are seeking. I believed this to be a far worthier contribution to the continuum of literature to leave behind, come what may.

Before long several friends were turning thirty and showing the same apprehensions I had. And I told them with all sincerity, If I were given the option to trade any year of my thirties with any year of my twenties, I would not take it.

You can’t be serious, was the common reaction.

But I am. My twenties were reckless and arrogant and my eyes were closed. I’ve learned twice in any year of my thirties what I did in any year of my twenties. And I’d never trade that.

I don’t believe any of them proved me wrong.

So now I was turning forty. I thought of the saxophone player and how he was turning fifty. I didn’t need to be told that forty is young. Not only would it have been dishonest, it simply didn’t matter. As we age, those of us who continue to seek and to discover the Enlightened A-ha are able to exchange being young for that youthfulness that does not fade. I began to look forward to my forties with the same joy as those who long for their youth would look forward to twenty-nine if they could reverse the progress of their years.

I began to look forward to my forties with the hope of understanding Beethoven in all his profundity, the beauty of his caesura, the power of a single, slow note. A level of understanding that was not possible in my twenties or thirties.

Acknowledging that I did not or could not know then what I would know is not born of arrogance and is not a belittling of the young. This is the heart of humility, for it is an admission that there are still greater depths to his music that I will not find until my fifties, should I be so blessed to live that long. And that there will be some depths I may never fathom. In coming to cross that bridge between the heart and the mind, we humble ourselves knowing that we can’t even pretend to know what we will learn in the coming years, that our eyes are still opening and that others know far more than we do and that we can learn from them.

No one exists in a vacuum. We are each an accumulation of the experiences we have had with others and through others by what they pass on to us through the Community of Memory and through the books and art in its many forms others have left for us. Yes, in one sense, we are largely an accumulation of the impressions that others leave upon us and of our unique contemplation of those impressions and of the soul’s faith based upon studious reflection. This gathering of wisdom combined with the unique character and soul that comprises each of us is the determining factor in how we respond to and what we do with our experiences, is the ultimate correlation between our lives and our understanding of life.

It was late October and the leaves were turning as they always had and always would. That October I left my thirties. Yes, a decade is a manmade demarcation of time and some would argue of no consequence or purpose. But birthdays, like anniversaries and new years and graduations, are stops in a cyclic machine that, yes, man has created but in accordance with the chronological architecture created by God and which we defined in order to comprehend mentally and spiritually – in however small and imperfect a degree it may be – this overwhelming, unstoppable and unslowing rush we call Time, a progression as constant as the seasons.

As certain as the turning of a leaf.

We reflect at these stops in the machine so that we are reminded of our mortality, of our pitiful span of years over the great gap of eternity. It is important that we do so, for it is too often the only occasion we take stock of our limited store of days.

What is the purpose of such reflection? Its roots are the same as what compels us to examine life. The importance of any meaningful New Year’s resolution is to admit to our regrets and clarify our dreams so that we may determine to put an end to making regrets and to try our best to fulfill our dreams.

And which dreams ought we most faithfully pursue? Are they not those that — in addition to living a life of purpose and joy — involve continuing our quest for truth and sharing with others those truths we have discovered? Or, if others disagree with our discoveries, at least preserving the importance of the quest, acknowledging that there is a truth to pursue, and venturing through that quest with those we cherish?

It was my thirties that introduced me to some of the closest friends I’ve ever had, some of the most intelligent and compassionate and thought-provoking people I’ve ever met. I look forward to my forties knowing that such people as would celebrate my birthday with me and others I have not yet met will continue to be a part of my life. That I will discover the writers and philosophers and musicians of old, or rediscover those I already study at new levels, and that all these friends who are and who have been and are yet to be will help me to understand the world and my place in it and that I may do the same for them. This is the purpose behind the quest, for it is only our determination to arrive at a definite location that distinguishes a journey from an escape.

Outside, the maples and oaks were turning brilliantly yellow, amber, and scarlet. Those leaves on the ground had already turned to rust. I stepped gladly from the sidewalk to shuffle through them, gladly left my thirties wandering toward the youthfulness of the Enlightened A-ha, shuffling through the leaves, knowing and accepting gratefully that the fallen leaves become the soil in which wildflowers take root and bloom.