The Sage

     I’ve always had an affinity for old people. I like the way they think.

     Now I realize that’s a gross generalization, that your average old person probably thinks little better than your average non-old person, and that there’s no fool like an old fool, particularly one with his pants pulled up to his armpits, but here I’m talking about the tip of the tail, the smart old people who’ve spent their whole lives thinking and learning, compounding their understanding in a way that I, with my comparatively fewer years and my shallower well of life experience, cannot yet hope to do.

     There’s one old guy I admire so much I think of him as the Sage. I first met him at a charity tribute dinner, one in which we’d both been dragooned into attending to bolster a powerful CEO’s curiously fragile ego. We were seated next to each other. I introduced myself, he asked me what I did and before I knew it he’d skipped the chit chat and was interrogating me, determined to drain from me any knowledge I had that he didn’t. He doesn’t do what I do, but he already knew inside stuff that even I didn’t know. But what really impressed me was how easily he integrated what I gave him with what he already had, spinning interesting theories and fitting disparate pieces together in ways that had never occurred to me.

     It was like I was wearing blinders and he wasn’t. I felt stupid yet exhilarated, as if the clouds had parted and revealed, for the first time, how incredibly high a mountain I had to climb just as I realized I loved climbing.

     Over the years I’ve seen him at a few more public events. He still interrogates me, but I’ve managed to ask enough questions of my own to learn a little about him.

     His formal education ended in high school, but his real education never stopped. He has a fanatical devotion to lifelong learning. He needs to figure things out. He’s always reading, always questioning people, always mastering something new. Like all wise people, he knows what he doesn’t know, and it drives him nuts. He can’t accept “I don’t know” for an answer from himself.

     With all his knowledge, he doesn’t come across as a know-it-all. Partly that’s because he likes to focus on what he doesn’t know, because that’s what interests him. Partly it’s because he doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of him, so he feels no need to put on a show. Mostly I think it’s just his extreme intellectual honesty. Even his declarations sound like they have question marks, as if he’s inviting us to correct him if he’s wrong. “Help me get this right,” he says before he teaches.

     Listening to him, I wonder time and again why he’s so unusual. Why isn’t everyone like this? The world is such a fascinating place, there’s so much to learn, yet so many of us run from its knowledge. We don’t want to know. Nuggets of knowledge are just lying  there for the taking, but we pass them by, never looking down, lost in our own little worlds.

     He has other qualities I appreciate. He’s not a dreamer. Too old for that, he says. What you get from him is unvarnished realism, sometimes very painful realism. No sugar-coating: that’s fuzzy thinking. When your head’s in the clouds, he brings you back to earth. “Listen: It is what it is. That’s all I know. You can figure out on your own time what it should be.”

     He’s thrifty. Or cheap, depending on how you look at it. Drives an old beater of a car, something that simply isn’t done in Los Angeles. I don’t know where he lives, but I expect it’s the same house he bought in 1950 when he was first starting out. What’s odd is I suspect he may be rich, but he’s not saying, I’m not asking, and there’s no telling from looking at him. I like that.

     He’s not a particularly nice guy. Small talk and other social graces elude him. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in getting to know me, or anyone else I’ve seen him with. When I see him at an event, he usually recognizes me and remembers what we spoke about the last time we talked, which could have been months or even years earlier, but he’s never bothered to remember my name. That part isn’t important to his learning project. What’s most disconcerting is the way he ends a conversation – he just turns away without a word. The first time I wondered if it was something I said but, having had it happen time and again, I’ve figured it’s just his way.

     One trait he shares with many of his generation is a deficiency of entitlement. He’s said that every day he wakes up wondering how he’s going to justify his existence for another 24 hours. He also says the world owes him nothing. I trace this back to his formative years in the Great Depression and World War II, a time when many had the entitlement knocked out of them. They take nothing for granted. My parents were like that and did their best to strip the any sense of entitlement out of me. Modern psychologists and self-esteem advocates would say that’s a bad thing, and I’ve certainly suffered for it at times, but overall I find I can connect best with people who share my lack of entitlement.

     He’s currently justifying his existence by writing a treatise on life and a few things he’s learned about fishing. He says this jokingly, but I think he’s serious. It’s just the sort of thing a Sage should do, bequeathing his most valuable asset, his knowledge, to society. In case he is serious, I’ve offered to copy edit the manuscript to ensure that I get my hands on it.

     I really hope he’s serious.

Comments

[Andrew Love]

it's great to see this blog active again, and tonight, as I read it (waiting in the hospital, during the endless hours as my wife labors with our first kid, it's quiet, she is knitting, I am reading) I am reminded of why I like this blog..

and I think it's because this blog does exactly what it observes this old guy doing, taking the jagged blocks of observation, and linking them together with a paste of humor, and incisive reasoning.

It would be fun if this fellow did write his book...

what would be even more fun, is if we who have followed this blog for years, realize that we have been reading a slightly younger man's version of this manuscript, all along.

[R J Keefe]

A model to us all. His not having gone to college is significant — most minds don't survive our notions of higher education. Sound like he'll be updating Izaak Walton's "The Compleat Angler."