TEXT SIZE
RSS
E-MAIL
PRINT
MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONOld Soul
How Aging Reveals Character — A Conversation With James Hillman
GENIE ZEIGER was a longtime contributor to The Sun who lived in Shelburne, Massachusetts. She died on December 24, 2009.
I first became acquainted with the work of James Hillman ten years ago through A Blue Fire (HarperPerennial), a selection of his writings edited by Thomas Moore. Since then, Hillman has become my personal King Solomon, an intellectual hero, the one writer whom, though sometimes baffling, I read again and again, then say aloud in astonishment, “I never thought of that.” Thanks in part to Moore’s distillation and clarification of Hillman’s work, I have come to see such themes as architecture, suicide, jealousy, love, and family in startling, fresh ways.
Most important to me is Hillman’s emphasis on embracing all aspects of one’s nature as being rooted in the divine. He uses the Greek gods as a model for this need to honor, not transcend, the war god, the jealous god, the depressed god. He condemns the New Age insistence on transformation, on sloughing off the “old” self and becoming some new, idealized person. Instead, he urges a deepening of personal traits that are set at birth.
Hillman’s writing is bold and imaginative. He readily employs the poet’s technique of leaping from idea to idea and trusting the unconscious to supply the connection. Though he initially benefited from Moore’s editing, it is really Hillman’s ideas that have brought him to center stage as a proponent of honoring the soul, with all its mysterious costumes and demands. In the past few years, he has even appeared on television to talk about his book The Soul’s Code (Warner Books), a selection of Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
In his newest book, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, Hillman addresses the subject of aging and, in his usual fashion, turns many generally accepted concepts on their heads as he presses for a broader look at the “misery” of decline: memory loss, irritability, insomnia, heart failure, drying up. In our country, aging is regarded primarily as a disease on which huge sums of money must be spent in search of a “cure.” Hillman contends that it is not our hips that need replacing, but our beliefs about old age — ideas that give priority to biology and economics, rather than to soul and individual character.
Hillman has said he sees himself not so much as the founder of the school of thought called “archetypal psychology” (he was director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, for ten years) but as a “re-visionary thinker.” His re-visioning of aging takes as its central paradigm the notion of character, which he defines as the whole of one’s nature, “that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago.” It is character, he says, that forms how our faces look, what our habits are, our interests, friendships, eccentricities, ambitions, and work. It is what determines the way we give and receive; it affects our loves, our children. And, as we age, the force of our character naturally deepens. “As character directs aging,” Hillman contends, “aging reveals character.”
If character and soul are the primary ground of our being, then the physical body and its losses may be looked at in more open and imaginative ways; the agitations and miseries of aging can be seen in light of their psychological purposes and the insights they provide into character. For example, rather than being annoyed when one’s mother tells the same story for the hundredth time, one might see her as passing on the archetypal “Story” by which we understand our lives and convey ancestral lore and wisdom.
To grow old well, Hillman says, takes the courage to let go of useless negative ideas about aging, and to cultivate instead curiosity about this process, finding its value. We must, he insists, keep our eyes open to both the fading light and the blaze of beauty at sunset.
Now seventy-four years old, Hillman is known for his acute and deep perception, not his bedside manner. It was, therefore, with trepidation that I first approached him for this interview. Here I was about to meet my main teacher when it came to the affairs of the mind. I was terrified when I called to cancel our first appointment because I was sick. Part of my sickness was, I think, fear. Hillman had been difficult and cold on the phone, challenging me about how I was going to approach this interview. But I’d also recently received a postcard from a friend with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
I found Hillman’s home just off the common in a small, elegant New England town. In person, he was both powerful and shy — shy not in his voice, which is authoritative and blunt, a hammer striking flat, but in his eyes. He hardly looked at me at all before the interview began. When he did, however, his regard was intense, and a buzz of sexuality resonated around our talk. A really good conversation is erotic.
During a break, Hillman made tea and served it in an old pot with pictures of the presidents on it. Two cats jumped around his high-ceilinged living room, which was filled with soft gray light. As I began to feel more at ease, I confessed how scared I’d been to meet him. But then, I told him, on the drive over, I’d heard my dead father say, “Relax, he’s just a guy!” Hillman laughed. In the course of the interview, he never lectured, and our talk took the kinds of unexpected turns so common in the best of his writing. He began by commenting on The Sun.
Hillman: The Sun is a completely personal and unusual piece of work, but it’s a lone voice. I would like it to be more political, especially in North Carolina, a state that has such extremes between very good people and very heavyweight people. It’s indirectly political, though, because it stands for values.
Zeiger: And it stands for personal expression at a deep level. There aren’t many places where you can honestly tell the hard truths of human experience.
Hillman: My thinking, though, is that when we compare our deep personal experiences with those of Eastern Europeans, or Russians, or South Americans, or Africans, ours seem so irrelevant, so tiny and shameful — just people talking about what sort of relationship they had with their father. Our novels, compared to those coming out of other parts of the world, are insular and parochial.
Zeiger: But what can we do about the fact that we have these insular lives, that we’re surrounded by so much comfort? We can’t manufacture hardship in order to write deeper, more meaningful novels.
Hillman: Good question, what do we do? After all, the people in Kosovo, or wherever we look, have personal experiences, too: their spouses walk out, or they get cancer. But their experiences are part of something else. They resonate with the world, with society, with tragedy and fate, with political and social repercussions. Are ours just part of our comfortable life, as you say? Or is it that we’ve cut ourselves off from the larger figures of the cosmos?
Zeiger: I often stay away from the news and then feel guilty for not participating in the larger theater of the world. But if I see those images, I’ll feel a responsibility to do something about them, and I can’t, except perhaps to send money. I’m left feeling powerless.
Hillman: Yes, powerless, but there are answers. Gary Snyder says, when something strikes you — whether it’s a hungry child, or the death of a fish, or the cutting of a forest, or the warming of the air — take that particular thing and enter into it. Learn about the salmon, about the Indian myths surrounding it, about the whole life cycle of the fish. Through your learning, you develop sympathy, and you become an expert. You pick one place where your heart can connect to the world’s problems. We can’t just say, “This is too much. I can’t bear it.”
Zeiger: I do volunteer work at a senior center leading writing workshops, but it doesn’t feel like enough. It’s too easy. I enjoy it. Perhaps there needs to be some element of sacrifice.
Hillman: That’s a good point. Your example also raises the question: Why does our society believe old people need help? They are the ones who would be, in some other society, passing on help to others: teaching skills, telling stories, leading rituals, caring for children. They have a contribution to make, and instead they are segregated as sick people who need to be nursed. This is ridiculous. And The Force of Character is partly about that status.
SHARE
