Roger Rosenblatt on the Nature of Aging

 As a writer, Roger Rosenblatt has masterfully fulfilled multiple roles, that of reporter, novelist, memoirist, and, I would add, poet.  His books and essays are remarkable for their grace, insight, and wit.  As he's grown older, he has been reporting back from the land of the aged, mostly recently in an essay in The New York Times titled How to be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me) (April 13, 2025).  The essay's ten observations, rules, pieces of advice - whatever - may or may not make you happy at 85 (or any age), but they certainly better the odds.

I must admit that I parted company with him on one, his fourth:   "Get a dog."  For all of their virtues (and there are many), dogs will no longer be a part of my immediate family.  Though I'm not yet 85, I have entered the "no stoop, no bend," zone where those actions are to be avoided as much as possible.  Impossible with a dog.

One message (there, that's the right word) that resonated particularly with me is his sixth.  It is, I think, both simple and profound, and the basis for one of Rosenblatt's bedrock beliefs and very relevant to aging.  It reads in its entirety:

Everyone's in pain.

If you didn't know that before, you know it now.  People you meet casually, those you've known all your life, the ones you'll never see - everyone's in pain.  If you need an excuse for being kind, start with that.

It's in that sentence at the end that a fundamental truth lies.  Yes, be kind, an action rooted in empathy, and let that lead you to - here's the bedrock strata -

love.  That's the core message in much of what I've read of Rosenblatt's work and it's clearly spoken in this essay.

There's another bit of counsel for my later years that I have taken from Rosenblatt, one that does not appear in this essay nor, I believe, in any of his other missives explicitly from the aging frontlines, such as Rules for Aging:  Resist Normal Impulses, Live Longer, and Attain Perfection (2001), written when he was 60 years old, or in the occasional essay such as What They Don't Tell You About Getting Old, The New York Times (September 30, 2023) written at 83.  But it is reflected in his wonderful memoir Cold Moon:  On Life, Love, and Responsibility (2020) (published when he was 80).  It is this:  be open to the natural world.

Cold Moon, a brief book, is an extended prose poem, drawing the reader into a stream of consciousness as Rosenblatt looks back on aspects of his life.  It mimics the improvisation, and call and response of jazz, and, at times, the poetry of Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot, and the prose of James Joyce.  Sounds heady, but it's quite accessible.  The music of his writing carried me.  Rosenblatt often engages in wordplay in an effort to capture the paradoxes, inconsistencies, persistent threads, conflicts, irresolutions, pain, and humor of life.

A central element in Cold Moon's tapestry of memory is the 1946 movie Stairway to Heaven, titled in England A Matter of Life and Death.  David Niven stars as an English bomber pilot returning to England from a bombing run in a plane that is on fire and plummeting to sea.  He's alone with the body of his radioman, his crew having bailed out.  With no functioning parachute, he's decided to jump to his death rather than perish in a fiery impact at sea.  Before he does, he makes radio contact with the operator at a British airbase, a young American servicewoman, to report his situation.  The movie hinges on that accidental connection and the love that ensues.  Miraculously, Niven survives his jump and equally miraculously finds the servicewoman.  But his survival is a mistake that the powers in heaven seek to remedy, only to be thwarted by love, manifested through tears and the willingness to sacrifice one's self for a loved one.  It's a fantastical story told simply though lushly (it turns the Wizard of Oz trope on its head:  heaven is shown in black and white while earth is in glorious color).  The movie posits that love conquers death, and also, for good measure, nationalism and prejudice.

Rosenblatt recounts how, at age five, he was kept from swimming at the beach because of an ear infection and, instead, went to a local movie theater with his mother every day for a week.  The theater showed only one movie daily over that particular week - Stairway to Heaven.  The young boy clearly absorbed its message.

References to the movie and its central theme recur throughout Cold Moon.  Stated most succinctly early in the book when he writes:  "I believe in life.  I believe in love.  I believe we are responsible for each other."

In this book, Rosenblatt frequently turns to the natural world for analogies to illustrate and explore life, his and others.  Early on, he writes:

When we lament that we’ve lost our connection to nature, to the natural world, what does that mean, exactly?  What are we missing?  It has to do with the nature of nature, I think, which is stoic and steady.  While I yearn and jump about, the sea out there is just out there.  It goes about its business, its sea business, unaware of and uninterested in the frantic little boats that ride it.  Why do we lament that we’ve lost our connection to the sea?  Because the sea, for all its rock and roll and danger, knows itself, accepts itself, and that’s its value.  Nature fills the background of our lives with a self-reliant peace.  What are we missing?  Peace.

Rosenblatt proposes that there is a peace to be gained by acknowledging nature as "the background of our lives" and recognizing that it endures while our time, individually and, indeed, collectively, is limited.  It's a lesson learned from age.  That said, I would add that missing in this equation is the violence and upheaval that is also part of nature.  The track of deep time is punctuated by cataclysmic episodes.  This is not to dismiss the value or truth of his observation.  Yes, there is solace and, perhaps, peace to be gained by a connection to nature, just not always.

His specific references to the natural world in Cold Moon are many.  Two, in particular, have stayed with me.  He describes the life cycle of the Kemp's ridley sea turtles in which just a few of these small turtles, beset on all sides by mortal dangers, manage to beat the odds to be born, to survive a long and arduous trek through the ocean, and to complete the circle returning to their home beach, thereby keeping the species alive.  Rosenblatt writes, "In turtles and people, certain instincts are lifesavers."

He recounts the symbiotic relationship between a particular beetle and the mimosa tree in which the beetle cuts a slit into a branch of the tree to lay its eggs, a process which ultimately kills tissue in the branch causing it to fall, releasing the newly hatched beetles to look for other trees.  It's a process that prunes the tree promoting its health.  "Tree and beetle cannot get along without each other. . . .  They are responsible for each other."

Of course, the very title of the book signals a deep relationship to the natural world.  On December 20, 2019, at midnight, Rosenblatt observes a full moon rising over the ocean and beach:

This is the Cold Moon, also identified as the Long Night’s Moon, the last before the winter solstice.  My weathered mind flicks to my own winter solstice, the coming of my wintertime

There are rewards to be earned by pausing over, contemplating, and exploring Rosenblatt's references.  So it is with the name Cold Moon.  In keeping with the spirit of the work, there's a universality at play here.  This particular full moon at the end of the year carries different names drawn from different cultures.  It's not just the Cold Moon or the Long Night's Moon, but also the Frost Moon and the Winter Moon.  In early Europe, it was known as the Moon Before Yule and the Oak Moon.  This moon is also an integral part of the Hindu festivals of Datta Jayanti and Karthika Deepam.  (Gordon Johnston, The Next Full Moon is the Cold Moon, Skywatching, NASA, December 9, 2024.)

Explicit messages in the book for old age?  He offers a few.  Contemplating his face, he muses, with a touch of sarcasm:

Old age is the only purely realistic stage of life.  The stage when one is glad to inhabit the Gobi desert and quietly celebrate the cracks.  Every crack a Gobi rushing river in the driest terrain.  The cool example of old age.  Who would condescend to pardon such stunning, breathtaking beauty?

He also offers this moving paradox:

We will never again be what we were.  I am that sentiment.  We will be what we were, always.  I am that sentiment, too.