The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Solstice and Our Search for Meaning: Annie Dillard on How Winter Awakens Us to Life

Solstice and Our Search for Meaning: Annie Dillard on How Winter Awakens Us to Life

Rilke considered the cold season the time for tending one’s inner garden. “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer,” Albert Camus wrote a generation later. “If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely,” Adam Gopnik observed after many more revolutions of the Earth around the Sun in his lyrical love letter to winter. But if we are to reap winter’s quiet and invisible spiritual rewards, it seems that special regard must be paid to the day of the season’s onset as the time to set such interior intentions.

That’s what Annie Dillard (b. April 30, 1945) invites in a splendid meditation on the winter solstice, originally published in her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — which I revisit frequently as a sort of secular scripture — and later included in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (public library), one of the 16 finest books of 2016.

anniedillard
Drawing by Wendy MacNaughton

Dillard writes:

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready — for what?

[…]

I stood at the window, the bay window on which in summer a waxy-looking grasshopper had breathed puff puff, and thought, I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent, and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf… Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note, but couldn’t catch the consonant that might shape it into sense. I wrenched myself from the window and stepped outside.

Art by Isabelle Arsenault from Once Upon a Northern Night by Jean E. Pendziwol

She considers how winter highlights one of the central perplexities of existence — the mystery of beauty. In a sentiment that calls to mind Baudelaire’s assertion that “beauty always has an element of strangeness,” Dillard contemplates winter’s strange and sorrowful landscape of loss, and writes:

Is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all?

[…]

A wind rose, quickening; it invaded my nostrils, vibrated my gut. I stirred and lifted my head. No, I’ve gone through this a million times, beauty is not a hoax… Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it.

Art by Carson Ellis from The Shortest Day

Watching a maple leaf twirl to the ground in its final flight, Dillard considers something else we easily forget, as essential as beauty — the irrepressible cycle of growth and decay, life and death, each rendering the other both necessary and inevitable:

Another year has twined away, unrolled and dropped across nowhere like a flung banner painted in gibberish. “The last act is bloody,” said Pascal, “however brave be all the rest of the play; at the end they throw a little earth upon your head, and it’s all over forever.” Somewhere, everywhere, there is a gap…

[…]

The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps … are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the solid, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from The River, a watercolor ode to the seasonality of being human.

In a passage that calls to mind Simone Weil’s beautiful notion of “the needs of the soul,” Dillard arrives at the ultimate existential gift that winter gives us when we make ourselves willing to receive it:

There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed; your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you always come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for… Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Did you think you would keep your life, or anything else you love? … You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone…

I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door… The universe was not made in jest but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.

The Abundance is a bountifully rewarding read in its totality. Devour more of its richness with Dillard on what it takes to be a writer, then revisit Henry Beston on solstice, seasonality, and the human spirit and Dillard’s abiding wisdom on the two ways of seeing, choosing presence over productivity, and how to reclaim our capacity for joy and wonder.

BP

If Birds Ran the World

Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens and draw from them divinations. They furnish our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the deepest measure of intelligence.

Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility — a glimpse of us better than ourselves.

That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” — an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible.

THE SEASON OF PHANTASMAL PEACE
by Derek Walcott

Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill —
the net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
                         it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,
the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

“The Season of Phantasmal Peace” appears in Walcott’s indispensable Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (public library), which also gave us his “Love After Love” — one of the greatest poems ever written.

For a kindred vision of a more harmonious world, lensed through the possible in us, savor Marie Howe’s poem “Hymn.”

BP

The Leaf that Wouldn’t Fall: A Tender Illustrated Parable about the Measure and Meaning of Love

The Leaf that Wouldn’t Fall: A Tender Illustrated Parable about the Measure and Meaning of Love

Two of the most dangerous myths we live with are the idea, handed down to us by the Romantics, that in true love two people meet each other’s every need and desire, and the idea, sold to us by the merchants of materialism and woven into the fundamental mythos of the modern world, that happiness is a matter of attaining the external objects of our desire that would finally give us the interior stillness of enough.

But then we live.

We live and we discover that our desires are mirages in the desert of our self-knowledge, discover that of all we attain nothing holds, nothing but the light between us. We discover that love is not found in the grand gestures and dramatic demonstrations of devotion, is not proven by doing the impossible for someone, but dwells quietly in showing up with passion and persistence for the possibility of more light.

French author Nadine Brun-Cosme and artist Olivier Tallec invite that discovery with great tenderness in Big Wolf & Little Wolf: The Little Leaf That Wouldn’t Fall (public library) — the sequel to their uncommonly lovely parable about loneliness, belonging, and how friendship transforms us that remains one of my favorite books of all time.

High up in a tree was a little leaf.

In the spring, this leaf was such a sweet and tender green that Little Wolf wanted nothing more than to eat it up.

“Big Wolf,” said Little Wolf. “Go get me that leaf. I just have to taste it.”

“Wait,” said Big Wolf. “Eventually it will fall.”

When summer comes, the leaf grows shiny and deep green, so dazzling that Little Wolf wants it even more, to use as a mirror. Big Wolf keeps assuring him that it will fall if he waits.

When autumn comes to color the tree with its magical alchemy of photons and frugality, Little Wolf is even more beguiled by the leaf, yearning to press it against his cheek. Once more Big Wolf counsels him to wait for it to fall.

But then it doesn’t.

As the skeletal tree rises from the snow-covered hill, the little leaf keeps waving in the gale, a banner for the kingdom of longing.

One morning, Big Wolf awakes, stretches, and, in the unbidden way that those who love show up for those whom they love, announces that he is going to climb the tree.

He said it just like that, for no reason at all.

Just to see Little Wolf’s eyes sparkle.

As Big Wolf ascends the tree and climbs onto thinner and thinner icy branches, Little Wolf’s delight petrifies to fear.

But when Big Wolf finally stretches across the thinnest branch and manages to touch the edge of the leaf with his fingertips, the leaf crumbles at his touch, raining red and gold flakes down upon Little Wolf in the setting sun.

Little Wolf looked up into this rain of gentle stars.

As pieces passed in front of his nose, Little Wolf caught a teeny tiny one onto his tongue, and he tasted its sweetness.

As another passed before his eyes, he saw how bright it was.

When a piece slid all the way down his cheek, he felt how gentle it was, and he trembled for a long time.

Then all the pieces blew farther and farther away.

Big Wolf watches from above, still and smiling.

Back down on the ground, they sit together as night falls and Little Wolf whispers:

That was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.

This may be what love is — how the fantasy can crumble into a reality more beautiful than you could have imagined, how in the failure to meet the other’s need is the tender triumph of having tried, how these gestures of kindness and care are in the end the most beautiful thing we can give one another.

BP

The Woman Who Mapped Labrador and Revolutionized the Literature of Exploration

The Woman Who Mapped Labrador and Revolutionized the Literature of Exploration

Nothing changes the history of the world more profoundly than changing the landscape of permission and possibility for people — what is possible and permissible for whom in a given culture. And no one has changed the history of the world more profoundly than the people who, with the self-permission to defy the prohibitive dogmas of their time and place, have broadened the horizon of possibility for others; who by some variable of their birth were not allowed or expected to do the thing — the bold thing, the passionate thing, the unreasonable thing — they ended up doing.

“So wild and grand and mysterious,” Mina Hubbard (April 15, 1870–May 4, 1956) writes in her journal, looking out at Labrador from beneath her narrow-brimmed felt hat, feeling the weight of her revolver, hunting knife, and compass belted onto the skirt she is wearing on top of loose men’s breeches and heavy leather moccasins rising almost to her knees. Stowed in her canoe are her sextant, barometer, folding Kodak camera, and some fishing tackle. After weeks at sea, she has finally arrived at the last unexplored frontier of her continent, which she would come to see as an “uncommon place with an uncommon power to grasp the soul.”

Mina Hubbard in the field

Meanwhile, her competitor — the man she blames for her young husband’s death in this very landscape twenty months earlier, now leading a parallel expedition — is seeing only “dismal waste” in it, feeling menaced by the “desolate” landscapes, and complaining about the mosquitos. “Homecoming will be the best part of the trip,” writes Dillon Wallace. “I dread going back,” writes Mina Hubbard, her state of mind “one of continued surprise” as she watches the river grow “more and more splendid all the time,” the majestic migration of the caribou, the aurora borealis swirling above the crackling campfire.

In the official accounts of their expeditions, neither would make mention of the other. Mina alone would make a lasting scientific contribution — her maps of the Naskaupi and George Rivers would backbone all atlases of the region for decades, until the advent of aerial mapping in the 1930s. She would accomplish this by making a home at that place where poetry and science meet — the blessing refusal to decouple truth and beauty — revolutionizing the literature of exploration.

Born on a pioneer farm in Canada — a cluster of colonies Queen Victoria had confederated into a country just three years earlier — Mina Benson was the seventh child in a family of meager means and strict adherence to a Methodist church that believed higher education corrupts the soul. She learned to read and write in a one-room schoolhouse by the local sawmill with a belfry on the roof and a portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall. By sixteen, she had become an elementary schoolteacher herself. But she dreamt of a larger life. After a decade of teaching, she left for New York and enrolled in nursing school.

Mina in her nursing uniform

“Oh dear I wonder what is going to become of me,” she wrote to her sister just before her thirtieth birthday.

Five months later, having risen to assistant superintendent of a Staten Island infirmary, she was assigned a young man with typhoid fever. Two years younger than her, he too was a dreamer who had grown up on a pioneer farm and had gone to New York seeking to contact the world, starving his way into journalism.

Less than a year later, Mina Benson married Leonidas Hubbard, her “Laddie,” in a small New York church with no family present. They honeymooned in the wilderness and in the years that followed, she often accompanied him on assignments in nature.

Leonidas Hubbard

In 1903, Leonidas Hubbard persuaded his boss at Outing magazine to assign him to Labrador — three paid articles about the last frontier, and an unsalaried leave to undertake the expedition they would require. He invited his new friend Dillon Wallace, in many ways his opposite — a junior partner in a law firm, pale and pot-bellied from his desk job, suspicious of the remote wilderness. But, perhaps driven by the secret yearning that even the most contentedly caged creatures have for freedom, Wallace accepted the invitation.

On the last day of spring, their expedition sailed from the Brooklyn harbor with Mina aboard. After passing through Halifax, they spent a night at a hotel in a St. John’s hotel where, by an auspicious stroke of chance, they met the Newfoundland captain who had once been first mate on Robert Peary’s historic expedition to the North Pole. At Battle Harbor, Mina disembarked and the men continued on. “Fog and rain,” she wrote in her journal. “Cried. I wanted to.”

On January 22, after months of anxious silence, Mina Hubbard received a telegram that simply read:

Mr. Hubbard died October 18th in the interior of Labrador.

Her bright-eyed Laddie, her beloved dreamer she would always remember as “glad of Life because it gave him a chance to love and to work and to play.”

She would eventually learn that the two men and their local guide, George Elson, had run out of provisions after going up the wrong river; that Wallace and Elson had turned around to search for a cache of flour, leaving Hubbard in a tent; that Wallace had returned to search for him, but had lost his way and nearly his life in a snowstorm. Hubbard’s famished body was found a fortnight later, his diary at his side. Wallace’s circling footsteps were preserved in the snow just two hundred yards of the tent. It seemed to Mina that he “simply turned around and went back.”

Wild with grief, unable to bear the finality of his death, Mina Hubbard set out to honor her husband’s life and commissioned Wallace to write an account of their expedition.

Upon receiving the manuscript, she was galled to find a hero’s journey with Wallace as the heroic explorer and her husband as the “homesick boy” who perishes along the way. She asked Wallace to return her husband’s papers. He refused, keeping Hubbard’s field notes, maps, and photographs, sending her only his last letters, and holding on to the diary until the book was finished. Against Mina’s explicit repudiation, he published it, illustrated with Hubbard’s uncredited maps and photographs.

One January night in 1905, after weeks of “feeling very, very helpless and sad” while living as a boarder at another widow’s house in Williamstown, Mina Hubbard heeded a call that came to her “like a sudden illumination of darkness,” saying simply: “Go to Labrador.”

In February, Wallace’s book was published. It was nightmarish enough to watch it become a national bestseller, but when Wallace decided to capitalize on his newfound fame and recast himself from desk-bound lawyer to writer and intrepid explorer, announcing it was “God’s will” that he should finish “the work of exploration Hubbard began,” Mina couldn’t bear the idea of him warping her husband’s image and hijacking his dream.

She protested the only way a person of courage and creative vitality protests — she would do it herself.

With redoubled determination, she set out complete her husband’s work by embarking on a 600-mile expedition across the wildest edge of the continent, discovering herself along the way and charting a new terrain of permission and possibility for others.

Mina Hubbard’s compass

She kept her plans secret, even from her parents, only telling her mother that she was going on a long journey. Understanding that the fulcrum of any great feat is the total person, body and mind, she enrolled as student in the senior class of the Williamstown high school. Every morning, Mina Hubbard, thirty-four, laced up her mourning black and headed to the classroom to study the classics alongside the teenagers, then went home to work on her meticulous provision and equipment lists.

On June 16, 1905, while the young Albert Einstein was sitting at a Swiss government desk dreaming up the relativity theory that would make GPS possible, Mina sailed for Labrador to map its uncharted rivers.

Her vast arsenal of equipment and provisions included two balloon-silk tents, three axes, two Kodak cameras, and twelve pounds of chocolate.

After a nauseating ten-day crossing, she found herself not in the “desolate peninsula” she had read about in the accounts of other explorers who had approached and turned away but a place of “strange, wild beauty, the remembrance of which buries itself silently in the deep parts of one’s being.”

Dillon Wallace, who had found out about her expedition from the newspaper headlines, was on her heels. Although they had left days apart, he arrived six weeks after her, already paying the price of their different strategies. By the overconfidence that is the Achilles heel of performative masculinity, Wallace had set out with just two canoes and three assistants hired from the mainland primarily for their academic training and their skills as handymen, all novice canoeists. They had lost their way attempting to follow old portage overground routes, lost some of their equipment trying to canoe into a snowstorm, and finally turned up at the Hudson Bay Company’s trading post at the mouth of the George River, trapped on a cliff after running their canoes into the low-tide mud. They had to be rescued by the company employees ashore.

Mina, though less resourced, had invested in three canoes and hired local guides — George Elson, who had tried valiantly and in vain to save her husband’s life, a Cree man who spoke his few English words prolifically and with great cheer, and a half-Cree, half-Russian man who hardly spoke at all and startled with his Scottish accent when he did. Her party traveled the native way, sticking to the river by canoe.

At the canoe

All along, Mina filled her diary with observations and exultations. Against the history of male explorers writing about nature and native cultures in the phallic language of conquering continents and penetrating uncharted wildernesses in a perpetual hysteria about the hardships their heroism surmounted, Mina’s account stands as a love letter — to the wilderness, to its people, to her Laddie, to the courage of facing the unknown with openhearted curiosity.

From the moment she set foot its shores, she looked at Labrador not with a plunderer’s eye but with a painter’s, like a poet, marveling at the silver cloud masses, the “deep rich blue” of the hills and rocks, “the sweet, plaintive song of the white-throated sparrow.” She writes in her diary:

I awoke on Friday at 2.30 A.M. The morning was clear as diamonds, and from the open front of my tent I could see the eastern sky. It glowed a deep red gold, and I lay watching it. An hour later the sun appeared over the hills touching the peak of my tent with its light, and I got up to look out. The mists had gathered on our little lake, and away in the distance hung white over the river.

Mina at the campfire

As she struggled with her sextant and the eternal problem of latitude, she never ceded her responsibility to awe:

The trail led down into a valley opening eastward to Seal Lake, and walled in on three sides by the hills. On either hand reaching up their steep slopes were the spruce woods with beautiful white birches relieving their sombreness, and above — the sheer cliffs. A network of little waterways gave back images of delicate tamaracks [Larches] growing on long points between. Not a leaf stirred, and silence, which is music, reigned there. The valley was flooded with golden light, seeming to hold all in a mysterious stillness, the only motion the rapids; the only sound their singing, with now and again the clear call of a bird.

Among the purposes of all three expeditions was to meet the indigenous Naskapi people — a branch of the Cree nation, considered at the time the most “primitive” of “Indians” — known today by their own term for themselves: Innu, meaning “human beings” or “the people.” Taunted with tales of rape and violence in their hands, Mina simply met the people she encountered as people — sitting with the women, playing with the children, photographing families with her Kodak, and chuckling at how much the young men’s advances resembled those you would encounter at a New York bar — those “little touches that go to prove human nature the same the world over”:

One of the young men, handsomer than the others, and conscious of the fact, had been watching me throughout with evident interest. He was not only handsomer than the others, but his leggings were redder. As we walked up towards the camp he went a little ahead, and to one side managing to watch for the impression he evidently expected to make. A little distance from where we landed was a row of bark canoes turned upside down. As we passed them he turned and, to make sure that those red leggings should not fail of their mission, he put his foot up on one of the canoes, pretending, as I passed, to tie his moccasin, the while watching for the effect.

A Northern Mother and Her Little Ones by Mina Hubbard, 1905.

But as she marveled at how “Labrador can be so kind and so beautiful,” Mina did not romanticize the indifference and brutality of wild nature. Her hands were swollen with sunburn, her neck “wet and sticky with blood” from the “mosquitos and flies in clouds,” whose bites felt “like the touch of live coal.” Some days she walked most waking hours across hard rocks and thorny bush, crossing mountains along bear paths, watching the river make playthings of her tents and canoes. When the canoe capsized in the violent rapids, one of her men nearly drowned and the river swallowed half of what was stowed in the boat — their stove, tarpaulin, frying pans, one pole, one paddle, and all of their axes. That night, Mina wrote in the diary:

No thought of giving up.
Only anxious to go at it harder than ever.

What menaced her was not fear of the forces without but the terror within. She was haunted by the knowledge that her beloved had looked upon these same hills, bathed in these same rivers, slaked his own soul on the same beauty. “Try to make memories breathe inspiration, not discouragement,” Mina instructed herself in the diary.

Some days were harder than others. On the two-year anniversary of the day she said goodbye to her Laddie at Battle Harbor not knowing she would never kiss him again, she writes:

Sometimes seems too much to bear. This work keeps me from being utterly desperate. Wonder what I shall do when this is done.

Over and over, she met him in beauty:

To-night after the rain the sun came out again before disappearing beyond the hills and lit everything up with a golden light. Clouds lay like delicate veils along the hillsides sometimes dipping down almost to their feet. It is all so wild and grand and mysterious and how his heart would have beat hard with pride and joy in it all if he could be here. Along the edge of the bank I watched it for some time thinking, thinking.

It took Mina two months to complete her maps, traveling the George River and tracing the Naskapi River to its source — the first white person to do so. Reluctantly, she left Labrador, knowing Labrador would never leave her.

Mina Hubbard’s map of Labrador

Upon returning home, Mina began writing her account of the expedition and nested into it a loving memorial of her husband. A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador was published three years later to patronizing reviews, focusing more on the body of the explorer than on the body of work accomplished. One reviewer, aiming to compliment, described Mina as “one of those semi-masculine ladies who astonish their readers by their courage.” Another dismissed the book as “essentially a woman’s story, filled with the unsophisticated wonder of it all,” taking care to note that “Mrs. Hubbard would probably have been a failure were it not for her male companions.”

A sole review in a London paper focused on the science, comparing her work to Wallace’s:

The main geographical results of both expeditions are the maps which the books contain, and it must be admitted that Mrs. Hubbard’s contribution to the cartography of Labrador is far superior to that of Wallace. It is both on a larger scale and more carefully plotted… It would require a third exploration to show whether Wallace or Mrs. Hubbard is the more accurate surveyor, but from the extremely sketchy character of Wallace’s maps we may hazard the opinion that the lady would prove the safer guide.

Within weeks, Mina and the reviewer were engaged, and so began the second chapter of her life. She moved to London, went on a lecture tour, raised three children, and became an advocate for women’s participation in the study of the natural world.

One spring morning in her mid-eighties, crossing the railway tracks by her house, Mina was killed by an oncoming train — that fuming mechanical mascot of industrialization, emblem of all that is unwild.

Covering the bed she had woken up in were her two plain wool blankets from Labrador, emanating all that unsophisticated wonder of a life worth living.

BP

A Decalogue for the Dignity of Growing Old: Eva Perón’s Revolutionary Rights of the Elderly

In modern society, Simone de Beauvoir observed in her later years, “it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life” — it is something upon which the vast majority of humanity looks upon “with sorrow and rebellion,” dreading it more than death itself. But her one solution to the problem of keeping old age from becoming “an absurd parody of our former life” is balanced precariously on the tip of Maslow’s pyramid, entirely depended on the needs below being met. So too with Bertrand Russell’s key to growing old contentedly and Ursula K. Le Guin’s insistence on the civilizational value of elders. The great paradox of modernity is that we are creatures of fraying flesh and brittle bone whose destiny is to diminish in abilities until all is dust, living in a culture equating productivity with the value of personhood, so that the person in the creature is increasingly devalued with the ripening of age.

Eva Perón (May 7, 1919–July 26, 1952) was still in her twenties when she set out to change that.

Growing up in rural Argentina, she had been moved to tears by the elderly man who regularly came to her family home asking for help, “humiliated to the point where the only thing he had left was his humility,” she would later recall. That humiliation, she came to see, was a structural problem, a flaw of the system design. And so, knowing that the most valiant way to complain is to create, she set out to redesign the system.

After researching all past efforts across legislation and philosophy, none of which offered an adequate solution to the problem of ensuring rights she saw as “profound” and “primordial” — “the Rights of Old Age” — Evita wrote them herself. She did not know then, nine months before her thirtieth birthday, that she would never live to know old age.

Eva Perón by Pinélides Aristóbulo Fusco

On August 28, 1948, before the eyes of her people, Evita presented to the president — her husband — the decalogue she had been working on obsessively, to be included in Argentina’s Constitutional Reform the following year. Addressing the nation, she held the whole world accountable for what she saw as one of the most overlooked social injustices of our civilization:

The problem of abandoned or dispossessed elderly people lacking the essentials of life has always been a key concern for the governments of all nations. Unfortunately, it has never achieved a definitive resolution… The issue remains open to all kinds of improvisations, theories, and even undermining born of apathy…

At stake, she insisted, was nothing less than “the miracle of successfully closing the cycle of human life” — a miracle that demands of society a “collaborative, just, humane, and effective” collective will that includes “all individuals without exception.” The ten rights she outlined were not just a political statement but a humanistic appeal to “all people of goodwill who feel connected to the plight of those who, after contributing their labor and social support, reach old age deprived of the means necessary to continue living with dignity in the common life of humanity.”

These are the ten rights, which I have translated into English from the original 1948 document held in the archives of the Congressional Library of Argentina:

I. RIGHT TO ASSISTANCE
Every elderly person has the right to fundamental protection, under the auspices and at the expense of their family. In cases of abandonment, it is the State’s responsibility to provide such protection, either directly or through institutions and foundations created, or to be created, for that purpose, without prejudice to the State’s or said institutions’ right to subrogate and demand the corresponding contributions from any non-compliant but solvent relatives.

II. RIGHT TO HOUSING
The right to hygienic shelter with basic household comforts is inherent to the human condition.

III. RIGHT TO NOURISHMENT
Healthy nourishment, adequate for each person’s age and physical condition, must be particularly considered.

IV. RIGHT TO CLOTHING
Decent clothing appropriate to the climate complements the previous right.

V. RIGHT TO PHYSICAL HEALTH CARE
Care for the physical health of the elderly must be an especial and ongoing concern.

VI. RIGHT TO MORAL HEALTH CARE
Free exercise of spiritual expression, in accordance with morality and creed, must be ensured.

VII. RIGHT TO RECREATION
The elderly must be recognized as having the right to enjoy a moderate amount of diversion in order to bear contentedly their awaiting time.

VIII. RIGHT TO WORK
When the state and conditions permit it, occupation through productive work therapy must be facilitated. This will prevent the decline of the personality.

IX. RIGHT TO TRANQUILITY
To enjoy tranquility, free from anguish and anxiety, in the final years of life is the heritage of the elderly.

X. RIGHT TO RESPECT.
The elderly have the right to the respect and consideration of their fellow human beings.

While Evita was ensuring that growing old remains a privilege and not a privation, cells were silently mutating in her body to deny her that privilege. But the decalogue she left behind was nothing less than a revolution. Word of it traveled throughout Latin America, so that when the young Che Guevara passed through Peru on his motorcycle as Evita lay dying at thirty-three, an old indigenous man who spoke no Spanish timidly approached him and, with his son translating, asked for a copy of the famous rights of the elderly in Argentina’s new constitution. Che “enthusiastically promised to send him one.”

Rights, however, are not one-time feats but the ongoing responsibility of the society which they serve. Within three years of passing the Constitutional Reform, the widowed Juan Perón was overthrown and the military dictatorship that set in overturned his constitutional amendments, cutting out Evita’s decalogue, affirming what we so willingly forget: that progress is not a vector pointing up and up but a sine wave slowly undulating upward through regular dips. John Steinbeck knew it: “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” he wrote at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.” Zadie Smith knows it: “Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” she wrote in the wake of the first Trump election.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days

Evita’s revolution of dignity may have been stricken from the Argentine constitution, but the words with which she ended her speech that August day lit a torchlight for the future history of our world:

Our aspirations seek to be realized even more profoundly, encompassing not only the vulnerable elderly of our society, but all the forgotten of the earth. Justice and solidarity neither recognize nor can recognize borders. They are higher manifestations of the human condition, revealing forms of the divine breath that animates our lives and that seeks to be perfected in the face of eternity… [I have] the unwavering faith that these same rights we proclaim today, presented before the nations of the world, will serve as inspiration, stir consciences, and one day reach, like a distant inspiration, the white heads of all the vulnerable elderly people of the earth.

Nothing more.

BP

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