The Young Man Within
I am rewatching The Crown, that wonderful Netflix series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II. The current episode starts with Winston Churchill speaking with his assistant, a young blonde woman who acts as his secretary. She is apparently infatuated with Churchill and at the suggestion by him that she spend more time with a young man her own age, she has taken to reading Churchill’s biography to acquaint herself with his youthful life and times. This serves to just further imbed her infatuation. There is little about the interaction that is unique, it happens often in life. Young women are often smitten by older men, which some would call an Electra Complex and others simply see as the primordial attraction to power. What is more interesting is the reaction of Churchill. Rather than feeling proud for having impressed a young woman and been of interest to someone of the younger generation, he looks troubled and saddened as though he is bemoaning his lost youth and vigor.
This all strikes me as ridiculous. Churchill as a young man certainly did some noteworthy things…for a young man. But we would not be quoting him and watching movies of him had he not grown into the man who was capable of leading England out of its worst crisis ever, when the Huns were literally knocking on the door of London night after night during the infamous Battle of Britain. Of course he could not have been the man he was during WWII had he not been the bold and presumptuous man of his youth, but in May, 1940, Churchill was a man of sixty-five years of age who had literally and figuratively been through the wars. He had been a Boer War hero, he had been a member of Parliament for years including serving as Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Minister of Munitions during WWI, Secretary of State of War and Air, Secretary of the Colonies, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and finally, Prime Minister. It was only through his long and extensive experience, some good and plenty not so good, that he was able to have the fortitude to take on the Nazi crisis the way he did. The young man had become a well-travelled man of years and it was this older man that rose to the challenge and did great things that the world will remember for a long time.
And in his even later years as a retired statesman, this very accomplished older gentleman wrote a Nobel-Prize-winning work of history and produced equally great works of art. To say he was a Renaissance Man is perhaps to define the expression. But it is less the breadth of his talents and more the fact that he achieved most of his greatness at the later stages of his life that are the subject of my thoughts this morning. There is a scene in The Crown when during a cabinet meeting, he rises, clearly in need of a bathroom break, and one is made to feel as though this tottering old man might well relieve himself on the cabinet room carpet. It is that scene that presages the attempt by Anthony Eden, his deputy, to ask King George VI to consider convincing Churchill that he needed to retire (something he refused to do). Churchill, during his most impressive moments as a leader and then a a writer, historian and painter, was, indeed, an old man who had trouble getting from one place to another. He was stooped with age and not without plenty of maladies.
And yet, he persisted. His persistence may have been what saved the world at that crucial moment in 1940, before the United States had the nerve to enter the European conflict and stage their assault on Germany from a base of operations in England. That would have all been impossible had Churchill not injected the British people with the spine to stand up to the Blitz and not allow Hitler to roll over them. Today we are seeing that same sort of gutsy obstinance exhibited by Volodymyr Zellenskyy in Ukraine as the modern-day Hitler, Vladimir Putin, tries to roll over Ukraine the way Hitler tried to roll over England in 1940. At least Zellenskyy has the benefit of vigor and youth, but it was the old man in Churchill who hobbled his way through that previous crisis.
I am sixty-eight years old now and while I am no Winston Churchill in terms of my experience and accomplishments, I think it is fair to say that the capabilities I now enjoy, whatever they may be, are a direct product of my fifty years of experiences. I am not faced with a global conflagration to solve and I doubt seriously there is a Nobel Prize in my future or even a gallery showing of my art, but I too am broadening my activities beyond that which I trained for those many years to do. I advise in my area of greatest expertise, much as Churchill did in his later years (in my case via my expert witness work). I study history through my teaching in graduate-level finance. And I write, sculpt and paint with abandon about any and everything with the artwork for the most part restricted to my back hillside in the form of boulder sculpting and painting. I aspire to no particular goal for my artwork just as I do not necessarily seek a broader audience for my writing. I will leave a body of work for eternity or for as long as the digital world chooses to save the written word or Mother Nature decides to maintain the back hillside as a place where people reside and visit.
I have not been conscious of this before writing this story, but I suspect that my writing and my art are, in a very Churchillian way, an expression of the young man within me that aspired to something more or at least something different from a career in finance. At times I had wanted to be an architect or a scientist or an engineer. My recent work on my Hobbit House, on my boulder sculptures, my pathways, plantings and stairways, all speak to these aspirations of youth. I dabbled here and there as a hobby as I was coming up through the ranks in banking. I put in a rock garden here or added an addition to a home there, and I certainly took the time to start writing while still in my thirties, but none of it was done with intensity. It was all very casual and unremarkable. As I am now if full-scale retirement (except for that bit of consulting and teaching I choose to do), these are my main activities and if I am not engaged in one of them, I am engaged in another one. It’s what I now do.
Since I live in a place called Casa Moonstruck, I am reminded of that character in the movie Moonstruck who is Loretta’s grandfather, Cosmo’s father. He spends his time walking his dogs and howling at the moon. His one great speech comes at the end when he says “I am old and the old are not wanted.” I have always had a hard time reconciling that image of aging with who I am. Granted, the grandfather is 80+ years old and his son is about 60, but I have a very hard time seeing myself in that place. It’s less about living in the house of his son and walking dogs for pleasure and more about feeling that I am old and not wanted. I may very well be not wanted at some point (some might think I have arrived there already), but I am unlikely to feel that way about myself. The reason is simple, I think I will always see myself as Churchill must have, as the young man within who still has much to give and much to accomplish.