"You can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
―Hunter S. Thompson,Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Thinking of the tides of life here on the penultimate day of my sixtieth year populating this time and space. I recall that the Roman Empire reached its geographical apex under Trajan, that moment when it sprawled as far toward the Euphrates and the North Sea as it would ever reach, and yet it persisted in decline for another three centuries. Like a person, more-or-less a quarter of (western) Rome's existence as an empire was spent in a gradual, mostly imperceptible denouement.
Trajan, for his part, memorialized his fleeting moment in a column that's still there in the Forum.
Peg and I have been to the very spot, five years ago. The ruins that surround it speak as loudly as the column itself about the nature of human triumph.
Then there were my benighted ancestors, who like their MAGA descendants engaged in a nearly (in the South's case, anyway) successful attempt to shed the legacy of liberty the Framers left us. Their high water mark sits memorialized on Cemetery Ridge,
right there where Lo Armistead was shot dead by men commanded by his best friend at West Point, while leading his own brigade into capture or death. The Confederacy never had the means or the will for such an audacious foray again, and you could just smell the end of the thing.
I guess I wandered into thinking of all this after reading an essay this morning in the Atlantic by Arthur Brooks, a Harvard lecturer who writes on the subject of happiness. There was a time the very idea of happiness scholarship seemed sort of ludicrous, and the field is in fact crowded with the shallow and the mawkish. But Brooks isn't one of those, drawing his lessons from Aquinas and Buddha and, in this particular essay, Mick Jagger.
"Satisfaction", the song I mean, stands there in plain view as an insightful indictment of consumer culture. That certainly wasn't what I was thinking as I blasted it in my bedroom at twelve.
I've read a lot of Brooks's essays on happiness over the last couple years, as his focus on how to find or maintain joy in life as one ages becomes more relevant. In this particular essay, he stresses the importance of giving up the notion of finding happiness is acquiring stuff or admiration or something external to yourself and the relationships that are the real treasure in this life. Besides starting to lose the stamina to sustain endless ambition, the constant striving itself is bad for you because it takes away from the important stuff in the zero sum game of our time on this earth.
So I'm coming around to the notion, inconceivable to me only a couple years ago, that we won't add to the real estate empire, at least not without letting something go in exchange. The Columbia is capable enough--we don't need to spend $1.3 million on the newest, fanciest plane. I'm going to work on not paying attention to how my billable hours and collections stack up when compared with my partners on our monthly productivity reports. Like golf, I just need to play my own game at my own level. I need to spend more quality time with P, and with our family, in the time we have left before I find myself curled up in a diaper, as both of my very ambitious parents have ended the ride.
"I need". The very way I phrased that last bit shows I have a long way to go to shed a way of thinking and feeling that's become ingrained.
Back when I was at Squadron Officers School in 1991, working like a man possessed to earn my way into being named #1 in a squadron of eighty captains, I had a classmate who somehow had found his way into the program as a lieutenant, a navigator on C-130s flying with the Alabama Air National Guard. Without being dismissive of the program, which would have signaled a measure of ego and arrogance, he also made it clear he could not care less about his class rank or getting any accolades out of his time there at Maxwell.
One day one of my other classmates, another burner like myself, asked our affable Alabamian if he had a plan in the event things didn't work out with the Guard or at SOS.
"I reckon I'll just go back to that double-wide on the Alabama River, momma'll get her job back at Wal-Mart, and I'll fish more and drink a little beer. Come to think of it, that might not be all bad."
At the time I thought the sentiment was funny and a little pathetic. I mean, what kind of man doesn't want to win at everything?
But looking back, all that winning over the course of my life didn't bring much joy, and even the triumph and adulation that came along periodically throughout the three decades since then "seems like straw", to quote Aquinas. When have I been happy? During this time with Peg that's racing by. When I think of my sons and our blended family. None of that has much to do with bank accounts or antique boats or winning the big appeal. Those things are nice, but it's foolish to think they'll bring more than fleeting satisfaction.
So, looking around at what we've acquired and accomplished, I feel like Trajan looking at a map of Rome. We've reached the high water mark. It's time now to concentrate on what really matters, and to let the tide run out, as it always does.
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