The other day at my neighborhood shoe store I bought a new pair of house-slippers. My old slippers gave out, the bottom of one of them having detached itself from the main body, causing me in the early mornings to flap my way round our apartment. I bought the same kind of slipper I had before, blue, wool-felt, clog-like, made by Haflinger, a German outfit. C. Wright Mills, a once-famous American sociologist, years ago gave a lecture in which he attacked the East and the West, all religions, the family, children, dogs, and much else. In the question session after the lecture, a student asked him if he believed in anything. “I do,” said Mills, “German motors.” I guess I must believe in German slippers.
When I arrived home, unpacked, and tried on my new slippers, I heard myself mutter, “These should see me out,” meaning I’m unlikely to need another pair during my lifetime. I must have picked up the phrase from an old English movie. In my mind’s eye I see an older actor, trying on an overcoat, adjusting his shoulders to feel the snugness of the fit, examining briefly the length of the sleeves, and announcing, “This should see me out.” By “out,” of course, he meant until death.
When one gets to a certain age—at 81, I am there—the future becomes decidedly more finite, and one tends to view one’s needs in a much different, drastically less expansive way. I have an 11-year-old car—a black S-type Jaguar with fewer than 50,000 miles on it—that has given me no trouble, is not overly advanced technologically, is in every way comfortable, and has, as the newer Jaguars do not, the silvery figure of a jaguar on its hood above its roundish grill. The car is taking on the feel, if not quite the look, of Inspector Morse’s 1960 red Jaguar, which I always thought was the true star of that English television show. Every time I get into my 2007 Jaguar, I say to myself, gently patting the false wood on the front dash, “I’m counting on you to see me out.”
Here is a partial list of See Me Out items in my possession: Three blue blazers. Four Latin and three French dictionaries. One pair of tennis shoes (for a man who doesn’t play tennis). Five copies of H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Six pairs (in various shades) of gray trousers. Seventeen wine glasses. Thirty-seven shirts, long and short sleeved. Fifty-six neckties. One tuxedo. All these, I do believe, should see me out.
Not, please understand, that I am in any hurry to leave. I like it here, on earth, like it exceedingly. But a man of a certain age, an alter kocker, if you will (and why wouldn’t you?), has to think about what he no longer needs. With advanced age, I find envy, like any interest in movies about people under 40, has departed, and with it covetousness. Villas in Tuscany, Rolls-Royces, French mistresses, who needs them? Not this dude, surely.
If all this is true, and I assure you it is, why do I find myself fairly frequently strolling into resale, consignment, thrift shops, and used bookstores? In one such store the other day I found, for $5, a small white, polished clay Roman charioteer behind two rearing horses. For $10 I recently brought home a large poster of a slightly menacing elephant advertising guided tours of the Serengeti. In a clothing consignment shop near my apartment I discovered, in a perfect fit, an unsullied tan suede jacket for $24. A trip to a nearby used-bookshop yielded a copy of Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin and Barry Strauss’s The Battle of Salamis, the two for under $10.
Now what is a man who finds himself regularly muttering about this or that item “seeing him out” doing buying tchotchkes, wall decorations, clothes, and yet more books? Is it that I cannot resist a bargain, which, when come upon, still brings a pleasing frisson? I prefer to think it is instead evidence that I am far from ready, without aid of stage directions, to exit at left. My friend Edward Shils, at my age, would occasionally buy a bowl or a new kitchen utensil. “Doing so,” he told me, “gives me a sense of futurity.” Santayana wrote that no matter what one’s age, one should live as if one expected to live another 10 years. I don’t know at what age Santayana wrote that, but he himself lived to 88.
My new German slippers may well see me out, though I’m counting on the exact departure time being still a good way off. When that time does come, I hope that I, like the man presented with his hat by a butler in many an English movie, may be alert enough to say, “Thanks just the same, but I’ll see myself out.”
