ESSAYS/CULTURAL STUDIES
Willard Spiegelman
Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Farrar Straus Giroux
Hardcover (ebook) 978-0-374-26122-1, 208 pages, $24.00
September 13, 2016
Life, we are often reminded, is a journey, and some journeys are better than others, especially if we share them with good friends.
The delightful personal essays in Willard Spiegelman’s Senior Moments take us to past chapters, adventures and concerns in his life, while also gently taking us forward to contemplate the final silence we will also encounter someday.
Fittingly, his book opens with an essay titled “Talk,” in which he contends: “The person who excels in conversation has mastered the art of listening as well as speaking.” And Spiegelman, the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, ends Senior Moments with “Quiet,” an entertaining and thoughtful examination of how our lives and attention spans now are almost constantly bombarded by noise, to the point that conversations have been replaced by shouting over the ambient hubbub. “In nearly all restaurants, everywhere,” he laments, “commotion and hysteria have replaced tranquility.”
He sharply rejects one friend’s defense that loud, busy restaurants can be a “fun” form of “theater,” exclaiming: “If I want theater, I buy a ticket and go to a theater to see a play. I don’t want to witness, let alone participate in, the soap opera on all sides of me, any more than I want to eat architecturally sculpted vertical food. Let’s hear it for calm, and relative silence, and a nice plate of things laid out horizontally.”
In six other chapters carefully placed between the “Talk” and “Quiet” bookends, Spiegelman’s peripatetic journey of remembrance and reflection takes the reader along, via personal essays, to “Dallas,” “Japan,” and “Manhattan,” as well as into “Books,” “Art,” and “Nostalgia.” Each segment is engrossing and enlightening, yet also imbued with calmness and charm.
In “Dallas,” for example, some things Texan have jarred his East Coast roots, yet not the cuisine. He finds “the grandeur of Texas cafeterias . . . awe-inspiring.” And: “Local food, la cocina tejana, has at least one pinnacle, which many scorn but which I adore: chicken-fried steak.”
In “Books,“ he notes: “For the purposes of travel, especially on vacation, I always carry with me one big book, a loose and baggy monster, usually a novel, that I can that I can tuck into at night, on the plane, or in random moments of leisure, waiting for a friend or a bus. I want something I can open and close and be assured of finishing within two or three weeks. If I have to keep at it for much longer, I risk forgetting the start of the book as I heave toward its end.”
Spiegelman is the author of eleven other books and has been a regular contributor to the Leisure & Arts pages of The Wall Street Journal. He modestly labels Senior Moments as “a glance at paths I have followed and others I have not taken.”
Many readers will relish his book as a pleasant, wide-ranging journey taken with a friend who knows how to provoke important thoughts and concerns, in the midst of wry smiles and laughter.
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