Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein Page B

longest-lived people in today’s world; it isn’t just the olive oil in their “Mediterranean diet.”
    ON PONDERING TRANSCENDENT QUESTIONS IN OLD AGE
    I am now sitting alone under an awning on the terrace of the sole taverna in Vlihos. Today I want to read and think a bit about some philosophical ideas that have always eluded me.
    In addition to being at the perfect stage for reviewing his life, an old man is in a prime position to noodle about the “meaning of it all” questions that burned in his mind as a young man but then receded as he got down to the business of making a life for himself. (To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens while you are philosophizing about its meaning.) But now these questions feel significant again; in fact they feel more urgent than ever.
    For all his negativity about old folk, Aristotle did say that “education is the best provision for the journey to old age,” and part of what he meant is that acquiring good tools for thinking—and thinking philosophically—prepares us for one of the principal callings of an authentic old age: pondering the big questions.
    I need to take a step back when considering such questions. Sometimes I think my basic philosophical impulses, those “what’s it all about?” churnings in my gut, were ruined by studying academic philosophy. Too often I became preoccupied with the heady, abstruse concepts of the great thinkers and lost that sense of wonder that made me read them in the first place. I need to remind myself that to head off in the direction of philosophy, a person really only needs the basic intuition that the unexamined life doesn’t quite cut it for him.
    ON TAKING PHILOSOPHICAL RISKS IN OLD AGE
    In the comedy film
The Bucket List
, two terminally ill old men compose a list of experiences they want to have before they kick the bucket, and they then set off to have them. High on their list are skydiving, climbing the pyramids, going on an African safari, and, for one of them, visiting a high-priced call girl. The idea is that they have nothing to lose at this point, nothing to fear, so why not go for it? For my part, I can go to my grave ­regret-free without doing any of those particular things, but the spirit of their adventures speaks to me. I have nothing to lose or fear by taking some philosophical risks at this point in my life.
    When Epicurus said that our minds gain a unique freedom in old age because of our “absence of fear for the future,” among other things he was saying we can now take mental risks that were too scary for us when we were younger. And taking some philosophical risks—say, the one Camus famously dared us to take when he wrote, in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”—is almost as scary as jumping out of an airplane fastened to a flimsy-looking canopy. Come to think of it, these risks are pretty closely related: they both demand us to stare death straight in the face. Kierkegaard pulled no punches when he challenged us to take philosophical and spiritual risks; he famously wrote, “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.”
    ON DARING TO THINK ILLOGICAL THOUGHTS IN OLD AGE
    Here in the Vlihos taverna, with people seated around me, I pull Heidegger’s
Introduction to Metaphysics
out of my shoulder bag. This is the tome that opens with the stupefier, “Why are there things that are rather than nothing?”
    Whatever could have possessed me to lug this baby across the Atlantic to this remote island village? It must have been the inevitable thoughts of mortality that hover over me. Heidegger’s question seems to go beyond the start and stop of an individual life—say, mine—to
being
itself. What is that all about?
    I have this nagging suspicion that for the past fifty-odd years I have been