Life in retirement isn’t, as some are wont to take it, an invite to a waiting room to be escorted away by Death. No, it need not be so. I see it as a “second chance” to relive your life all over, as it were. And add value to it, if you thought it all had gone to waste. Philosophy, someone might say.
Since retiring from public life, I have refused to take another job, though at 60 plus I am as fit and mentally alert, perhaps much more than some younger people. Yes, I want to rest the time worn and weather beaten body somewhat. Now I sleep a lot. My bedtime is 9 pm to 8 am. In between, I read myself to sleep between 4 pm and 6 pm. But I don’t want the brain to just go to sleep too. So what do I do? Plenty. I’ve gone back to an old passion: reading. In the university, I used to put aside some fund for buying books – set course books and others including novels, political biographies and autobiographies as well as medical, philosophical and psychological volumes. I didn’t leave out professional journals and general interest news magazines. Of the latter, I fell in love with TIME and NewsWeek, both American. Sometimes, I found TIME a boring, heavy read unlike NewsWeek whose style was more conversational and so was easier to follow. I kept up the habit after leaving the university. My library grew and grew. There are some books that I had not opened for some 20 years since I bought them. And it’s to them I’ve returned. I’m devouring them at a pace that sometimes amazes me. My wife of more than 30 years often wonders aloud whether It’s her I’ve married or books. Because she has had to fight them for space beside me. My apologies, ma.
Many of the books I’ve returned to recently include John Steinbeck’s two classics The Winter Of Our Discontent and Grapes of Wrath; Odumegwu Ojukwu’s Because I Am Involved; V. Naipal’s The Suffrage; Camara Laye’s The Radiance Of The King and Chinua Achebe’s There was A Country. I mustn’t forget William Golding’s two must reads, Lord of the Flies and Inheritor, which I bought in 1983 and am only now finishing. Ahn, ahn. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House that covers 800 pages. I purchased it in 1980 and still haven’t read more than a hundred pages!
My stockpile of the now rested Reader’s Digest makes very interesting re-read. But my pick of the lot, however, is Saul Bellow’s The Victim. To me, it’s the loveliest of his five fictions, including Dangling Man, Herzog, Henderson the Rain King and Seize the Day [ this latter won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976]. The protagonist in The Victim is Asa Leventhal, a man uncertain of himself. His self-doubt makes him one very easy to manipulate. This is what Kirby Allbee seizes upon to prey on. He convinces Leventhal that he is responsible for the loss of his job and so owes him a debt that must be repaid. He dogs Leventhal every step of the way. One day Allbee attempts what appears to be a suicide but actually it is an attempt on Leventhal’s life in his very own apartment.
However, what arrests my interest more is the conversation between Leventhal and Allbee on whether anybody can be considered self-made. Allbee doesn’t think there is any such a person. “The day of succeeding by your own efforts is past,” he tells Leventhal. “Now it’s all blind movement, vast movement, and the individual is shuttled back and forth. He only thinks he’s the works. But that isn’t the way it’s. Groups, organizations succeed or fail, but not individuals… But you find people who have their luck and take the credit for it, too – all brains and personality, when all that happened was that they were handed a bucket when it rained.” Mrs Harkavy also believes influence is a major key to success in life. In deed, she is convinced it’s the only key. I still recall a case in which I was involved. There were two university course colleagues of mine that I helped a lot with coursework. At the end, they managed only a pass degree. But one had an uncle who helped him enter the diplomatic service and he prospered a great deal. The other had a relation who held a top position in government. My former classmate was given a high paying job in the Central Bank of Nigeria and posted to London. Without help from higher up, on my own, I managed to get placement in a newspaper office where I was paid peanuts. Was I “The Victim” here of a system that survived only on influence?
