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	Becoming Old and Discovering that All is Always Now By David Finn

It is a pleasure to write that, at the age of 86, I enjoy as much as ever working on projects that are meaningful to me. I even think I can sometimes do better than ever when I write, or take photographs, or paint, or work at Ruder Finn. I especially enjoy learning every day about things I never knew before. Some of my friends who are my contemporaries find it hard to believe they are no longer young. One of them tells me that when he looks in the mirror he doesn't recognize himself. That's not my problem. I do recognize myself, although I am surprised to see what I see. Photographs of me at a younger age look more realistic. But that doesn't affect my inner feelings. I'm sure my friend who doesn't recognize himself feels the same way.

Old people may feel young, but they don't look it. When we see people who are old, we have no difficulty recognizing their age, but it's hard to know from their appearance what's in their hearts and minds. Many years ago, Ruder Finn had an old-age home as a client, and I took some photographs of the people who were there for a brochure we were preparing. They weren't complaining about their way of life, but their faces looked old and sad. Many had problems trying to stand up straight. Their hearing was poor. I was embarrassed when some of the nurses talked to the residents as if they were children. It was hard to tell what their lives were like. They talked a lot to each other, ate their meals together, sometimes played cards, occasionally watched movies. But it was depressing to see how dull their daily experiences were, and there was no way of knowing what their inner feelings might be. Surely they knew their lives would soon come to an end, but I couldn't tell if they were sad about it. Many of them were debilitated physically, although few complained. I confess that it wasn't easy to find a way to take cheerful photographs of them for the brochure, and I felt somewhat dishonest in trying to project a positive image of them in their current state. The brochure turned out okay, but I was unhappy about what I had seen in that environment.

My uncle Louis Finkelstein, who lived to be 96, told me he was glad that he was becoming old from the bottom up. In those later years he sat in a wheelchair in his home and could hardly walk, but his mind was as sharp as ever. He was grateful that he could keep on studying and writing. Louis was a rabbi and a scholar but wondered, like everybody else, what it would be like after he died. My wife has always said that she believes she will see her mother and father when she dies I told that to Louis, and he said he didn't know about "seeing" her parents, but he thought she would be with them because he did believe in afterlife. Then when he was close to the end, he asked me to try to take a look at him in the last instant of his life. If he saw something wonderful ahead of him he would have a smile on his face. If he was in pain he would have a grimace. He thought that perhaps he could send a message back to the living. Unfortunately he fell into a coma a couple of days before he died, and he was unconscious when the final moment came. So there was no message about afterlife.

Louis once told me that when his close friend Professor Lieberman, a great talmudist, died in his sleep, that he had been blessed with the "kiss of God." My long-time friend and teacher, Ernest Zierer, also died in his sleep; he was in an airplane on the way to Berlin to deliver a speech. One friend of mine who was a well-known radio commentator said that he was hoping not to die in his sleep because having some time to prepare for one's death was important to him, but unhappily for him he did die in his sleep.

There are different points of view about whether dying suddenly is a blessing or a curse. Thomas DeQuincey wrote that "sudden death has been variously regarded as the consummation of an earthly career most fervently to be desired, or, again, as that consummation which is with most horror to be deprecated."

Those whom I have known who died suddenly might have been considered blessed with the absence of pain or fear but cursed because of the sudden end of their lives and the shock felt by loved ones left behind. I always thought that my long-time and dear friend Seymour Fox, who was a scholar, a teacher and a rabbi, would speak at my funeral since he was younger than me, but it was I who wrote a memorial about him for the Jerusalem Post after he died while taking a walk one morning in Jerusalem. My good friend Paul Gottlieb, who as the head of Harry Abrams, Inc. had published many of my books, and who had recently become the chairman of the board of the Academy of American Poets, of which I was also a longtime member, died having breakfast before coming to an executive committee meeting where we were waiting for him. The wife of Victor Gruen, a leading architect and a longtime Ruder Finn client and personal friend, died drinking a cup of tea in the afternoon. My uncle Jack Borgenicht laughed when a doctor told him that his heart was weak and he might die suddenly at any moment; he died in his 90s talking on the telephone. Hank, who was the husband of my friend Anita Huffington, whose excellent sculptures I have photographed for a book on her work, died while walking his dog in the afternoon.

My sister, Helen, fainted at home one evening, and was taken to a hospital, where she seemed to quickly recover; she told me on the phone not to worry, then a couple of hours later died suddenly. The architect Louis Kahn, who designed the superb Yale Center for British Art that I photographed for a book on the building, and where I had two oneman shows, died in the men's room of Pennsylvania Station (unidentified for several days because a thief had emptied his pockets). My brother, Herbert, was killed instantly when shot during a holdup in my car just after midnight when we were driving home after an evening at the Metropolitan Opera. My friend Heinz Pagels, the head of the New York Academy of Science and an experienced mountain climber, was killed when he fell off the side of a mountain in Colorado. Those deaths were close to unbearable for those who were left behind, although there might have been some solace in believing there had been no pain for those who died so suddenly.

There was another devastating, sudden death that I will never forget. Charles Frankel was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and author of outstanding books on freedom and democracy. He was also one of the first outsiders to serve as Ruder Finn's ethics advisor. Then one day I heard on the evening news that in the middle of the night a robber had managed to get into Charles Frankel's home and killed him and his wife while they were sleeping. It was as shocking to us as the news that Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The deaths of the Frankels has stayed in my mind for all these years as terrifying examples of sudden deaths that are painful to cope with and impossible to understand.

It is a different kind of disaster when friends or relatives die after suffering for a long time with increasing pain. My mother was one of those. Her doctor didn't tell her that she had cancer, which I believe was a terrible mistake. She thought she would recover from her illness, and when things got worse she felt she wasn't being taken care of properly. She suffered terribly, both physically and emotionally. My wife's sister also suffered a long time with cancer without being told what her illness was and mistakenly thought till the end that she might recover. My cousin Elaine Finkelstein suffered greatly for months before she died because of a stroke that paralyzed a good part of her body, including her ability to talk, which was so painful for her. I might add that all my more than thirty-eight aunts and uncles (some were married two or more times) from both my father's and mother's families have died — many of them painfully, including two suicides — and it is difficult to find some profound insights from their different experiences.

There is, however, a significant story of the death, many years ago, of Ruder Finn's first executive vice president and a close friend, Paul Zucker. He used to tell me that after he retired he wanted to write a play. I urged him not to wait and to write his play now, but he laughed and said he would wait. Some time later, he had a severe pain in his back, which he did his best to ignore. Eventually he had an operation and the surgeon discovered that he had cancer that had spread too far to be treated. Neither the doctor nor his wife told him what his illness was, or that it was fatal. He recovered for a while, and in order to make his remaining time as meaningful as possible I arranged for him and his wife, Renee, who also worked for Ruder Finn, to go to Greece. Greek Tourism was a client at the time, and I told him it would be helpful if he could to meet some of the people we were working with. But my real purpose was to make it possible for him to see the Parthenon, which great classical scholars have always hoped they would see before they died. He was thrilled to go and had a wonderful time on the trip.

When Paul returned, he became deathly ill. By chance he overheard his wife telling someone on the telephone that he had terminal cancer. He asked why in heaven's name he hadn't been told the truth, and afterward I asked him which was better, not to know or to know. He said he realized that he was terribly ill and thought whatever sickness he had might be fatal. So it really didn't make any difference. But he thought it was a mistake not to tell people what their illness was. He died shortly afterward at the age of 43, and we created the Paul Zucker Award, which we have given each year to executives who have conducted projects that contribute to social good and of which we are especially proud. We've been giving that annual award for almost 40 years to members of the firm.

Also, when I talk to new interns at Ruder Finn, I always tell the story of Paul and the play he never wrote. I call their attention to one of my favorite Thoughts and Images that is hanging on the wall of our conference room with a quotation by Ortega Y Gasset: "We cannot put off living until we are ready." It is accompanied by a photograph of a Michelangelo sculpture called Morning. I urge the young interns to do now whatever creative project they might have in their hearts and minds. They shouldn't put it off until later, the way Paul did.

My friend Dorothy Blaney, who was a great educator and president of Cedar Crest College, knew she had cancer the moment she was diagnosed. Her approach was to talk about it to her friends and write about it openly in her monthly columns. She fought as hard as she could to beat her illness, but eventually she lost her battle. A few days before she died at the age of 65, I sent her the galleys of a new book of her essays that we were publishing, and she was so pleased she called to tell me that she considered it her legacy.

When Henry Moore was in his early eighties he suffered from severe arthritis. He had trouble walking around his property in Much Hadham, England, leaning on his two canes. Then when he was 86 he became ill, and the doctors in England thought he was dying of cancer. But they were mistaken. He didn't have cancer and he didn't die. He lived another two years. When I visited him during that time, he was extremely weak and had a hard time even making sketches, but he never stopped working. He died at the age of 88, one year younger than Michelangelo, who was his idol.

People who are able to continue being creative despite their age or illness can be an inspiration to others. I have known some people in their 80s and 90s who were full of life — not in old-age homes, but in their own homes and in their offices. They were grateful to still be around and were continuing to do what they always loved to do. Most of them were working on something that was important to them — and to others. Their memories might not have been so great, and physically some of them had problems. But I was inspired to see that they were finding so much meaning in their lives. They were pleased with what they were accomplishing every new day. I appreciated that, for it is the way my wife (who is 81) and I both feel. Stanley Kunitz, who lived to be 100, wrote a poem about it:
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day
as it does each day

Kunitz loved gardening as well as writing poems, and in one of his last photographs he could be seen bent over with a smile on his face, happy to be in his garden, taking care of his flowers.

Besides doing what one has always enjoyed doing, there is the continuous opening of one's mind. Energetic people in old age who keep on working are aware of what they still don't know and are invigorated by keeping their minds moving in new directions and being inspired by great thoughts. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything - no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars.

These old people who keep working and looking with a fresh eye into the world around them continue to have a meaningful life in their later years. Even as the end approaches, their minds can be open. My father, who had been a lawyer, a writer and a businessman, never stopped working until he died at the age of 87. At the end, he knew that he had terminal cancer, but he never lost his sense of humor about it. The night before he died he told me he had made up a ditty that went like this: "Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep / If I should die before I wake / Please, Lord, give my soul a break." I always remember that as a cheerful way to face the end of a long and active life.

My cousin Kitty Carlisle Hart, who recently died at the age of 96, found a new life when she retired as the head of the New York State Council on the Arts. She had been a theatrical performer and singer before she went into government, and when she retired in her 80s, she became a singer once again, performing regularly, always with enthusiastic applause and appreciation. I saw her a few days before she died, and she was sitting up in her chair in her living room, with oxygen flowing into her nose but smiling cheerfully as she always did, miraculously seeming to appreciate whatever life she had left. Her long-time friend Roy Neuberger, who is now over 100 years old, continues to love the wonderful art collection he built, as well as enjoying the success of the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y.

So having known many old people over the years, and having reached an age in which I, too, have become a member of that elite population, I have a few thoughts I can pass along about becoming old.

To begin with, the way we divide time — years, months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds — has practical value but ultimately should be recognized as an illusion. We know that our lives consist of a finite number of years, and that they have an end as well as a beginning. But there is a very different way of thinking about life. A moment doesn't begin and end unless we look at our watches. We experience life as a continuum. Even when we wake in the morning, that is not the beginning of the day; it is a shifting from our experience at sleep to our experience of being awake. Falling asleep is the same; it is not the end of the day but rather a movement to another phase of our lives. All of life is that way, whatever our age might be. Every moment is infinite, although life itself is finite.

It is wonderful to recognize that truth, since the vigor, the insight, the ecstasy of our experiences can have the same intensity and depth when we are old as it did when we were young. There need be no difference. Abraham J. Heschel once wrote: "The greatest problem is not to continue but how to exalt our existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous... Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. [God] has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a herenow."

I once discovered that truth from another source. For many years, my wife and I spent a week once every spring and once every fall in Florence, Italy. It is a city we loved more than any place on earth. And every time we were there, I always took a special walk by myself through some of my favorite streets, wondering if I could find the answer to what life was all about. It was a question I only asked myself in Florence, where seeing some of the greatest works of art ever created inspired me to think about it. At the end of my walk, I inevitably concluded that I hadn't found the answer. But then one time lightening struck, and four words burst into my brain that I felt formed the answer I had been seeking. They were words from the end of a passage from "Burnt Norton" in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.

The answer I had been seeking was, all is always now. The essence of life is what is happening now. Now is everything. I later made a painting of that phrase together with an image of a Chinese vase that I had given to Laura shortly after we first met. The expression "all is always now" was the gift T.S. Eliot gave to me, and it somehow seemed related to the gift I had given to a nineteen- year-old girl I would soon marry, and which still has a special meaning to me.

Because every moment is infinite, a life that ends after only 25 years, as it did with John Keats, can be as full as a life that ends at 93, as it did with Picasso. We are heartbroken when a young person dies, but we also feel heartbroken when an old person dies. The loss is always devastating. But as long as we are alive we continue to experience eternity in the exalting moments of our lives. Keats saw eternity in beauty. His poem Endymion, for which I once created a series of paintings, begins with this wonderful passage:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Then at the end of his Ode on a Grecian Urn, he wrote again about beauty:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

We can learn something from Leo Tolstoy, who searched intensely for the meaning of life in his later years. He thought that writing his great novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina was not as worthwhile as people believed. He became increasingly devoted to the ancient Greek concept embodied in the phrase "Know Thyself," as well as Christ's commandment to love one another. It was Gandhi's perspective on what constituted a meaningful life that inspired his devotion to working on a spinning wheel as well as his determination to achieve independence for India. And it was Gandhi's philosophy that inspired Albert Schweitzer's commitment to what he called "reverence for life."

All those concepts have something in common and are imbedded in the three principles that Tolstoy thought should be the basis of a good life - although it contradicted many common beliefs. First was to avoid deceiving oneself and not to be afraid of the truth; second, to renounce one's own righteousness, peculiarities, and distinction; third, to labor with all one's being to sustain one's own life and the lives of others.

Despite Tolstoy's strange behavior with his wife and family in his later years, I have always admired the values he attributed to labor, as well as his warning against self-deception, and even his dismissal of the importance of recognition — despite the latter's apparent contradiction with what people think should be the objective of public relations. Friends who know about all the work I do have often asked me if I take the time to sleep at night because I seem to get so much done with my photography, writing, painting, and work in the office. They also seem puzzled by my criticism of personal publicity. The simple answer I give about the love I have of working on so many projects and my ability to accomplish so much is a quotation from Proust that "time is elastic," which, to me, means one can always find the time to do what one wants to do. But the deeper answer is related to Tolstoy's scornful view of recognition: I do what I think is meaningful, not what I think will win applause.

Recently I read a fine biography of Walt Whitman by Justin Kaplan, and it was clear that he did seek applause for his lifelong poem, and somehow that seemed appropriate, for he was writing about what made his life so inspiring. There were many insightful passages that Kaplan quoted from Leaves of Grass (the title itself creates wonder, for what, one might ask, are leaves of grass?). But when reading it a thought jumped into my mind: "We should live with eternity in our minds as the truth beyond death." These were my words, not Whitman's, but they somehow expressed what I believe is the way he felt about life. Seeing eternity in each moment is recognizing the endlessness of life, as well as the infinity of time and space. It is beyond our capacity to understand the apparent contradiction between time and timelessness, between life and death. Perhaps, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "The end is where we start from." Even if we believe we cannot know what happens after death, we can still feel that in some way there is not an absolute end to what we are. That is the inner meaning of life.

Some people I know are sure there is life after death and they feel comforted by that expectation. I believe that it may also affect the way they conduct their lives, hoping that doing good things will be rewarded afterward. Other friends of mine are convinced there is no afterlife; they feel that one should concentrate on what one can do in one's lifetime that is worthwhile and not expect any blessings afterward. There are some who are deists and profoundly believe in the existence of God; others who are atheists who are sure there is no God. And there are those who are agnostics and simply don't know what the truth is.

I must confess that for me the subject is not an issue. I believe that the human mind is incapable of penetrating the ultimate mystery of existence. I understand what Neil Gilman meant when he wrote that "all our God-talk is built on a skeleton of metaphors, constructs, models, paradigms..." I understand what William James meant in Varieties of Religious Experience when he wrote "I say God to describe what is indescribable... I [feel] myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, anything in Nature... losing self in a perception of supreme power and love."

I also understand why the scientist Jane Goodall, who devoted herself to the study of chimpanzees, thought the finite mind could never comprehend the form or nature of what people believe is the great spiritual power called God, Allah or Brahma. I like what St. Augustine wrote, that not knowing what God is is the only thing we can ever know. And I'm impressed with Dennis Overbye's observation "We don't know what we don't know, and we never will" when he described some of the latest scientific explorations of the universe, including the recent discovery of "dark matter," which seems to be a complete mystery.

I believe we can sense that our lives are somehow related to what we think of as eternity, and that the sense we have of spirituality is somehow in tune with the mystery of the universe, the way Einstein did. "I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist," Einstein once wrote. "I prefer the attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being." But he believed "to sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly, that is religiousness. In that sense, and in that sense only, I am a devoutly religious man." He also wrote: "I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion."

Although Einstein believed we can never know what is beyond the human mind to comprehend, we can somehow be inspired by something we know that we can never know. We can, after all, experience "hints and guesses," as T.S. Eliot put it.

There is no doubt that scientists will eventually solve the mystery of what happened 13.7 billion years ago when the Big Bang took place, and why what seemed to have been equal amounts of matter and anti-matter did not annihilate each other and leave nothing behind to coalesce into stars and galaxies. But will we ever know what was there before the Big Bang? Scientists see farther and farther into the distant parts of the universe, but what about those who think there may be other universes that we will never be able to discover? If there is life after death, where could those lives be? If there is a heaven, doesn't it have to be someplace? I am excited by the sense of eternity we can have in our minds, but I also believe that we can never know whether that eternal sense is related to what is truly eternal.

I've read several books by Nietsche and I think I know what he meant when he addressed the issue of eternity and declared that God is dead. He believed we need to look at human capacities without the concept of a supernatural being. But I can still appreciate the deeper insights of religion - including not only my own Jewish religion, but also the many others that I know something about. When I was in the army in World War II I carried with me a book entitled World Religions with sacred texts from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and was inspired by them all. At the time, one of my favorite authors was Sir James George Fraser, whose Golden Bough traced myths and religions throughout history (I was thrilled to be able to buy all the original 12 volumes).

Another favorite author was F. Max Muller, whose books on the origins of religion and of language fascinated me, as did the 50-volume series called Sacred Books of the East, which he edited (I wanted to buy the whole series but was only able to find volume XXXV on The Questions of King Milinda, and XXXIX and XL on The Texts of Taoism). All these books were enlightening. They helped me deliberate about unanswerable questions. Later I read books by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Liebniz, Hume, Spinoza, Kierkegard, Kant, Spengler, Dewey, James and others, each of whom had a different point of view about the nature of being. I was intrigued to learn that Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, famous friends and philosophical collaborators, had opposite ideas about being. Russell believed in what he called "the perpetual perishing" of the universe in which nothing ever survived, and Whitehead believed in "the eternal advance" of the universe in which nothing was ever lost. I also was struck by the concept of God described by Mordecai Kaplan, a distinguished Jewish scholar whom I knew (when I was in my teens I used to take painting lessons with him from the teacher Temima Gezari - her maiden name at the time was Nimitzowitz - who later became a lifelong friend); he believed that "God" was not a supernatural being but rather a "cosmic process" enabling mankind to achieve the maximum possibilities for a good life.

I believe that what one sees and hears as well as thinks can reveal a sense of eternity. Schopenhauer wrote about the sublime when, for instance, we look at the reflection of the setting sun on the edge of a building at the end of the day and we have a glimpse of the infinite universe. Some years ago I took a photograph of a shadow rising up on a building in downtown New York; in the background there were the monumental World Trade Towers, brilliantly lit. That photograph has haunted me as an image that was real the day I took it, as the sun moved across the sky, but after the terrible time that all of us can remember it was gone forever.

I have often listened to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and been exalted by the beauty of the chorus, which to me seem to be echoes of the sounds of eternity, and I always know that when the music ends the memory of that ecstasy will never disappear from my mind. In Washington's National Gallery of Art, I once stood for an hour trying to grasp the mystery of Leonardo DaVinci's portrait of a young woman thought to be Ginevra Benci, which he finished in 1476 when he was 24 years old; although I couldn't stay there forever, I knew all the elements of the image I had seen would always be part of my inner being. At another time I worked for a whole day photographing Michelangelo's great Rondanini Pieta in Milan, and I felt that I could see in every form, every surface, every chisel mark, images of perfection created with the sculptor's tools almost until the day he died. The prints I made of the different elements of that sculpture have ever since seemed to me to be unique visions of eternal beauty.

We may have such images in our minds at any time in our lives, but there is no doubt that as we get older, there are all kinds of physical problems we face, and we do our best to find ways to cope with them. When we are sick we tend to feel helpless, but Proust was hardly ever well when he wrote Remembrance of Things Past, one of the greatest works of literature ever created. We don't recall names that we have always known well, and we worry that that's another sign of our decline. But then we are encouraged by exceptions. I find little difficulty remembering the names of sculptors whose works I have photographed over the years. We have problems memorizing poetry the way we used to. I once memorized the 879 lines of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which meant so much to me; I still know them very well, but I can't recite the whole poem the way I used to. We oldsters can find tricks to remember what we want to, which is what I do with my Blackberry, which has become my substitute memory. I have a whole series of names that for some reason I tend to forget, which I put at the beginning of my alphabet with A — in front of each name, and with that strategy I can always find the names I am looking for.

Still, there are some problems we can't overcome. We don't walk as steadily as we used to. Sometimes I find myself veering to one side or another as I pass down the halls of our office, or move across rooms at home, or walk down a street. Once I fell down on the lawn outside our home, and a physical therapist taught me how to solve the problem I had with one of my shoulders. A remarkable percentage of people in later years fall here or there, sometimes with critical effects. Two people I know died after such a fall, another person's brain was affected and he barely regained the ability to speak.

We can never know what the future will bring, and we tend to think of it in different ways. When I was a child about seven or eight years old, I announced to my brother that I knew who the Messiah was. He wanted me to tell him my secret. I announced that I was the Messiah and that I would never die. He laughed, and I was embarrassed.

But the eternity of life always seemed more realistic to me than the end, and I could never quite come to grips with what it would be like not to be. Curiously, when we were young, Laura said she never thought about dying and wondered why it was so often on my mind. I thought a lot about it but I could never quite understand what it meant. Then later, she was more realistic than I was about making plans for what we would want to happen when we were gone. Clearly the end comes nearer as one gets older, but some of us think clearly about it and others don't, although none of us can know how much time is left.

But there is another way to think about time. Perhaps it doesn't matter how much longer our lives will be. To quote Einstein again, he said shortly before he died, "The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion." We know what is happening now but we can never know what will happen a moment from now.

As the days go by, whether in earlier or later years, we can find ourselves probing more and more deeply into who and where and what we are, without thinking that the end might be near. We can enjoy working on things we love to do. We can continue to think about subjects that are important in our lives. We can have the pleasure of relaxing, reading, listening to music, watching television. Sometimes we can look at the sky and watch the clouds move, thrilled to see those changing forms high above us. We can see birds standing on a branch and then flying in the air, squirrels running across the lawn, rabbits jumping, cats and dogs acting like humans. We can enjoy spending time with family and friends. We can appreciate the favorite foods we eat, we can be grateful for athletics and physical pleasures, be happy when we have a good night's sleep. Despite our age, there are many moments when we can feel the same way we did when we were young — energetic, inspired, full of passion. We can be exulted by the wonder of life. We can be inspired again and again by the new discoveries and insights that enter into our mind. "To be old is a glorious thing," wrote Martin Buber, "when one has not unlearned what it means to begin." We can feel that our lives are as meaningful and inspiring today as they ever were or ever will be.

There are even some things that become better as we get older. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Upside of Aging," by Sharon Begley, reported some good news. "An emerging body of research," she reported, "shows that a surprising array of mental functions hold up well into old age, while others actually get better." Among the latter are vocabulary, facility with synonyms and antonyms, the storage of "cognitive templates" and finding solutions for new problems. It seems as if there is a certain wisdom embedded in the minds of old people that can help address emotional challenges that younger people have a more difficult time coping with.

It is also true that having a long project that one considers important and will take a few years to complete invigorates one's life. Louis Finkelstein spent the last years of his life writing a four-volume study of a secondcentury interpretation of the biblical book Leviticus. He once told me that when he was working on a passage that described white spots on the skin at an early stage of leprosy he asked his friend, the art historian Meyer Shapiro, to help him understand how many different colors of white there might be. That's how carefully he explored every subject in the book. He was thrilled when a distinguished Christian scholar told him that 100 years from now his four volumes would be considered more important than the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Although I continue to work at Ruder Finn, which has been a satisfying part of my life for almost sixty years, one of my most ambitious creative projects is to produce an eight-volume series of books on The World of Sculpture. It will include my own text together with a selection of photographs that I have taken ranging from ancient Egypt to modern times. I have been working on that project for about five years and probably have another two or three years to go before finishing it. It gives me great satisfaction to know that nothing like this series has ever been produced before. And there are other books I work on at the same time, which I hope will be worthwhile contributions.

When some of my friends have known that they were deathly ill, they told me they were ready to die. Others made it clear that they wanted to fight to live until their last breath. I suppose the difference has to do with one's personality. The best advice I have heard is not to think about it in advance. One should enjoy every moment of one's life and not spend valuable time thinking about how it will end.

When we do think about the future it would be wise if our minds would be concerned about what the world will be like as well as what will happen to us. In the United Nations Conference on Religions of the World, which Ruder Finn helped organize in the year 2000, Ted Turner, who contributed to its financing, pointed out in his opening speech that religions have caused more wars in the history of mankind than anything else. Religion can be inspiring, but it can also be deadly. Those of us for whom the unknown is somehow part of our lives have to find our own way of confronting the problems that seem imbedded in the minds of many who preach it. We need to search for beliefs that will have a chance to make a better world in the times ahead.

All these thoughts enter one's mind as one reaches the later stages in life. We count our years, celebrate our birthdays and recognize changes that come about as we grow older, but I believe we should never forget that the passage of time is not what determines the ultimate meaning of our lives. The eternal now is always here. We should do our best to make the most of it.

I might add that my wife and I have worried about what will happen when one of us dies before the other, which is almost inevitable. We've been happily married for three quarters of our lives and have become more like one person than two. My expectation is that when one of us dies the other will have to face what will be an unreal, artificial existence, finding mirrors of our long lives together, and our deep love for each other, in the love of others in our family. But when our end (or beginning) does come before or after the other I hope that we will somehow be able to feel an ultimate appreciation for the richness our lives have had together, as well as the gifts we have received over the years from the love of all those who have made our time on earth meaningful and fulfilling.