A Map To the End of Time
Serendipity. I had just read two novels by Claire North, Ithaca and House of Odysseus. Like two others by Madeleine Miller (Circe, The Song of Achilles), they were retelling an ancient Greek myth, in this case the story of Odysseus. Just as Madeleine Miller had done, the two novels took a familiar story and retold it with a focus on a different character: in this case, it is Penelope, not Odysseus, who takes centre stage. In fact, during the time of both books Odysseus is far away, fighting at Troy, and then tangled up with Circe.
Serendipity? Well, when I began reading Ronald Manheimer’s book, A Map To the End of Time, my initial interest was in the account he gives of setting up a reading group for older people, exactly what I have been doing for some time. The introductory chapter, Grey Spirit Yearning, explains how Manheimer was drawn to running such courses by reading Tennyson’s Ulysses. He tells his mentor’s wife he finds the poem inspiring. She agrees:
“ ‘As well you should – it is inspirational. And yet the poem misses something most important. Wouldn’t you say?’ I didn’t know what to answer, and looked up to Shep [his mentor] for guidance. Before he could intervene, Mrs Sheppler continued. ‘It’s a man’s poem. I suppose that’s only natural. A man’s fantasy of starting over …. What’s missing is the wife, Penelope. Tennyson discards her immediately – ‘aged wife’ is how he puts it, if I’m not mistaken. Perhaps that was the Victorian Tennyson, downplaying the female unless to make her mysterious, untouchable, remote. But we must forget the real thing. …. Unlike Tennyson’s, our real Ulysses does return home to his ageing wife. He chooses history, not immortality, even if only in this Greek legend.’’’
Yes, serendipity. Like Manheimer, I’ve enjoyed exploring readings in philosophy with somewhat ‘maturer’ people. Ron Manheimer thought such a group would offer a path to wisdom. Possibly, but not the kind of wisdom you acquire when younger, the wisdom of the form ‘oh, that’s what that means’. As he makes clear, Socratic-style discussions with older people are both illuminating and yet unpredictable, sometimes hilarious, sometimes provocative and often surprising conversations. Like Manheimer, I found they have been a source of unexpected friendships with a diverse group of people.
Manheimer adopted a helpful model for the first part of his book. He explains how he decided to run a discussion group, how he was encouraged, and then we join him as he gets under way. Very quickly, it is apparent he faces a challenge. He has decided to present his small group of older participants with material he knows. Why is this a challenge? Quite simply, it is because he has thought about the material, and has insights to offer, explanations available. His first session is based on T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, and he has many insights into them. The result is like one of those strange constructions where we alternate between two perspectives: Manheimer telling the group what he knows, and the group exploring and developing their ideas, with him becoming a commentator.
This is a far from trivial issue. When I first began facilitating discussions based on extracts from ‘great writers’, I had benefitted from a wonderful example. My first seminar was as a participant, and our discussions were led by a ‘moderator’. What this meant in practice was that the moderator knew the material and he had chosen passages for us to read aloud and discuss. However, despite eventually discovering his very considerable knowledge, he allowed the discussions to evolve as the member of the group made comments, suggestions and offered explanations. As I watched him at work, I realised he had a plan in mind: first, there were some critical points he would like us to confront, but without foreclosing on what we might say about them. At the same time, he worked hard to avoid being conclusive: he might summarise an area of discussion but sought to do so without suggesting that what he had to say was an answer. In effect, quite often he was bringing things together by telling us ‘this is what you seem to be concluding’.
Is that what we mean by good facilitation? There was more going on. Since he knew the material well, including, of course, pieces that we would read later, he had a broad and fairly detailed understanding of the territory we were going explore: in two weeks we would go all the way from Plato to 20th Century philosophers. At the same time, he also knew this territory was vast, and that whatever we covered, there would be so much more to discuss. Did he have some key points he wanted us to grasp? Perhaps, and he certainly made use of his morning summaries, when he would review the selections and discussions of the day before. However, any shaping was subtle. We weren’t travelling on our own, but the pieces and his highlighting of suggestions offered a kind of mud-map of the territory. However, our journey would be ours, and another group might only cover some of the same areas.
Manheimer manages to make his views on this somewhat unclear at the start of the book. Its title is A Map to the End of Time, which sounds at least partly structured and with a direction and destination in mind. However, it also has a subtitle, Wayfaring With Friends and Philosophers. Wayfaring is fascinating term. The dictionary suggests it refers to travelling on foot, but with a bit more searching you can see it is not so much travelling to go somewhere in particular as walking around, peripatetic strolling. It seems Manheim is offering a map that leads somewhere, and at the same time is suggesting we might simply want to walk around, itinerants, relying on what is revealed by chance or happenstance.
Once Manheim has established an initial group, of six older people, that first discussion on Eliot’s Quartets is followed by a second, discussing J S Mill. I’ve often used an extract from Mill on Liberty, but Manheim focusses on Mill’s autobiography, and the path that led him to supporting women’s voting rights. At the same time, Manheim allows a number of young people to join his group! It was at this point he gives a ‘mini lecture’, a decision that made me sit back and think. If this is wayfaring, it is travelling slowly and taking time to examine the material. However, it appears it is also travelling with clear guidance, helping the party keep on track, as it were.
When I am exploring a reading from a writer’s work, I like to think that the material is a starting point, and that the conversation wanders as the those taking part suggest ideas and follow thoughts. Perhaps that is both more hopeful than true, and I am more of a guide than I like to think. I do offer comments and suggestions and will bring the conversation back to the text from time to time. Do I also give mini-lectures? Manheim ensures that his seminar members know quite a lot as they discuss a topic, both in terms of the material and the person who wrote it. It makes the title of his book clear: there is a map, and the process of exploring has a sense of direction. The conversation is going somewhere, rather than ending up just anywhere.
Further into his book, we discover Manheim is interested in the journey of the ‘self’ and explores the ideas of the ‘narrative self’ and the ‘relational self’, and even the view that we have multiple selves. Now there’s a challenge for our journey through time. It offers the perspective that at different points in time we take on or emphasise one aspect of our self and leave others to one side. That sounds rather like changing the clothes you wear, but with each set of clothes comes a different personality. We do that, of course, in the sense of deciding to be more formal, or to change to be more aligned with a group we are meeting, or yet again to change to be more engaged with a particular pursuit. However, do we do that and push other sense of ourselves to the side, or do we ‘play’ at different roles, always knowing the ‘real person’ inside?
Manheimer is clever. Having seduced me with describing conversations with his discussion group, the more I read the more I understood that this was about conversations with a variety of friends, individuals, family members, work colleagues, and participants in seminars and conferences. This wasn’t about wayfaring with one set of people, but life as a wayfarer, reflecting on philosophical discussions and others with a philosophical undertone. The Map to the End of Time was about his journey, and what he had learnt as he grew older, a kind of autobiography, but one where we could learn from his reflections on his experiences.
Manheimer’s various conversations are intertwined with observations and humour. There’s even the odd joke: “such as the one about the old man who picks up a magical frog – a beautiful princess who offers to satisfy his every desire if only he will kiss her. Putting the creature into his pocket he comments, ‘At my age I’d rather have a talking frog’!” I had to read that twice to understand it was a joke … it was in a paragraph at the beginning of an extended chapter on the role of humour. It preceded and offered a natural bridge into the next chapter which explores the relationship between the quality of life versus the length of life. Yes, this is what I understand to be the journey of a wayfarer, wandering without a need to end up in a specific location, and even setting aside the rules of time and space.
A Map to the End of Time is a very enjoyable book, but not for the reason I bought it and began reading it. I thought it would offer me insights about running a discussion group. The more I read I realised it was a ‘story’ book, a series of anecdotes, drawn from various points in the author’s life. In some ways it reminded me of Charles Handy’s books.
Charles Handy was a very influential figure in my life. He, too, would offer vignettes to illustrate a point. Quite often, the vignette would be short, and the point touched on lightly. He had the knack of making each story very visual and memorable, however, knowing that stories like that ‘stick’, and will continue to help thinking long after you hear them. Like Manheimer, most of his stories were drawn from his life. However, Manheimer gives his stories in full, often relating conversations that continue over many pages and he will wander off into all sorts of interesting territory.
Both Handy and Manheimer were teachers. Although both used stories to explore important philosophical issues, their approach was very different. Handy relies on being provocative: some events he describes make you stop and think, some simply lurk in the text, waiting to ensnare you pages later … “ah, I get it, that’s what that was about”. Manheimer is a more traditional teacher, and each interaction goes into detail, both with his account of the conversations involved, but also in terms of his occasional reflections along the way. The contrast is one that plays on my mind quite often: instead of allowing a discussion in a seminar group to develop as serendipity play its part, perhaps I should draw more conclusions? Reading A Map to the End of Time has prompted me to be more attentive. My role isn’t just to bring the conversation in a group back to the topic, but sometimes it is to summarise, draw conclusions, make some key points. Or perhaps not. My discussion group members are smart, and have the ability to draw their own conclusions, often with more ability than I offer. Teacher or moderator or facilitator? Enabling adult learning is tricky.
In many ways, A Map to the End of Time is about timelessness. It is about stories, and how we tell them and then retell them. Each time around stories can offer new insights and perspectives, because each storyteller and their audience bring their own various past histories, interests and values into the event, and each hears aspects of the story that make sense to them. Sometimes we hear a story, and enjoy it because it is well told, and sometimes we enjoy a story because it leaves us with something to consider.
Manheimer offers two perspectives that are particularly helpful. The first has to do with stories and why they can enlighten us. He is a serious philosopher, and so is careful not to be dismissive, but it is clear from the accounts of discussions he offers, he considers some interactions are more important than others. If I explained to him that I had just been reading one of Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Bertie, he would wait to find out why it was relevant. Smith tells many stories, and many are light, frothy, a nice way to pass a couple of hours. However, they can contain an episode, a confrontation, or even a conversation that remains after I’ve finished the book. Smith labours hard to make his stories entertaining, and he knows many are ‘light’; he is clever enough to slip a passage or two into a tale that can – and sometimes does – reverberate long after the events of which they are a part.
In A Map to the End of Time Manheimer works hard to show how an account by a historian or a philosopher can lead to a compelling discussion. What he can’t do, of course, is replicate that at a personal level for the reader. We might visualise and enjoy a story by McCall Smith about some events in Edinburgh. The account might cause us to pause to think about an issue, but often the story is merely good entertainment and not much more than that. The strength of Manheimer’s book is it constantly remind the reader it is only in talking with others you are likely to discover interesting ideas: second-hand thoughts from a book are fine, but those developed in live discussion are more likely to strike home. In my discussions with a group, I often learn more on the day than in any preparation beforehand. I can only hope that the other members of the group get some similar value by taking part.
Well, that is familiar stuff about facilitating discussions. Teaching by telling has less effect than hearing about other views. Others’ comments and reactions to ideas are likely to have real impact. Sitting round a table engaged in a discussion often introduces us to perspectives that are unfamiliar or challenging, and as a result more likely to help us think.
Manheimer ends on a very interesting note, when he turns to considering what we mean by ‘home’ and why it is important. Like Manheimer, I have travelled a lot, and moved several times. That has proven to be a benefit and a disadvantage. On the positive side, I like the challenge of new people, new settings, new ideas, and I’ve found it hard to stay in one area of work for a long time. Variety, challenge and unfamiliarity are, for me, very creative. I suspect I am a little afraid of getting stuck, and confronting what I don’t know as often as possible is very affirming.
On the other hand, a sense of home is also important. By that, I don’t mean a building, or even a particular location. I can and have felt at home in several very different locations. Nor is home necessarily about having family or friends around me. Access to family and friends matters, and I like keeping in touch, following what’s happening, enjoy others’ lives, achievements, challenges. However, for me home is about where I feel at rest. I don’t need a ‘map to the end of time’. As long as I feel ‘at home’ in my own head, I can enjoy peace and continue to learn and grow, setting aside any need to think about ‘the end of time’.
