On Aug. 26 — the day before I turned 70 — my wife, Dorothy, and I moved from our home at the base of Cardigan Mountain to a two-bedroom apartment in Hanover. I lost the place we had loved for 22 years —150 acres, miles of ski trails, an 1810 farmhouse, and my writer’s cabin. I lost our land’s moose, beavers, river otters and feisty bluebirds. I lost the sound of barred owls, the faint calls of loons up on Orange Pond.
Well it’s not exactly a loss. We made a deliberate downsize. But
beside the relatively easy riddance of stuff — canoes, kayaks, furniture, 1,000 books — I lost living in the closest thing to wilderness that the Upper Valley has.
Friends wonder if I’ve lost my mind. But the move makes sense. We’re next door to Dorothy’s twin sister, and a mile’s walk from the Dartmouth Green. We have many friends in Hanover, and the apartment is very nice.
But I need the rhetorical tools I’ve been teaching for years to control the shaky voice in my head.
- Loss is pain.
My mother died at age 61, right after Dorothy and I first moved to New Hampshire. When my sister called with the news, I jumped on my bike and rode Ruddsboro Road down to Mascoma Lake and back. I was instinctively making a painful effort.
And the thought occurred to me: This is painful. Losing my mother — the woman who read to her children at night, who loved snow and pets and holidays — was painful. Riding my bike over a steep road was painful too, though not nearly. By conflating the two, I employed
analogical thinking.
That’s Aristotle’s name for taking two seemingly unlike things and declaring them the same; the more unlike the better. Equating an easy task with something hard can make the hard thing seem bearable. While a life change is much easier than the death of a loved one, I find the helpful rhetorical techniques to be the same. These days I’m declaring the apartment a luxury hotel. It’ll even have room service (Dorothy brings me coffee while I work). Our apartment life in a college town constitutes a trip.
Then someday when I’m ready I may call the place my home.
- Pain is grief.
That’s a metonymy, a “belonging trope.” It takes a characteristic
(smart kid) and makes it stand for the whole (“The kid’s a brain”). It can
also employ a cause to name an effect, or a container to name what it
contains (“I drank a bottle”). When my mother died, I took an element
contained within the complex emotion of grief — pain — and made it stand
for the whole sense of loss.
- I can bear pain.
Some years ago I was suffering from an ailment called snapping hip syndrome, which begins with a debilitating tightening up of the muscles. You could say the same thing was going on with the rest of me. In my late 50s, I had gotten old beyond my years, drinking too much and growing nostalgic for the good old days when I was an enthusiastic outdoorsman. Worst of all, I was losing my taste for life. I was truly stuck.
Dorothy became weirdly convinced that rhetoric, the 3,000-year-old art of persuasion, might get me out of my funk. Dorothy is the kind of dawn-enabled lark who springs out of bed with a cheerful “Good morning! What are your plans for the day?” and I love her anyway. A relentless booster, Dorothy listed some of the triumphs that had come from my work with the art of rhetoric: helping pediatricians get children vaccinated, enabling NASA to coax mothballed MX missiles from the Pentagon, showing corporations how to recover from their own screwups…
She leaned in and whispered ecstatically, “And you once got thousands of publishing executives to lick each other!” (This was not entirely accurate. I had asked 2,000 executives to lick each other. It was in the London Palladium during a tour for my book “How to Argue
with a Cat.” The stage lights were bright, and I couldn’t see the audience. But I did get them to purr.)
Still, Dorothy believed that my work on the ancient art lacked one helpful angle. “Have you thought of using the tools on yourself?” My wife is very smart and I do everything she says. So I began a yearlong experiment in self-persuasion that entailed a gloriously stupid and pointless goal: to become the first person over 50 to run his age up Mt. Moosilauke, reaching the top in fewer minutes than I was old in years. To cure my snapping hip syndrome, my doctor referred me to an orthopedist. He subjected me to an excruciating procedure entailing hundreds of dextrose shots; the idea was to flood the zone of my nerves to relax my gluteal…I hate even to think about it.
While sweating through the stings, I called on my rhetoric. This isn’t therapy, I told myself. It’s training.
I was using another rhetorical tool, framing, which redefines an issue. More than a mere medical procedure, these shots were preparing me for a glorious athletic feat!
Another rhetorical device: the trope of hyperbole. It comes from the ancient Greek for “beyond” and “to throw.” Somehow the idea that I wasn’t just recovering but hyperbolically throwing myself way beyond the possible made the pain not just tolerable but sort of cool.
What’s more, those shots constituted a test of suffering.
- Suffering is a skill.
According to the ancient Roman rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero, our ability to bear injustice and bad fortune is our saving grace. Our souls can stand a great deal. If Cicero had been next to Hamlet while he debated whether to be or not to be, the Roman would have had a ready answer. The melancholy Dane asks which is nobler: “to suffer the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune,” or “to take arms against a sea of troubles.”
Suffer, Cicero would say. Definitely suffer.
He meant that as a kind of skill — not a state of agony but a knack for
withstanding it. Leaving aside the fact that carrying a sword into the sea
hardly reveals a rational soul, Cicero would be making an important point.
The ancients believed that our own inherited flaws and the horrible luck
flung at us by outrageous fortune can serve as opportunities to
demonstrate our souls’ superior nobility.
This interpretation of suffering — allowing in the pain — helped me deal with the loss of my mother. As a trail runner, I had turned suffering into a skill.
I applied the same internal voice four years ago when my sister, Sherry, died. Like my mother, she was beautiful and clever right up until she died. I miss her terribly. It’s painful to think of losing her so early. But I can stand the pain, just as I can bear the much easier pain of hoisting my aging body up mountains.
- The future means choices.
I’m determined not to mourn or regret. The doctor who first defined nostalgia rightly described it as a disease. Instead, my life ahead will be filled with choices.
Aristotle called this thinking deliberative rhetoric. It focuses on the future, and its persuasive power comes from the audience’s sense of the “advantageous”—what they want or expect. Even our memories can be reframed into the future tense. How will Dorothy and I remember our beautiful place in Orange and our fortune in getting to steward that land?
How will I think of Mom and Sherry?
In the past few days I’ve been exploring the paths in Hanover. Yesterday afternoon I chose to walk a few feet from our apartment onto the Girl Brook Trail, which led me to Balch Hill. I had the top to myself, a waving sea of goldenrod, postcard views of Ascutney and Moose, and a border of susurrating pine and hemlock. On my way down I met a friend I
hadn’t seen in years.
The gain in elevation told me I haven’t really lost a thing.
Jay Heinrichs edited the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine as well as a variety of inflight and newsstand magazines. His book “Thank You for Arguing” is a New York Times bestseller. His latest book, “Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion,” reveals whether he actually succeeded in running his age up Moosilauke.
