And my answer would be: “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
It got the laughs because it fit every silly caricature of men, from Curly of The Three Stooges to Dagwood Bumstead. And it is absolute nonsense. As Pascal wrote, “Man is infinitely more than man.”2
I know a lot about the collected works of Oliver Hardy but not much at all about the English novelist Thomas Hardy, except that he abandoned novels to write poetry. The explanation I read, described ironically by the novelist Stephen King, is that “fiction’s goals were forever beyond his reach, that the job was an exercise in futility. ‘Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,’ Hardy supposedly said, ‘the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.’”3
Hamlet and Ahab have nothing on a bus driver or a bank teller. Not when it comes to the richness and complexity of what we think, feel, believe, and experience at any given moment of our lives. Nope. There’s no such thing as the shallow man, no matter how shallow he might behave on occasion. Granted, when I’m eating a bologna, egg, and cheese sandwich — called a “Pittsburgh Steak Hoagie” at a tavern I frequent — while channel-surfing for The Simpsons reruns, I’m not exactly King Lear. But I’m also not a bag of bones. None of us is.
Wisdom From an “Old Feller”
Dredging the mall for the detritus of the consumer culture for male clothing is not usually my idea of a good time, which is why I dress the way I do. But when my wife decides that the ten-year-old shirts are old enough, she insists on my presence. So I go.
On one of those trips to the mall, I begged off for a few-minute break from the sensory overload of trying to pick out a shirt from a stack of fifty and escaped to the sunlight. I sat down on one of the metal benches outside, and an old feller sauntered by and asked if I had room to spare. I always have room to spare for an old feller.
He was dressed in Early Retirement — a pair of striped shorts, white T-shirt, black socks, and sneakers off the clearance rack of a department store. He was a mall walker, putting his time in not so much for the exercise as for something to do. He sat down not for a break but because I looked like a guy who would listen and not interrupt. He was right.
The wife had died before him, which always leaves a man bewildered. It’s like the natural order of things is disrupted. He was living alone, but his daughter was nearby, and she stopped by four or five times a week. He made it sound like an imposition rather than a blessing.
The old feller lived on a little bit of a pension, from a steel mill job that went belly-up before he was done with it, and Social Security, which got him grumbling about the government and the Republicans. He had a grandkid, and I got the impression that a son-in-law was not part of the story.
We sipped some coffee and surreptitiously eyeballed a pretty young thing walking by.
“You know what keeps a man going?” he asked me.
Thinking I was the straight man in this one, I responded, “Guilt, debt, and responsibility.”
“Where’d you get that bit of philosophy?”
“From a comic strip,” I admitted.
“You know what I’d do if I had fifteen thousand bucks?” he said, picking out a number that to him was as impossible to imagine as a million bucks. “I’d go to Alaska. I was there in the military back when I was a kid. I’d go back in a second.”
I think his dream of Alaska was more focused on youth than the frozen tundra. There’s always a good time to be had back then, whether we’re an old feller walking the mall or a twenty-six-year-old pining over a lost love from senior year of high school.
One thing that can make us old fast is thinking that we are getting old. Mitch Robbins, the Billy Crystal character in the movie City Slickers, in the throes of middle-age angst, laments the potbelly, the surgeries, the hearing loss, till finally “you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering, ‘How come the kids don’t call?’”
“And one man in his time plays many parts,” I thought, scrounging a line from an otherwise wasted college education. Shakespeare described the stages of a man’s life, from infancy to its final moments. He concluded:
… Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.4
Shakespeare wrote that for laughs. We don’t laugh much when we read it today.
The old feller got up and did a little stretch. He’d buy a lottery ticket that afternoon, he said. He was feeling lucky. One big hit, and it was off to Alaska.
“You know what keeps a man going?” he asked again.
Still expecting a punch line, I answered, “Alaska?”
“Nope. It’s what the nuns told us — faith, hope, and love. Most of all love.”
“I think Saint Paul said that. Lennon said that too,” I admitted.
“The Commie?”
“No. The Beatle. All you need is love.”
Then I wished him good luck on the lottery. And good luck on life.
Wisdom from Saint Paul
When Saint Paul saw that “the time of my departure has come,” he wrote to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:6–7).
Saint Paul speaks well to men:
Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandments, are summed up in this sentence, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (Romans 13:8–10)
What Paul is discussing for us here is what we call virtue. The nuns spoke of the theological virtues — faith, hope, and love. And the cardinal virtues, the moral virtues that are faith, hope, and love lived: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. All these virtues Paul has defined for us in Romans. He has defined for us how we are to live, answering that eternal question of men: “What the hell am I doing with my life?”
Which was the point Jesus made to the rich young man.
Virtue is classically defined as the habit of performing actions for good. These virtues we either naturally gain and acquire by the repetition of good acts (the cardinal virtues) or come to through the grace of God (the theological virtues). The virtues are how we are meant to live. They are what we admire in others and hope to find in ourselves, if only through a mirror darkly.
Many of us have spent years trying to convince ourselves that life based on the virtues is too hard, involving more change than any one person can accomplish. But with grace, the sacraments, and the “repetition of good acts,” this great life — a life for which we all strive — is not only attainable but easier than the opposite.
It’s said that the natives of Rome sometimes feel oppressed by the city’s very history. It’s hard to think of yourself as a unique child of God in a city where a thousand-year-old piece of sculpture is the new stuff. You can get lost in time that way. Time becomes the enemy; history, a sad tale from our early memories to the dust that we will most surely become — “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
But as Pope Benedict XVI once explained, we can never get lost in history, never get lost in time,