Krishnamurthy shares what it feels like to accept new limitations. Then Max talks with Russell Banks about why writing comes more easily now than ever before, how he learned to let go of the anger that drove him for so long, and what it really means to be alone.
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transcription
[PRE-ROLL]
[OPENING MONTAGE]
Madeleine Albright: I know this program is 70 Over 70, but I really wish I were younger. I wish I was 70… but, I am ready!
[THEME MUSIC STARTS]
William: I’m 72 years old.
Paula: I’m 75, miraculously enough.
Sandy: I am 83 years old.
Betty: I am 88 years old.
James: You know, I’m here at 92.
Lucia: I’ll be 94 in May.
Donalda: I’m 101 years old.
Krishnamurthy: Hi, my name is Krishnamurthy. I'm 86. I live in Laurel, Maryland.
[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]
Krish: What I’ve learned at 86 is the body is limited and as we become older, we need to know how to accept it and live within this limitation.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Krish: When I was 65 years old, after having sold my actuarial consulting company, I went on a cruise to Alaska, and when we got off the ship, I said, ‘I want to become a cruise consultant. That's going to be my new new passion,’ but what I would be doing, where it would take me, all that was unknown. And I said I would jump, and take the future as it comes, and I started the ball rolling.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
Krish: So within a year, it was fairly clear that my clients were interested in ‘what are the beautiful things which we can see in different countries’. So I became the owner of a travel agency called The Krish Group Travel Team. And I take them so that they can see the great wall in Beijing and starting from Amsterdam, the Danube River, and the animals of Tanzania. Come on, come on with me and I will show you the world!
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
Krish: Everybody who traveled with me knew that I had been an insulin diabetic, and I had only one eye which was working, but that-that was not something which prevents me from pursuing my passion. Then four years ago, half the sight of the left eye, I lost. I was left with only half an eye. I could not drive anymore. Even walking, I had to be very careful. And that half eye was not enough for me to-to lead a group. And I realized the time had come when I had to bring in younger people and train them. And that's what I started doing.
[MUSIC PICKS UP AND CONTINUES]
Krish: At 86, I’ve been able to give up the reins without any sense of loss. At 65, energy was flowing in my body. Today I have reached a stage when the energy is only 25 percent of what I had at 65, but you have to take advantage of everything that comes to you. I hit upon the travel business and did I know where it would take me? No, it- I did not. Did I know how my body would be at the end of 5 years, 10 years or 20 years? No, the future is totally unknown. So we cannot plan for that. We have to go with the flow. I had set the ball rolling.
[THEME MUSIC FADES IN]
Krish: Other people are now moving the ball. And I'm just enjoying the movement of the ball.
Max Linsky: That was Krishnamurthy, and from Pineapple Street Studios, this is 70 Over 70, a show about making the most of the time we have left. I'm Max Linsky.
[THEME MUSIC CONTINUES]
Max: My guest this week is Russell Banks.
Russell is an author, and he’s best known for his novels — The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, and Continental Drift.
[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]
Max: Writing was a way out of a difficult childhood for Russell. His dad was abusive and an alcoholic, and Russell found a home, not just in writing, but in the community of the writing world.
He was a fixture at writing workshops. As his career blossomed, he spent decades teaching, mostly at Princeton. But now Russell spends most of his time in a small town in upstate New York with his wife. And writing has become a much more solitary experience.
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Max: I went into this conversation curious about Russell’s recent work — he’s written more in the last few years, and more personally. It turns out that solitude has led to something of a breakthrough for him. Writing comes more easily now than it ever has. And I wanted to understand how that happened, and if getting older had somehow cleared the way.
Russell Banks is 81 years old.
INTERVIEW
Max: Russell Banks, hello, thank you for doing this.
Russell: Well, thank you for having me, I'm happy to be here.
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Max: I was hoping we could start with a little, uh, a little shop talk. What's your writing life like now and how has that changed from when you were starting out or in middle age.
Russell: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Well, it's interesting because both externally and internally, my life has changed over the years. I was married and had children and raising children when I was teaching, um, into now old age, I'm 81. And my children are grown and out of my, uh, economic life is such that I don't need to do anything other than write. And so the external part of my life has altered over those years. And the internal life has evolved both, um, in lockstep with those changes, but also on its own. It's always been the dominant chord in my life, my work has been since I was in my late teens, um, and it still is, but how I approach that has changed quite a lot.
Max: Tell me more about that. Ho-how do you approach it now?
Russell: Well, the biggest contrast may be when I was young, and for quite a few years, I really needed the company of other writers. My work wasn't being published. I-I-I was still trying to learn how to invent myself as a writer, so I needed other people who were in a similar situation. And I know now, I mean, there was a middle period when I think I was a good teacher, uh, as a transitional period, almost between when I had a community of writers and we exchanged ideas and book titles, to a period when I was in that position with younger people, and I was, uh, able to keep translating the world in some ways in a literary sense for the younger writers. And now I realize I would be terrible in a classroom [Max laughs] because, in a way, I no longer think about the process of writing. I've reached that stage of life--- I remember, I think it was Larry Bird or some basketball player and toward the end of his career, he was asked by a sportswriter, um, about what did he know now that he didn't know when he was younger? And he said, ‘I now know where in the court I have my shot.’ And that's what happens. Eventually, you now know where in the court you have your shot and you don't take it anywhere else. You don't bother.
Max: You're just getting to your-your literary spots now?
Russell: Yeah, exactly. And no one could tell you where it is. You-your body knows where it is, it's a kind of muscle memory for writers, as much as there is for athletes, I think. And, um, makes it very difficult to articulate for somebody else. I can't even talk about my own writing now. Uh, I simply go and do it every day, and I do it without any particularly conscious, um, thought.
Max: It's habit now.
Russell: Well, it's not habit. It's intuition. And, um, I also think of someone like Tony Bennett, you know who in his 90s, you know, has in his head ten thousand songs and he knows them all. And nobody can teach him anything because only he knows those songs that are in his head, uh, and that's the song he sings. I know the song that's in my head and nobody can tell me about it, and nobody can enlarge upon it, really. And I can't learn any more about it than I already know. So I have to listen to that song in my head, and only that. I can't have any static or counter melodies or anything else coming in at the same time, or I won't hear it.
Max: Are you still hearing new songs ‘cause Tony Bennett, he's singing the same stuff, right?
Russell: Yeah.Yeah.
Max: And Larry Bird was taking the same 18-foot jumper on the bass line over and over and again.
Russell: That's right.
Max: But that feels slightly different than what you do.
Russell: Yeah, it is. It is. Although it is and it isn’t, now that you're you're raising the question. The last year and a half, I've been able to write three books in that period, and that's a lot for me in a short, relatively short, period of time. And, um, I don't think they're like anything else I've written, and yet probably a critic would say, ‘oh yeah, they're very much like the work you did in the past’ [both laugh], but I don't feel as though I'm repeating myself, really. But I'm able to concentrate and discover the work, the voice, the themes that were there all along, but that I really had too much static coming in to really get to. Those songs were there in my ears, but there was interference along the way and I managed, as I've gotten older, to eliminate a great deal of the interference.
Max: I think what you're talking about is the creative process. And what I hear you saying is-is that, you know the work is in you somewhere. The stories are there. And you've gotten to a place now where there-there's less between you and them. They just come more naturally.
Russell: That's, you got it. Yeah, that-that goes to it--what I'm trying to get to. When you begin, um, I think most writers, certainly, you have some kind of almost mystical belief in, there is a truth that you know is somehow this process is the only way I can get to it. It's the only way I can penetrate the mystery of being alive is through this process, writing. And you know it's there. It's veiled and it's on the other side of a screen, as it were. But you don't know how to get through that veil and-and gradually you find a way. You map a route in a way into the deepest mysteries of your own and other human beings' existence. At a certain point in life, if you live long enough and you work hard enough and you bend your life to the rigors of that discipline, you manage to penetrate that almost without thinking one day and then you're on the other side. And I think that's sort of what's happened to me over the last decade or so. And I know I come across as sounding a little bit stupid and-and dumb because I simply, um, I simply can't articulate very clearly how it is I do what I do, you know [both laugh].
Max: Right? I guess you could say is, I don't know what to tell you. I broke-I broke through.
Russell: Yeah, yeah.
Max: How does it feel to have broken through?
Russell: Well, uh, when I was young, um, my priorities were work, um, friends, family, and maybe health. And now I would say that order has been really altered. It is health first, because I've got to stay alive to keep doing this, just to keep on loving my family is second ,and my friends a third. And work is fourth. I'm able to do that, to rearrange the priorities, I think, because I don't have to work at work, any more than I have to work at growing my hair or my fingernails. I get up every morning, as I have for many years, and and go into my office or my studio as I think of it and, uh, and hang out there until middle afternoon and-and good, now I can go and take care of business at the house and think about what am I going to cook for supper and, uh, check in with the wife and-and take my dog for a walk in the woods and so forth. But every morning starts more or less the same way and runs more or less the same way to middle afternoon.
Max: Just walk down to the studio and-and let your hair grow for a little bit.
Russell: Yeah, that’s exactly right [laughs] and not worry about it. You know, there's a kind of pervasive anxiety when you're young that, you know, somehow this flame that you've managed to nurture and your fear that it's going to go out any minute. And if you don't constantly feed it, you're going to lose it. Um, at this point, I've got a really solid bed of coals that are there, and I don't have to worry about it. It'll generate enough heat on its own without my having to feed it.
Max: So there's no-there's no anxiety for you about static reentering.
Russell: Not at this point. No, I don't think so. No, I'm not anxious about it at all, for that matter. And you know, the other thing you finally realize is-is if I died tomorrow, um, there is a strong, uh, sense I have of well, I did my work. I joke, sometimes they say, ‘you know, if I died tomorrow, people will read about it in the paper and I say, Well, he had a good life. He was 81 years old.’ [laughs] Yeah. And he wrote a bunch of books. He got paid for it as well [both laugh]. That provides me with a certain degree of-of freedom.
Max: It's like you're on the other side there, too.
Russell: Yeah, yeah. And, uh, it's so naturally, I want my life to last as long as is possible, but but on the other hand, most of it is behind me. And I just want to keep the motor running as long as I can.
Max: Do you invest in trying to extend your life?
Russell: How do you mean?
Max: Are you careful about what you eat? Do you exercise, how does extending your life fit on that list of priorities you were talking about earlier?
Russell: Oh, well, I said I put health up there on top now, but not in in as far as meticulous or obsessive or-or disciplined away as I probably should. My kids call me America's oldest living smoker. I still smoke. I probably drink too much. I stay up too late. But I also am very physically active and I'm exploiting what I think is probably a very fortunate gene pool. My mother lived to 96 and was clear eyed and clear minded up to the end. My father's family is the same thing into their 80s and 90s and beyond.
Max: Well, you're certainly the first person in their 80s who I've ever talked to, who listed health as the number one priority and was still smoking.
Russell: [laugh] You can see, I like to walk on the edge. I guess for many years, most of my adult life I was a serious trekker and climber, mountain climber, and, uh, I was climbing right up to my late 70s. I was 78 on the last big climb, and had to concede that I was getting too old for this kind of activity.
Max: How did you know that that time had come?
Russell: Well, I was in the Andes, uh, in Peru with a crew of friends, uh, all of whom were quite a bit younger than I. The next oldest was in his early 60s and then it went down all the way to, I think, 22. And, uh, they were all men and I knew every one of them. I had put the group together, pretty much, and so there was a point at which I realized that I was the weak link in the chain. And I was sitting down one night and the mountaineering guides were with us who were sitting there with us, and I said, ‘How many-how many climbers in their late 70s are still doing this high altitude climbing?’ And they said, ‘Russell, none. And it's time for you to stop.’ And when a 30 year old guide tells you that and he's the kind of guy who like, you know, summits Everest without oxygen [laughs], you-you kind of listen. But he sai- he said here’s the reasoning, whether you can do it or not, you are the weakest link and the weakest link in the chain is the one that breaks and everybody else is dependent upon the weakest link in the chain. And we're all roped together and if one goes, all the rest go. And so I realized that I said, you know I'm not taking responsibility for my age.
Max: You're imposing it on the rest of the people you've asked to come.
Russell: Exactly. And I just- I felt guilty for it. It was a up call because up to that point, I was kind of taking pride in the fact that I was still doing this in my 70s and, you know, in Nepal and the Himalayas and in Ecuador and so on, I said, ‘Well, I'm, you know, I'm pretty hot. I can do this stuff still’ and yeah, you can do it, but you're also putting other people at risk.
Max: Right. The shift was less about your own capabilities and more going from thinking about yourself to thinking about the group.
Russell: Exactly. And also the nature of the enterprise, too, which is that you are interdependent. So I took my gear, my crampons, ropes and stuff, and we went down and gave them to a high school climbing club there in a small town in Peru to kids who couldn't afford that great good gear. And that's it. That was two years ago and I haven't even begun up higher than the Adirondack Mountains in New York since then.
Max: Was it hard to hear that?
Russell: Maybe at the moment it was, but, um, but since then I've reflected on it and I realize I was actually grateful. It took the pressure off me. It's OK, you know it's OK, Russell, if you, uh, go down and don't come back up again, you're doing a good thing by doing that. It's not, um, an admission of defeat in some way. So it... no. I think at the time the moment I was somewhat maybe humiliated for it because I had taken pride in it, and now I realized that was false pride and, uh, and there was no reason at all for me to have those feelings. And, um, since then, I've managed to expunge them, I think.
Max: It's interesting that, you know, when you were talking about your writing life for so long, it was defined by other people, whether those were contemporaries just starting out, or students that you were teaching. And now it has nestled into this much more solitary life for you. And yet on the mountain, what had to turn was thinking less about yourself as an individual and more about the group that you're connected to.
Russell: Yeah, that's definitely the case. I think that, um, one does find ways as you get older to-to defeat your pride and accept your shared humanity. One hopes that that's how it works and it's sort of been the case in my own life, I think, that a rigorous and rugged individualism that drove me for so long had an element of egoism-big element of egoism and pride. And over time, life has a way of beating that out of you [laughs], if you're lucky. Or the mountain has a way of defeating you and-and scouring it out of you.
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Russell: And so that you become more increasingly aware as you get older of your interdependency.
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[[ MIDROLL ]]
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Max: That letting go of the idea of, you know, human exceptionalism and individual triumph, is that connected to the static that's been removed for you and your writing life? Is that part of what has allowed you to-to break through creatively, in the way that you were describing when we started talking.
Russell: I think so, now that you're saying it, I-I wouldn't have necessarily come up with that myself, but, um, but yeah, I think that there is linkage of here, definitely. And I'm grateful for it.
Max: Part of what I understand you to be saying is that this is something that you've worked on for years. It is-it is, it is a practice. Maybe this is just betraying my-my own, um, cynicism or fear or something, but is there is there anything about being in that struggle rather than being on the other side of it in the way that you were describing that you miss?
Russell: Not, no, I can't--I don't think there is, to be honest. I don't--I look back over my life and to earlier years when I was ignorant of history. Ignorant of literature, ignorance of the grace and beauty of other human beings and, uh, when I reflect on it and recall it, it feels as though I was trapped. I was imprisoned by those qualities of mine and I don't miss it at all in that regard. I suppose I had a certain kind of, oh, energy, psychic, emotional energy that might have been exciting to other people. It might even at times have seemed like charisma. But it wasn't exciting to experience from inside and it was a form of sort of emotional violence. And so I can't say that I missed any of that. And I suspect that those people who are closest to me don't miss it either [both laugh]. Uh, my, uh, daughters still say, I listen better. I'm less judgmental. I am not as hard, not as angry. They might use words like that to describe the evolution of-of my character and presence in their life.
Max: There's a part of your story, and I don't know if this is just the way it's written or the way that you have told it, that anger was a central part of your childhood and youth. Both from your father and your family, but also for yourself, you were-you were like an angry young man.
Russell: Mmhmm, yeah, that's certainly true. And, you know, when you're wounded, I feel I probably was as a child and it is by family circumstances that you usually are wounded in, as it was in my case-- alcoholism, violence and abuse. You can embrace the wound and hold onto it and it and convert the pain into anger. You can sustain that for a long time because you've--it-it's learned behavior. You've learned early on that this is the only way this is the way I can deal with this pain with his hurt. And it takes a great deal of unlearning in order to overcome that. And it isn't something you can do. I think overnight it-it takes time and it takes other people too, you know, you've got to have people who love you and whom you're able finally in some way to love back, um, in order to accomplish that.
Max: Can you articulate what it's like to unlearn that?
Russell: A lot of it had to do with my father, who, uh, died of cirrhosis of the liver of alcoholism when he was 63 years old. And, uh, I was then in my late 30s, and around that period, I began to see his pain, his suffering. And, uh, it led me to a kind of forgiving state of mind with regard to him. And I think that was-that was it was certainly a key that helped me unlock my own capacity for affection and, well, for love, really.
Max: Were you ever able to tell him that?
Russell: No. I mean, I could have told him, but he wouldn't have heard he-because he was-he was a man who was a wonderful mind and natural gifts were all destroyed by alcoholism. It was impossible to communicate with him on that level or-or really on almost any level.
Max: You said that it unlocked something for you, being able to see him in that way, did it unlock something for you creatively?
Russell: You know, the-the first step--yes--is that you, you finally forgive and have compassion for the parent who wounded you. And from there, you've got to take that out to the world, you've got to take that to other human beings. That particular kind of compassion and respect, um, you've got to start applying it to the guy who shouted at you this morning because your car was in the way when you were pumping gas. You've got to apply it to the people who seem to vote against their own self interests, again and again and again, you can't rage against them. And then that's connected to your writing to your work. Like, just I just finished the book of three novellas, um, all three of them are about people who voted for Donald Trump. And so I'm trying to write about people with whose politics I, um, deeply disagree with, and I wouldn't even have tried that, you know, when I was younger. It wouldn't have made sense to me. I wouldn't have been able to see them or hear them or imagine them, for that matter. Imagine, that's the important thing. You know, if you can imagine the father who was so cruel to you when you were a child and cruel to your mother and cruel to your siblings, if you can imagine that person, then you can imagine everyone else.
Max: And do you learn something through that imagining?
Russell: Oh, yeah. I mean, I-I guess you-you learn that nobody gets out of here alive [both laugh], that's the main thing you learn. You learn that they're going to die, you're going to die. They have to deal with their mortality just as you have to deal with yours. And everyone is alone on some essential existential level. You learn that and it's not just limited to you, yourself or the people you happen to live with and know intimately. That it's in fact the strangers among you, too. They, too, are essentially alone. And-and it's hard to unlearn it once you-once you have.
Max: So many people I've talked to over the last couple of months for this show have said a version of that. And I think the relationship to that idea can be really different. Really connected with the idea that you and everyone you know is going to die. What do you do next with that?
Russell: Well, it is liberating in a few senses. Um, you don't feel quite as lonely, despite the fact that you know how alone you truly are and that everyone else is as alone as you are, that you die alone. There's a real difference between loneliness and solitude. And I welcome solitude and, uh, and I've never been happy when I'm lonely. And-and-and so this allows you in a way to-to to expunge loneliness from your life without necessarily losing, um, solitude.
Max: That idea of loneliness versus solitude, I-I don't know that I've-I've ever heard that before. But it makes complete sense to me. It's quite a beautiful idea.
Russell: It is, it seems to me to be worthy--something worthy to strive for and to sustain and maintain as you get as you get older.
Max: Do you feel like you're-you're striving for something at this point in your life?
Russell: Well, I don't want to lose, uh, track of these particular set of insights and-and ways of living that have taken me most of my life to acquire. And so I worry about that. I-I would hate like hell to have that happen, and I'm not sure how I would respond to it if I began to see it happening. But otherwise, as long as that isn't happening, as I'm not being, my mind isn't being emptied out or savaged by illness or drugs or dementia, Alzheimer's, any of those things. Um, as long as I can still keep thinking clearly that I'm-I'm okay and I intend to-to keep utilizing as much of that consciousness as I have available.
Max: Do you think of yourself as a spiritual person?
Russell: Not in a conventional sense, I'm certainly not a practitioner of any particular spiritual discipline or exercise.
Max: The reason I ask is because the way that you're describing the creative process feels that way a little bit to me. It feels a little mystical, you know, and-and I've also talked to people who have described, there's lots of different metaphors for it. You know, it's a flow state, it's a river, it's...but it's all connected to what I think you're talking about, which is this absence of static, absence of tension. Does that feel like a spiritual idea to you?
Russell: Yeah, although I'm reluctant to put any labels on it, uh, of any kind, really. That becomes very quickly, you know, reductive and-and it's a box to check. And I--and I don't want to have my thought or my way of being conscious, um, boxed in. I still want to feel in every way and every day when I wake that I have to make up my path today, the path I'm going to take. And it isn't set in front of me. It isn't defined outside of me.
Max: Do you have a version of some of those ideas that you do feel connected to? I think part of what I'm asking is like, particularly around this creative process of feeling like writing has become letting your hair grow. Does that feel like it's connected to something bigger than you or-or not?
Russell: It's connected to something bigger than I am in as much as it's probably a universal human experience or it can be. It isn't just because I happen to be a novelist or happened to have a particular kind of-of linguistic gift, um, which might be in my DNA. It might be something I've acquired in bits and pieces accidentally over a lifetime. I just don't feel as though that's special. I think that it's accessible to all human beings. But, um, I would be remiss if i didn't admit that no matter how much you evolve over a lifetime, should you live long enough, uh there's still plenty of work to do. I tangled my relations with, uh, with a lot of human beings over people whom I loved and mistreated them or ignored them, or placed my own needs in front of theirs and so forth. And, uh as any-any-any one who is concerned or worried about the moral quality of his or her life--
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Russell: This is not something you simply solve like an equation. It's a day-to-day on-going process.
CREDITS
70 Over 70 is a production of Pineapple Street Studios, and it’s produced by Jess Hackel.
Our associate producer is Janelle Anderson. Our editors are Maddy Sprung-Keyser and Joel Lovell. Research and additional reporting by Charley Locke.
Our mixer is Elliott Adler and Jenna Weiss-Berman and I am the executive producers.
Our theme song is Like a Dream by Francis and the Lights and the music you’re listening to now is by Mavis Staples, who’s 82 years old. Original music by Terence Bernardo. Additional music by Noble Kids, and music licensing by Dan Knishkowy.
Our cover art is by Maira Kalman, who’s 72 and our episode art is by Lynn Staley. She's 74, and she’s also my mom.
Thank you, Krishnamurthy. And thank you, Russell Banks.
I'm Max Linsky. Thanks for listening.
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