Charles McCabe was a columnist with so many opinions to get off his chest that he sometimes stacked up a dozen columns ahead of his San Francisco Chronicle deadline. Joseph Alioto said McCabe was the only Catholic he knew who went to confession in public and got paid for it. Until his death at the age of 68, he devoted at least eight columns to the subject of aging. They’re in a pair of books, “The Fearless Spectator” and “The Charles McCabe Reader,” containing the best of his work.
He grew up poor and angry with the world and himself, but, “There is likewise nothing in myself that I more deplore than this tendency to rail at things that I cannot do much about. . .” he concluded.
“To survive you must curb feeling. You must learn, when you see a friend’s name in the obituary pages, to burke reminiscences of golden days, and to look sternly at work that is at hand.
“If you are lucky enough. . .that to see the world is to laugh at it, then your final days may go in grace.”
One thing that kept McCabe going was curiosity. “I wanted to know how the whole crazy plot would turn out. . .” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed the past decades of my life for anything. The chief use of my life has been that I have grown, or think I have grown. My chief pleasure in the later part of my life has been the observation of that growth. . .I can hardly wait to see the man who awaits me at the end of the tunnel of the next decade, if I last it out. I would like to be kinder, to love myself less, to wish to help people more. I would like my faults to be blunted by the kind arm of time. I would like to continue to wake up in the morning with the feeling that I have useful work to do.”
Give up your grudges, he urged. “They are a weight and an encumbrance. . .The wretched past has no right to encroach on the present. In fact, the sensible man has a positive duty to prevent this. Fortunately. . .just growing older does the trick. Here’s hoping you will be able to say, as the Abbe Sieyes replied when asked what he did during the French Revolution: ‘I survived.’”
A quote from a press handout caused him to ruminate: “The idea is held by far too many people that life is essentially a struggle against death, rather than a process constantly to be savored and enjoyed. . .We should concern ourselves always with taking things on, rather than sloughing things off. New interests should be sought like paying ore. Everywhere and whenever it can be arranged, the pulse should quicken.”
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