Too Soon Old, Too Late Schmart–It’s Never Too Late To Figure Out What’s What But Why Bother?

There is a saying among older men which, more than any other, better than ‘You got what you bargained for’, ‘Better late than never’, and ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, say it all - ‘Too soon old, too late schmart’.  However much alte kockers may try to figure out what’s what before it’s too late, the farther away the goal always seems.  

Why should it be so hard, after all, since there is nothing new under the son, human beings still perform in the same predictable, disappointing, ways.  Human nature is hardwired from birth; and regardless of the odd bits and pieces of strange genetic material from Great Grandfather Isaac, we all seem to play from the same deck.

So familiar are the hands dealt and so often are they played, that anyone old enough to remember Truman has given up on politics. Besides, there are never any takeaways that might add insight or knowledge.  World War II was fought for the same reasons as The War of the Roses.  Men and women committed adultery, murder, fraud, theft, and deception in the courts of Henry VIII and the Vatican of Urban II as much as they do in post-modern America.  

It’s not that we haven’t learned a thing. It’s that we can’t help it.  Until the human genome is completely recombined and reconfigured to alter human nature, we will all win half the time and lose half the time.  Of course the ones who will do the genetic tinkering in an attempt to make a better, more compassionate, more understanding and tolerant human race, will be still wired with the old codes, so the post-human generation will not surprisingly look pretty much like the old one.



Many older people, still feeling that one can indeed be schmart before it is too late, turn to literature, religion, the arts and philosophy for insights and answers.  The plays of Shakespeare, for example, setting human drama on a very large stage, might well illuminate the human condition.  

Shakespeare, however, knew as well as any historian or philosopher how history repeats itself in boringly repetitive ways, and the only thing of interest is how characters react to them.  Goneril and Regan played out the age-old melodrama of family greed, jealousy, and ambition, but were wonderfully evil in their attempts to dethrone their father, rule his kingdom and take his fortune.  Tamora, Dionyza, Volumnia, and Lady Macbeth are delicious villains, all about protecting their own, getting what is rightfully theirs, and confiscating especially what is not. 

Philosophy, then, may be the answer.  Parsing the works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Nietzsche must offer some hope of resolution to life’s conundrums.  Yet Berkeley’s phenomenology, Hume’s metaphysics, and Sartre’s moral purpose never satisfy.  Aquinas and Kierkegaard were barking up the wrong tree when it came to proving whether or not good can exist in a morally questionable world.  Of course they can and do.

During one service in a wealthy synagogue, the rabbi got carried away. Falling on hands and knees, forehead to floor, he said, "Oh God, before thee I am nothing.” The Cantor, not to be outdone, also got down, forehead to wood and said, "Oh God, before thee I am nothing." Seeing this, Levy, a tailor in the fourth row, left his seat, fell to his knees, forehead to floor and he too, said "Oh God, before thee I am nothing.” With this, the Cantor elbowed the rabbi and sniffed: "Look who thinks he's nothing!"

This is what eventually happens to people of a certain age.  There is no meaning to life so stop looking.

D.H.Lawrence is famous for his belief in the transformative nature of sex.  True union, the perfect coming together of man and woman in sexual intercourse, is spiritual.  At the moment of orgasm everything but the climax is irrelevant – marital discord, social inequality, money, ambition, children, propriety all are erased in that one elegiac moment.  

Of course his characters are just as spent and discouraged by what they see after sex – the wallpaper, linoleum, and stained armoire – as anyone else; but at least they have partaken of something more elevating and are better off for it.

Q: What's the difference between a Catholic wife and a Jewish wife?
A: The Catholic wife has real orgasms and fake jewelry.

Older men barely remember sex at all let alone any sexual divinity.  Little in their memory is Laurentian – a first kiss perhaps, but most everything else has been so mediated by Hollywood that they have no recollection of any real romance other than bits and pieces of sexual paraphernalia.  If anything they remember the sex they never had.  

D.H. Lawrence notwithstanding, sex was never all it was cracked up to be and certainly provided no answers to any existential question.

Sadie, an elderly Jewish lady, is leaving the garment district to go home from work. Suddenly a man who has been walking towards her stands in front of her, blocks her path, opens up his raincoat and flashes his wares in all their sordid glory. Unruffled, Sadie takes a look and remarks, "This you call a lining?"

Religion perhaps may offer answers to life’s conundrums.  Tolstoy, a non-believer, spent most of his adult life searching for meaning.  His character Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina wonders how God could be so cruel. He created man with wit, intelligence, creativity, insight, energy, humor, and ambition; lets him live for a few insignificant decades, and then consigns him for eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  

Tolstoy studied history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and religion for answers, but found none.  At last, much later in life, he finally gave up.  If billions of people have believed in God over the millennia, he reasoned, why shouldn’t I?



The history of Christianity is as fascinating for its historical evolution as for its spiritual principles. Theologians fought for four centuries about the nature of the Trinity; whether Jesus was both God and Man, one or the other, or only God.  Although the Church began as a simple household affair, early Christian leaders realized that without some kind of central authority, the very principles of Jesus himself might become so distorted that they would be unrecognizable; and without authoritative principles and doctrine, the Church would be no different from that of the Gnostics. 

One can learn as much about institutional organization, management, and marketing from the history of the early Church than anything more uplifting.

What about science, then?  Certainly the fundamental laws of nature are inalterable and as permanent and profound as any principle. Yet cosmology keeps changing with the times, mathematical theory evolves with each generation, Einstein and Darwin will soon be put on the shelf. 

The arts? Not much hope there in an age of personal identity and personal expression.  The paintings of Francis Bacon and Anselm Kiefer offer some insights into the human condition, but they are overwhelmed by abstract installations and concept art.

The Goldbergs went to pay their respects to their good friend who had just died. They filed past the coffin. "How good he looks," remarked Mrs. Goldberg, "how relaxed, how tanned, how healthy!" "And why not?" replied Mr. Goldberg. "He just spent three weeks in Miami."

For many people old age is exactly that – winters in Miami with no excuses or complaints.  For others it’s grandchildren and a few meals out.  We all get over our anxiety about figuring things out sooner or later. We either wear out like Tolstoy, get the picture quickly and don’t bother, or just play the cards we are dealt even though we know they have been dealt a million times before to people just like us. In the end we all end up dans un tas pêle-mêle, all jumbled up together in the same place, so why worry anyway.

Schwartz is sitting in his room, wearing only a top hat, when Steinberg strolls in.
“Why are you sitting here naked?”
“It’s all right,” says Schwartz. “Nobody comes to visit.”
“But why the hat?”
“Maybe somebody will come.”

Sexual Promise, Disappointment, And Epiphany–D.H. Lawrence And The Essential Nature Of Sex

D.H. Lawrence more than any modern writer understood sexual dynamics. His was a an unalterably heterosexual world one in which there were fundamental differences between between male and female, and knew that a perfect sexual union of the two could be existential.  How else to describe the perfect consummation of a man and a woman, one victor and one conquered, in a primal battle between the two?

Sexual dynamics for Lawrence is nothing less than a contest of sexual far from concerns of social establishment, social order, or patriarchy; but a struggle between two essential and undeniable human natures.  Lawrence, although he never defined his terms in this way, asserted that there was such a thing as gender-defined sexuality.  Women would always be the attracting, receiving partner; but their ‘submissiveness’ had nothing to do with capitulation or defeat, but a position derived from nature.

A chapter in Lawrence’s book The Rainbow is entitled ‘Anna Victrix’ for it relates the conclusion of a battle of sexual wills between Anna and her husband.  There are no compromises in Lawrence’s fiction nor any guarantee that men will prevail.  Women, like those in Shakespeare or his contemporaries Ibsen and Strindberg, were often stronger than men, more intelligent, more canny, and more able.  There is no guarantee that Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers, Tom and Will Brangwen in The Rainbow, the men in Women in Love, or the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover will prevail and that male Victorian supremacy will rule the day.   On the contrary, Lawrence’s men doubt their masculinity, fight their misogyny, are sexually helpless with desire, and never able to rid themselves of their mothers, fathers, class, and ambitions.



Women and men in Lawrence want and need to be sexually fulfilled; but both struggle to understand what that may mean.  While the complete, sexual unison that Lawrence portrays as the existential moment between a man and a woman - a catharsis of indecision and personal doubt and  a final remission of externalities and non-essentials – they must deal with an ‘after’far more complex than post-coital sadness, but a questioning of purpose and direction.  The couples in all of Lawrence’s work who have achieved this momentary sexual mutuality quickly lose its feeling of centrality.

Ursula as a young late adolescent in The Rainbow perceives the illogic significance of Jesus Christ Lord and Son of Man.  How magnificently spiritual and elegant is the risen Christ, transfigured, redeeming, and holy; but how triflingly insignificant is he, the son of man and woman, wounded, bleeding, and dying.  What is the message, she asks? Religious triumphalism or a singularly unattractive human living being? 

She comes to understand the fundamentally spiritual nature of sex – the end-all of human congress, the event of singular spiritual importance, and the most important, only event which is physical, emotional, and spiritual – and relates it to the Resurrection. God who becomes Man who becomes God in the Christian myth is a metaphorical allusion to ordinary Man becoming renewed and resurrected through sexual intercourse.

‘Nonsense’, say most post-modern critics.  There is no such thing as existential sex let alone sexual bi-polarity.  Gender exists along a fungible spectrum, they insist; and concepts of maleness and femaleness must give way to sexual gradation.  There is no such thing as man or woman, but every possible shade in between.  Lawrence’s conflicts of dominance and submission ending in sexual balance – maleness and femaleness perfectly balanced outside of considerations of gender, social class, or priority – are fictions. Women have always been chattels, complaisant in the interests of a good marriage; and the only struggle between men and women is a socio-political one.  The rest – sexual epiphany, sexual resolution, and sexual conclusion – is fantasy.

Much is made of sexuality these days, but only of the benign categorical type.  Where one fits on the gender spectrum is far more important than what does, and it seems that sex, the most fundamental, defining aspect of human relations has been forgotten.


Of course sex is still as diverse as the billions of people on earth, and no combination or permutation should surprise; but the current trend of classification if anything devalues the principal purpose and nature of sex.



Procreation, a one-off, deliberate practical outcome of sex, has little if anything to do with the more important dynamics of sexual behavior – dominance and submission, fantasy, infantilism, anger, frustration, and resentment; and whether one is M, F, Bi, Trans, gay, lesbian, or anything in between.

Gender classification is very American.  Social equality, justice, community, identity, and other procedural issues have always been more important than behavior.  It is far more important to create well-defined sexual spaces rather than to focus on the primal energies that are common to all.

Sex –the act itself – is as uninteresting as a cheap pornographic movie if it is divorced from need.  A rape is not sex but anger, hostility, resentment, misogyny, and sexual insufficiency.  Weekly sexual intercourse between married couples is duty, obligation, and a clausal fulfillment of contract.  Affairs are cheap anodynes, incest is sick, and transsexual adventures meaningless . Sex is an expression of will; bad sex – workmanlike, obligatory, and socially sanctioned a sign of complaisance, dissatisfaction, and anomie.

In what French intellectuals have called America’s ‘puerile sexuality’, most sexual partners look no further than the orgasm.  If it was good for both of them, then their emotional bond has been annealed.  Yet as time goes on they will inevitably have to deal with sexual frustration, an expression not only of their physical disappointment but psycho-social one.  Lack of sexual satisfaction, women know, is less a matter of male performance than male attitude.




In Lady Chatterley’s Lover Clifford tries to put the best spin possible on his impotence.  It is not so much the sex itself but the bonding it represents.

It's what endures through one's life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections especially! If people don't exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should.

What does it matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other.

And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing. . .that's what we live by. . .not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another.

That's the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.

Of course Lady Chatterley disagrees.  Sex is not simply a part of marriage, it is the part; for only out of the complexity of sexual arrangements can one understand the other.

And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded, had begun to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.

And yet was he not in a way to blame? This lack of warmth, this lack of the simple, warm, physical contact, was he not to blame for that? He was never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a well-bred, cold sort of way!

When polarity is challenged and when classic sexual dynamics give way to a gentler, more accommodating ease of sexual expression, all historical and Biblical notions become irrelevant.  The story of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden is nothing less than the first tale of sexual dynamics – an ambitious, curious, and restive female, and a complaisant, respectful, and dutiful male who differ.  The result is eternal damnation with no hope of redemption.  Forever after male and female will assert, compromise, submit, and conquer in no particular pattern or order.  Although Shakespeare’s historical plays are about men – King John, Richard II, Richard III; Henry IV, V, VI, and VIII – they are also about the women who ruled them.  Despite Elizabethan patriarch and elite social order, women always found ways to best men. 

The sexual wars were even more evident in Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, and Pericles.  There was no question of gender indecision in Shakespeare’s mind when he envisaged the struggles between Hamlet and his mother; between the ‘un-manned’ Macbeth and his ambitious wife; and between the insatiably ambitious Tamora willing to sacrifice her children in her vengeance against Titus.

For Lawrence sex, whatever its configuration within a relationship, can never be ignored.  It is never insignificant, never meaningless.  Too much desire or too little; too little patience or indifference; too little caring or too little passion; too much sex or too little.  Every sexual innuendo is parsed, worried, or buried.  Sexual slights are rarely forgotten.  Sexual attention always given more value than it is worth.

Lawrence was not the first author to write frankly about sex, nor the only one to raise issues of will, dominance, and sexual authority.  Shakespeare’s plays were all about strong women and their dominance in a patriarchal society.  The will of Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Volumnia, and Lady Macbeth was indomitable and profoundly sexual.  Othello was as much about Iago’s sexual jealousy of Othello as it was Othello’s mistrust of Desdemona.   The Comedies are all about sexual foreplay within a demanding social context.




Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was all about sexual dominance and subjugation.  Tennessee Williams was the most mature and sophisticated about women’s sexual longings, disappointments, and courage.




It is hard to ignore almost 3000 years of dramatic history, the chronicles of male-female relations from Oedipus to Blanche Dubois.  Tennessee Williams wrote a play worthy of Sophocles. Streetcar Named Desire is the quintessential play about human sexuality.  Sexual dominance, submission, history, calculation, and desire are indistinguishable from more secular human events.  Williams, like Lawrence schooled us in the essentiality of sexual dynamics.

Those men who have missed out on demanding lovers, ambitious wives, fawning daughters and a life of sexual adventure fall outside the margins.  They may have been content within them – stable, secure, and untroubled – but they have never known what Lawrence called ‘happy liberal excesses’,