Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, tennis great Chris Evert, 70, wrote about surviving cancer—and how it changed her. This week, Nicholas Lemann, 70, explains why he’s obsessed with his family’s history.
Within the all-encompassing vastness of the aging process, there’s one corner that is blessedly unrelated to the theme of declining health, or, for that matter, to any other form of decline. That is an obsession with family history. I can’t think of anybody I know under the age of 50 who has this obsession, but a significant portion (a third? half?) of my contemporaries do. It’s summer, so I get regular accounts in my inbox of friends’ trips, with whatever family members they can persuade to join them, to the faraway places where the people they come from came from.
The phenomenon has a fairly obvious explanation. When you’re younger, you are swept up in the drama of your own life: leaving home, making a career, creating a family. As you age, unless you are either a world-historical genius or self-deluded, you begin to realize that whatever you accomplished doesn’t actually amount to all that much. The meaning of your life has more to do with your place in a direct chain—proceeding, obviously, from you down to your children and grandchildren, but also, less obviously, from you upward through generations of people you may not have known or even have heard of. They’re your context. You need to know about them in order to understand your own life fully.
I’m a Southerner, so I grew up in a culture where, as William Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” My family has been living in the same small town in Louisiana since 1836, and we established a beachhead in New Orleans in the 1890s. That’s where I grew up, within a stone’s throw of dozens of relatives, whose reminiscences I often heard when we’d visit. So maybe I was primed for my family history obsession. What’s surprising is that it took so long to manifest itself.
