Free Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein Page B

choosing scenes from our lives, we are trying to give it coherence, even—heaven help us—
meaning
. But arbitrary as our choices may be, they are all that is available to us for this task. In his five-pound magnum opus
Being and Nothingness
, Sartre wrote: “There is a magic in recollection. . . . In remembering we seem to attain that impossible synthesis . . . that life yearns for.”
    In a philosophical old age, there is nothing I yearn for more than that impossible synthesis.
    ON THE WISDOM OF WILD STRAWBERRIES
    Toward the end of his popular course The Human Life Cycle, given at Harvard in the 1960s, Erikson would pull down the shades in his lecture hall and show Ingmar Bergman’s classic film
Wild Strawberries
. Erikson said that no case history or psychological survey captured the “overall coherence, the ‘gestalt,’ of a whole life” as well as this film. He considered it an extra­ordinarily sensitive and evocative modern portrayal of an old man reviewing his life and attempting both to make sense of it and come to terms with it.
    It is easy for me to understand why Erikson found so much richness in
Wild Strawberries
. The film traces a single long day of travel, memories, dreams, presentiments, and encounters with family members and strangers in the life of a retired Swedish doctor and bacteriologist, Dr. Isak Borg. In the company of his daughter-in-law, who is currently estranged from his son, Borg drives to Lund University, where he is to receive a medal for fifty years of dedication to his profession. At the beginning of this journey, he is an embittered old man, isolated and cynical in the extreme about the consolations of religion and the possibility that his, or any, life could have some transcendent meaning.
    Before his journey even begins, Borg is forced to confront the imminence of his death in a chilling dream of a clock without hands and a runaway horse-drawn hearse, which is revealed to contain his own corpse. The shadow of his mortality follows him for the rest of the day, compelling him to attempt one last time to make some kind of sense of his life. It is an extremely painful process for Borg.
    Many of the memories that come to him, especially of his childhood, are virtually indistinguishable from his dreams, and, dreamlike, these memories are distorted by his emotions, particularly by his pervasive feeling of regret. Do these distortions make his memories any less real? Or do they highlight the significance of the memories for him? For Erikson, both of these questions miss Bergman’s striking insight that we are able to “invent the truth” of our memories by the wisdom we bring to bear on them. Regret is not the only lens through which Borg can see his life.
    But regret cannot be dismissed either. This is not a feel-good film in which Borg, in the end, concludes that all in all he actually made a pretty good go of it. Not at all. Still, by day’s end Borg does achieve a redemption of sorts. He accepts his life, regrets and all, as
his own
—a human life, a life deeply connected to “my kind.” And he painfully reaches out to the people around him.
    The Italian director Federico Fellini’s classic life-review film
8½
tackles the question of regrets more directly and perhaps less subtly than
Wild Strawberries
, not to mention more lightheartedly, even comically. Living near the Mediterranean will do that to a man. In
8½
the central character, Guido, a filmmaker bereft of inspiration, finds himself reminiscing about the people and events in his life; these memories, in turn, become his sought-after film. Along the way, Guido has to contend with the comments of a cynical Greek chorus in the form of his archcritic, Daumier. Says Daumier, “What a monstrous presumption to believe that others might profit by the squalid catalog of your mistakes. And what good would it do to yourself to piece together the