ONE

Midlife Transition

“It was a dream come true!” Imagine that you had reached a point in life where you could look at all that you had done in your life as a dream come true. That’s what happened to Dante Alighieri (circa 1300), the greatest poet Italy ever produced. All his life Dante had nurtured an aspiration for political power in his native city of Florence. He fulfilled that dream, becoming elected one of the supreme magistrates of the city. But at the moment of triumph, it was all snatched away from him. In the year of his dream-come-true, he fell from power, was condemned to death, and then was exiled from his native city, never to return. His dream had turned to ashes. What to do?

Astonishingly, instead of bitterness toward those who had destroyed the dream, Dante turned his gaze inward. He began his greatest work, Divine Comedy, with the famous lines above, realizing that, even before his dream vanished, he himself had been far astray from his true self, as he tells us candidly.

Divine Comedy was written at a time of decisive transition, for both Dante the poet and for the wider culture of Western civilization in the late Middle Ages. In the Comedy, Dante the pilgrim is cast as Everyman, the voyager who makes his way from the depths of hell, through purgatory, into a celestial vision of paradise. In making this spiritual journey Dante frames for us an enduring story for the second half of life as a time when we turn away from the dreams of youth, fulfilled or not, toward a deeper understanding of our place in the universe and toward the ultimate meaning of our lives.

Dante the poet could take for granted a whole framework of common culture embodied in the medieval Church and in traditions of philosophy and literature. By refashioning the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, Dante could recast classical ideas in his own terms, seeing his own life in terms of a larger religious cosmology where the individual found pattern and purpose. Such a framework is rarely available today. By the early twentieth century, when James Joyce would try to frame a similar epic in his own masterpiece, Ulysses, a whole human lifetime was condensed into a single day. Joyce’s hero seeks meaning not in an afterlife, but in everyday activities that display only a distant echo of mythic meanings. A wider “map of life,” which Dante could take for granted, was no longer available to Joyce or his contemporaries.

Today, popular culture has enshrined these questions in the phrase “midlife crisis.” But the term “crisis” will not be used in this book. Instead, we speak of “midlife transition,” viewing the middle years as a period entailing a reevaluation of one’s life. For Dante, that reevaluation was prompted by a very tangible crisis: death sentence and exile from his native Florence. In those circumstances, he couldn’t avoid asking hard questions. For some people asking these questions also comes with a crisis—illness, divorce, loss of job, and so on. But for others, there is no single event, but rather a gnawing sense of the question of meaning. Or, as I described in the opening of my own book, The Five Stages of the Soul, “‘Time is running out,’ a little voice whispers.” “Is this all there is?” the little voice whispers. “A portion of my life is already over. Shouldn’t things be better? Or at least different?”

This is the moment James Hollis has described as the Middle Passage, a time when, “The question of identity returns and one can no longer evade responsibility for it.” Again, the Middle Passage starts when we ask, “Who am I, apart from my history and the roles I have played?” During the Middle Passage that little whispering voice may come in dreams. It is quite possible to ignore the whispering voice of midlife. In the 1981 film On Golden Pond the lead character, played by elder Henry Fonda says “We’re just middle aged.” His wife, played by Katharine Hepburn, replies, “Yes, if you live to be 140.” Years after that film I had the good fortune to meet Jane Fonda, who listened to her own whispering voice. By age eighty-seven Jane Fonda had become not just a celebrity, but a prominent voice about climate change.

The unconscious perception of mortality is often the stimulus to the dreams of midlife transition. The question becomes, what are the stories our dreams are telling us? Consider the following dream from Peter O’Connor’s Dreams and the Search for Meaning:

Steering

My car wouldn’t steer and I tried to go through an old brick tunnel over a road and got stuck against the edge because of no steering. Also I couldn’t see ahead as I was on top of the hill.

And then in a second dream as detailed by O’Connor:

Freeway

I dreamed that the construction of a freeway in a suburb [of the city] is nearing completion. There is a vast expanse of asphalt but no median strips, painted arrows or traffic lights.

Both dreams draw on the image of driving. In “Steering,” the dreamer is driving the car, a perfect symbol of self-management and control. But the dreamer cannot control the car, and this condition reflects his depression and confusion about where he will go next for the rest of his life. There is a tunnel that might be a way out for him, but because he can’t steer the car—and can’t control his life—he cannot find the way. The final lines display a paradox. The dreamer is “on top of the hill,” at the high point of life, just as Dante was before his fall as leader of Florence.

In “Freeway,” the dreamer is evidently driving, but he is confronted with “construction . . . nearing completion.” The “construction” in this dream is the life we have made for ourselves by midlife, the empirical self as reflected in our resume, the family photo album, in our accumulated memories. As the dream of youth is now “nearing completion” the dreamer confronts a problem: the rest of life, the second half of life, is just a “vast expanse” without any guidance and directions.

Both these dreams employ imagery of the automobile, that great twentieth-century instrument that promotes autonomy and control in our movement through the world. Think of the importance of driving for adolescents who are trying to break free and strike out on their own. It is natural that driving a car would represent autonomy. But there may come a point in our lives when the autonomy symbolized by the car no longer works. In the first dream, the dreamer’s car “wouldn’t steer,” and so he gets stuck trying to make his way through “an old brick tunnel.” It is curious that the dreamer “couldn’t see ahead” even though his car was “at the top of a hill.” These contradictory images—a tunnel underground and the dreamer at the top of a hill—suggest opposite poles of the psyche: a path through the underworld and then the high hilltop, a point where we ought to be able to see far ahead. But not for this dreamer. Despite being in a good position he cannot see and so he remains stuck.

The second dream adds imagery of the freeway to that of the automobile. The dreamer is seeking a path that would be free or lead to freedom. But in this dream the road leads only to confusion. In “big” dreams a city may represent the totality of the psyche or the self in its comprehensiveness. In this second dream the city (the self) is “nearing completion” but the dreamer remains on the outskirts, in the suburbs, not in the city itself.

To go into the self is to enter strange territory where we need guidance if we are not to get lost. This dreamer, in the midst of crisis, finds no guidance: no median strips, no arrows, no traffic lights. Here is an image of the self without direction, without any way of finding a “free” way to enter the city of the genuine self, firmly in the “middle passage” when we, in every respect, simply don’t know where we are going.