Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead by Willard Spiegelman

As Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he taught for many years, Willard Spiegelman made a name for himself with a number of impressive book-length studies, including Majestic Indolence, an examination of his much-loved English Romantic poets, and Imaginative Transcripts, which addressed the likes of Jorie Graham and John Ashbery. His role as a commanding scholar and critic took a remarkable turn in 2010, when he published a charming collection of personal essays ambitiously (and cheekily) titled Seven Pleasures, Essays on Ordinary Happiness—after the trivium and the quadrivium, otherwise known as the seven liberal arts—which brought him before a general readership. The volume included pleasing observations on "dancing, reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing," presenting these ordinary pursuits as deep wells from which one may draw with great satisfaction. It proved a popular book, something an author of thoughtful poetry criticism hardly dares dream of, and it changed the trajectory of his writing life, making him a celebrity beyond the groves of academe. Spiegelman's latest (again cheekily titled), Senior Moments, Looking Back, Looking Ahead, brings the author's deep knowledge of literature to bear on a fresh array of topics, eight altogether in this case, including three locales—Dallas, Japan, and Manhattan—and some broader categories, such as talk, books, art, nostalgia, and quiet. Those hoping for a dissertation on the pleasures and pains of aging will find instead a droll look at the world and how it has changed in Spiegelman's life (he was born in 1944).

Spiegelman remarks that he did not set out to write a memoir but that the book gradually turned out as something resembling one. While it contains no outrageous confessions and often only loosely bears upon its author, it is roughly structured according to stages in his life. Stories of his childhood in Philadelphia give way to episodes in Dallas, where he spent much of his life teaching, then Japan, which he visited only once, and finally Manhattan, where he has retired and seems to enjoy himself immensely (he encouraged others to follow suit in "For a Long Life, Retire to Manhattan" in the New York Times). Even the most personal episodes serve as points of departure for imaginative dilations on art, literature, cuisine, language, friendship, and the culture at large (this last is where we find the critic at his most acerbic).

The book begins with something of an origin story. We see the development of a critic, connoisseur, editor, and raconteur in what may seem, at first, the unlikeliest of places, working class Philadelphia. From the start, his wonderful talent for linking literature with life is on full display, as he relates that "unlike Shakespeare's Cordelia, whose voice was 'ever soft'… my mother's was loud, grating, often shrill, and always capable of penetrating the bowels of any department store when she was trying to locate a wayward child." His mother's voice is styled as the very fabric of his less-than-literary childhood in Philadelphia. He goes so far as to say that "when I hear a Philadelphia accent, I hear her." Yet it was in this rough, Philadelphian English that he felt the first stirrings of his calling as a man of letters, catching what he calls "phonophilia: love of sounds," though adding "at least certain ones." He goes on,

I can still hear, through the years, my family chattering: assertively, ironically, simultaneously. Language was the best way to make one's mark. I hardly knew it at the time, but language became my life's leitmotif.

While his love of language brought him great success as a literature professor, it is the "spoken language, even more than writing" that "brings us together." As a boy expanding his vocabulary, he was "discovering the essential charms of poetry itself, with its combination of the semantic and the non-semantic. Rhythm, rhyme, and music: melody enhances the meanings of words and the power of communication." Lessons begin to emerge...