Moving forward while looking back

Ishiguro does regret better than anyone.

Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) and Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) in the 1993 film version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.

The third age of life is for moving ahead, but it’s also about looking back on choices that have shaped our lives. For some, that retrospection may be tinged with regret. Regrets can be personal, involving romantic or family relationships, or they can be professional: a career choice that proved ill-suited, or, as in my case, a failure to make a choice at what would have been the optimum time to do so. Time always seems to be a central element of regret. Why did we waste precious time doing x? Why did we not do y sooner, or at all?

Such doubts are an inescapable dimension of being human. So why are we not all walking around desperately sad, grieving our poor choices and lost chances? Because we come to terms with them, as we must. That’s also part of being human, and it’s a large part of the third age.

When I reflect on this one author comes first to mind, and that’s British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Most of his works deal in some way with memory, loss and regret in the face of mortality, and The Remains of the Day (1989), which won the Booker Prize, is a powerful meditation on the subject. Mr. Stevens is the butler in a grand old English manor, Darlington Hall, where he served Lord Darlington for 35 years. When the novel opens in 1956, the house is under new ownership. His lordship has died in disgrace, tarred by his role in the appeasement of Hitler before World War II. Mr. Stevens, a narrator less unreliable than self-deluding, long ago passed up his chance for love in order to dedicate himself to serving “the greatest ladies and gentlemen of the land.” Providing an exalted level of service is his life’s work, and he expounds on the “dignity” that distinguishes “a great butler.” His fragile friendship with the housekeeper Miss Kenton ended two decades earlier when she, rebuffed, left the household to marry another.

As Stevens unfolds memories of the prewar years, we gradually realize what Lord Darlington was up to. In the early 1920s he begins hosting soirées for British aristocrats and highly placed Americans and Europeans who are sympathetic to Germany and bent on undermining the Versailles Treaty. By the late 1930s Herr Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain, is a frequent visitor to Darlington Hall, using his lordship to organize international support for the Nazis. Some reviewers suggest that Darlington was a dim-witted dupe, but I disagree. He and his patrician friends knew exactly what they were doing. “Democracy is something for a bygone era,” his lordship declares. “The world’s far too complicated a place now for universal suffrage and such like.” Meanwhile, “Germany and Italy have set their houses in order . . . See what strong leadership can do if it’s allowed to act.” Stevens is warned, but he either cannot see or refuses to admit what’s happening, even after he is required to summarily dismiss the household’s Jewish staff.

Most of us, however questionable our past decisions, haven’t made mistakes of this magnitude. We haven’t aided and abetted Nazis. The novel presents a case that is extreme, but it is one that I believe we can learn from.

After the war, when Darlington’s role is exposed, Stevens at first denies that this reflects on him: “It is hardly my fault if his lordship’s life and work have turned out today to look, at best, a sad waste – and it is quite illogical that I should feel any regret or shame on my own account.” It’s not that Stevens doesn’t recognize those emotions. He surmises, pityingly, that Miss Kenton, whose marriage appears to be failing, “is pondering with regret decisions made in the far-off past.” She “cannot hope . . . ever to retrieve those lost years” and must now live “a life that has come to be so dominated by a sense of waste.” But such self-reproach is for others, not for him.

He pays a visit to Miss Kenton, now Mrs. Benn, hoping to persuade her to return to Darlington Hall. And here the suppressed sense of regret tumbles into grief. The housekeeper has come to accept her disappointing marriage and no longer thinks of leaving: “But that doesn’t mean to say, of course, there aren’t occasions now and then – extremely desolate occasions – when you think to yourself: ‘What a terrible mistake I’ve made with my life.’ And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance, I get to thinking about a life I may have had with you, Mr. Stevens.” The butler must now face what he has lost: “At that moment, my heart was breaking.”

The last scene finds Stevens sitting on a seaside pier as the sun sets, two days after his final meeting with Mrs. Benn. A stranger, a retired butler himself, draws him into conversation, and Stevens confesses to professional as well as personal ruin. “I’ve given what I had to give. I gave it all to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now – well – I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.” He is weeping. “I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”

In an interview with the New York Times in 1989, Ishiguro remarked, “What I’m interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret. I’m interested in how they come to terms with it. On the one hand there is a need for honesty, on the other hand a need to deceive themselves – to preserve a sense of dignity, some sort of self-respect. What I want to suggest is that some sort of dignity and self-respect does come from that sort of honesty.”

And so Stevens realizes he must move on. “But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? . . . In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points,’ one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect.”

I find this to be true. I can identify such a turning point in my own life, more than 40 years ago: when I returned to the United States after two years as a Peace Corps health educator in Niger. As my time there neared its end, I had considered various career paths I might follow. Public health? Journalism? Academia? Yet once back in the States, I did not pursue any of them. It all ended up fine: I’ve made a decent living as a freelance editor and have time left over for teaching and activism. But the might-have-beens will always be with me.

The last word belongs to the stranger who gently chides Stevens as night falls and the pier lights begin to glow. “Now, look, mate, I’m not sure I follow everything you’re saying. But if you ask me, your attitude’s all wrong, see? Don’t keep looking back all the time . . . All right, so neither of us are exactly in our first flush of youth, but you’ve got to keep looking forward. . . . You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day.”

I’ve read this novel several times, and each time I find more to think about. In the third age, as we move forward, we must also look back. Owning our choices and any regrets we may have goes hand in hand with planning how to spend the time left to us, the remains of our day.