As a respite from orientation week, I watched one of my favorite films. Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) recounts one day in the life of an aged physician: the day he's to receive an honorary doctorate in Lund for his service to medicine. Setting out for the drive to the ceremony with his daughter-in-law, Isak comes to a fresh understanding of the coldness that's seeped into his mood, relationships and mores; a selfishness cloaked in "old-world manners and charm". The long-denied failure of his own marriage he at last confides - as well as a never-lost love for his childhood sweetheart. Snapping out of these sad reflections, Isak pledges to renew himself - to rebuild his family over the few remaining years.
Wild Strawberries is a gentle, intelligent film - a meditation on old age and the regrets that accumulate in its tow. And it got me thinking about what it will be like to be old. There's nothing worse than realizing, too late, the bankruptcy of a life ill-led, ambitions unfulfilled. We all know that. Yet perhaps Isak's shortcomings are more to be feared: how careless habits of thought and action, which everyday mean little, shape our character, and eat away at our capacity to change.
I guess staying alert to this looming danger of inertia is the way to avoid Isak's twilight pangs. Stubbornness grows over time. Maybe, with supreme effort, that's not inevitable. So Bergman believed.
"Know thyself," read the inscription above the entrance to the oracle at Delphi. Easier said than done.
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