The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Poetry of Old Age

A controversial interpretation of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey: Certain lives matter more than others; some of those lives are Black; and they may even be annoying and useless. Nevertheless they matter more because they know what matters.

A less controversial interpretation of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey: If poetry is the vigourous coercion of words to fit with reality, then the poetry of old age is the hardest to write, not because of too few words but because of too much reality. Old folk have too much memory; this overwhelms speech. There are simply too many connections that can’t be communicated to the young. The connections might make sense to others; but these others are all dead; and it wasn’t necessary to explain things to them in words anyway.

Just at the point when everything begins to make sense in life, when the world and one’s role in it are most coherent, when the interpretation of one’s past becomes honest, just then language becomes useless. This causes confusion, but only because it is a kind of divine revelation: words always got in the way. It was words that opened the way to trouble and hate and misery and death. The white man’s words, the bully’s words, the words of anyone in authority, have always mattered more - on the street, in the law, in your own head. But old age knows what matters: “God don’t care what they did to you. What he care about is what you did.” Words don’t matter.

There is only one thing that old people must do, properly or not: they die. “A man only got to do one thing to set him apart. A man only got to do one thing right,” says Ptolemy. This is part of the revelation that allows them to leave words behind. It’s the words that are important to abandon because money is words, reputation is words, promises and lies are words. So leaving words behind leaves all that and more. This may be frustrating for other people but it is liberating for those who know how to die well. This matters greatly.

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