Philip Harvey
Middle
age was once our thirties and forties, based perhaps on halving the biblical
seventy years. Today it seems to be whatever one feels like, we being only as
old as we feel, apparently. Few people today under forty think of themselves as
middle-aged, or admit it, while there are those in their sixties and seventies
who are only as old as they feel and therefore, by their own reckoning,
middle-aged. Middle age seems to go with keeping fit to reduce the middle of
your anatomy. It sometimes means losing focus on objects in the middle
distance. It means discovering you are not the centre of all attention, not the
middle of the universe.
Our
middle name is often a cause of involuntary denial and identity puzzle. A
middle name is like some personal secret that, once disclosed in a social
context, can give way in others to mirth, amazement, disbelief, and infinite
conjecture. How could you live with a name like that? What deep meaning did it
have for your parents to have chosen that name of all names? The name itself
may be as common as your main name, yet something about it being your middle
name turns it into a weird revelation of everything you are trying so hard to
keep from the world. Just the revelation of having a name other than the one
you use every day is enough to send some minds into a spin. And sometimes the
more middle names you have, the worse it gets.
These
thoughts sprang to mind in the middle of winter while at my workplace in the
Melbourne bayside suburb of Middle Park. The terms middle income, middle
management, middle stump are not misplaced when talking about Middle Park, and
the suburb today is decidedly middle class. None of these things have to do
with the name itself, but its name lands us in the middle of a quandary. ‘The
Encyclopedia of Melbourne’ (ed. Brown-May & Swain, 2005) has an entry for
the suburb but no explanation for how it got its name. Even more strangely,
neither does the recent book ‘The Heart of Middle Park : Stories from a Suburb
by the Sea’ (Middle Park History Group, 2011), so invitations are out for
someone to explain why the suburb is a Park and what it’s in the middle of.
Albert Park is to the north, but there is no park to the south. It is possible
that its toponym comes from being land reclaimed between the old lagoons,
including the one known as Albert Park Lake, and Port Phillip Bay. Any
improvements on this guesswork are welcome.
Obviously
things become more relative the more we learn. The middle is only the middle in
relation to the definition points around it. Another Melbourne planning oddity
is Middle Camberwell, which has been on the periphery of Camberwell for
decades. When Europeans finally got around to changing Near East to Middle
East, this still didn’t mean much to those Australians who from their angle care
to see the region as the Near West. J.R.R. Tolkien adopted the Old English word
‘middle-earth’, meaning the world we live in, for use as the setting of his
considerable fictions. He reintroduced the word into usage. The term has older
echoes in the Chinese concept of the Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese,
which is in fact the oldest and most common name for China itself. So if you
live in China at any age in any age you regard yourself as being in the middle,
just as a librarian in Middle Park would feel he is at the centre of everything
in the Library, and the world as a matter of fact, in the middle of winter.
Even
the middle of winter is open to conjecture. Is it the longest night of the
year, the solstice? Or the coldest, rainiest week? Is it the height of the ski
season or the low of knowing your team will not reach the finals? Is it the
week the cootamundra starts to blossom? The overlay of the four seasons of
Europe on Australian conditions has never helped in saying when we experience
the middle of winter. The Indigenous Australians have seven seasons of the
year, of which at least two correspond with the wintry phase we experience in
Middle Park and the rest of Melbourne: any concept of middle is not fixed.
The
Library itself caters mainly for two kinds of brow, the high and the middle,
while the lowbrow is not actively encouraged, even if treated as a worthwhile
object of research within reasonable grounds. The Library holds plenty on the
middle period of Kierkegaard, the middle period of Jung, and in fact the middle
period of almost anyone spiritual you care to name. Being a library
specialising in spirituality it holds an extensive collection of writings in
Middle English, which is the English that last employed the term
‘middle-earth’, by the way. And the Library, due to buying policies in several
areas including church history, mysticism, and hagiography, has a huge and
always growing collection of works of all sorts about the Middle Ages. Just as
users of Middle English knew they were speaking English but didn’t know it was
Middle English, so no one in the Middle Ages (which includes all speakers of
Middle English) knew they were living in some pre- or post- age of some kind or
another but would never have thought of it as the Middle Ages. Many believed
the End could arrive any day now. The Middle Ages could only have been defined
by someone who was postmodern enough to see that the Middle Ages had come to an
end. Various postmodern people in the 15th century seem to have
judged that the Renaissance had hit and it was time to put the old times behind
them. Two events are amongst those treated as points of closure, the fall of
Constantinople (1453) and the day Columbus conked into somewhere Indian (1492),
though most people agree the Middle Ages begin with the recognised fall of the
Western Roman Empire (476). Those who adopt the long view argue in
philosophical vein that we all live in a Middle Age, others that humanity
itself exists in a Middle Ages, with a fairly certain before and after.
The
Old English word ‘middle-earth’ contained its own implicit meaning, was its own
Weltanschauung as latter-day Germans like to say. On either side of the middle
where we now find ourselves, is heaven or hell, a prospect described in fervent
detail in the here and now by the most famous medieval poet, Dante Alighieri,
in his big poem, the Divine Comedy. This is how it opens:
Nel
mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi
ritrovai per una selva oscura,
chè
la diritta via era smarrita
which
some translate as the poet in the middle of his life finding himself lost in a
dark wood, though you will notice the Italian actually says he finds himself in
the middle of the way of our life.
The opening line, in other words, says that we all share with Dante in this
way, that we each find ourselves in the middle asking questions, searching for
a way forward. From the first line we are with Dante and see things through his
eyes: it is an invitation, in the middle of everything else, to go on a tour of
discovery. It is a tour of discovery of everything else, and so in its course
of ourselves. Literal scholars say Dante was 35 at the time.
What
is the middle anyway? Often we are in too much of a state of flux to say
exactly. At the Library counter if a borrower asks how I am the response might
be “oh fair to middling”, while if a long, distracting conversation looms the
polite excuse is, “sorry, I am just in the middle of something.” The middle of
what, though? More work? The ‘something’ won’t be finished until the middle of
next week. Only some things are certain: it is neither the beginning nor the
end, we are neither in youth nor old age, and we are in a place that is neither
a park nor between other parks yet is called Middle Park. We can go whole days
not thinking about our middle name.
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