“(For) many people their desire for their work outlasts their ability to do it.” – Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life”
Recently, The Museum of Modern Art director Glenn D. Lowry, a man I interviewed several times in my career as a cultural writer, announced that he will step down from his post after 30 years in September of 2025.
As much as his counterpart Philippe de Montebello at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who left that post in 2008 after more than 30 years as its longest-serving director, Lowry really shaped the New York City cultural scene at the twilight of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st. He could’ve stayed on.
But he told The New York Times: “I didn’t want to be the person who stayed too long.”
In that, however, Lowry is a rare bird. Contrast this with another recent Times story, which explored how a different cultural titan, Disney CEO Robert A. Iger, undermined his successor, Bob Chapek, and returned to the job – although having interviewed Iger when he was head of ABC, a Disney company, I came away from the article thinking that Iger never intended for Chapek -- who comes across in the article as way out of the elegant Iger’s league – to fail. After all, he picked him to succeed him. But he picked him to succeed in every sense of the word as long as he could control him.
Such people, the Roman Stoic philosopher and historian Seneca wrote in his essay “On the Shortness of Life, “achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition.”
If anyone should’ve known this, it was Seneca (circa 4 B.C.-65 A.D.), who was the emperor Nero’s tutor and adviser, often failed to practice what he preached and was condemned by Nero to death by suicide. How well must Seneca — caught between trying to maintain his life, never mind his lifestyle — and pleasing his narcissistic nutjob of a boss, have understood how ambition feeds ambition.
I was reminded of this in reading Ian O’Connor’s unauthorized but scrupulously researched new biography of controversial Green Bay Packers quarterback turned New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, “Out of the Darkness.” I worked with Ian at Gannett, where his sportswriting was a big deal before he moved on to ESPN. (If it seems as if I know everyone, it’s because you can’t do this job for 45 years and not meet a person or two.) Ian paints a detailed picture of how Rodgers’ Green Bay predecessor, Brett Favre – always Hamlet-like about retiring, to go or not to go – was highly ambivalent about the cocky Rodgers, who had been drafted to succeed him. (Perhaps not so ironically, Rodgers would get a taste of this himself when the Packers drafted Jordan Love, although Rodgers said he remembered his own experience and treated Love differently. Ultimately, Rodgers, like Favre, would also wind up on the Jets.)
To go or not to go. To stay or not to stay: No one likes being pushed out or thought a quitter. Sometimes, however, the body forces your hand, as with Rafael Nadal, who announced Oct. 10 that he will retire after the Davis Cup finals, Nov. 19 through 24 in Malaga, Spain. I’m sure Nadal would’ve preferred to go on, but his body, with a long list of injuries, clearly can’t. (I’ll have more on this in a future post.)
On the other hand, his longtime rival, Novak Djokovic, who thus far hasn’t won any tournaments this year but did deepen many records while checking off the Olympic gold medal box on his résumé and making the finals of the Shanghai Masters, where he lost to No. 1 Jannik Sinner, is going to hang in to get his 100th win and a 25th Slam – the latter a formidable task with Sinner and No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz particularly in his way.
Forget them. Djokovic lost in the third round of the US Open to someone I’ve never heard of and whose name I don’t remember (Alexei Popyrin). All respect to Popyrin, whom Djokovic said played great tennis, but this is Djokovic’s future – losing to guys like Popyrin in the third round. He’s offered to coach Nick Kyrgios (what a waste of a talent) to a Wimbledon crown. He’s pushing the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) that he co-founded. He could be president of Serbia or a United Nations ambassador tomorrow. Clearly, he wants to stay in tennis. The question is, how much longer can he play?
And then there’s the elephant in the room: “Look, I don’t know how other to describe it: You saw a nearly 80-year-old, angry narcissist continue to veer off into things that in any other setting might actually be funny, but they’re dangerous in this setting,” Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz told MSNBC after Harris and former President Donald J. Trump’s sole debate. (The Democrats are angry that the media isn’t going after Trump for being old and confused the way it’s gone after President Joe Biden. But hasn’t Trump always been confused? In his case, is it a factor of age?)
While Harris may have won that debate, has a slew of high-profiled Republican supporters like the Cheneys, and raised $1 billion, the race is a virtual dead heat, which begs the question: Why isn’t this woman winning by a landslide? “It’s a question I scream into my pillow every morning,” Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris said ruefully in the cold opening of “Saturday Night Live” Oct. 12.
My late Aunt Rita always said you’ll know when it’s the right moment to retire. Win, lose or draw, Trump is never going to let go. He can’t, because the spotlight nourishes an identity he would otherwise not possess.