Herb Kohl on aging gracefully

Excerpts from the LA Times book review of

Painting Chinese
A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth
Herbert Kohl
Bloomsbury: 170 pp., $19.95

A couple of years ago, as he approached his 70th birthday, Herbert Kohldecided he needed to do something for himself. The longtime educatorand author was struggling to come to terms with aging, as well as withhis grief at the collapse after four years of the University of SanFrancisco’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice, aprogram he founded that had “ended bitterly,” cut by the universityafter the funds Kohl had raised ran out.  For Kohl, the key to dealing with these traumas was to reopen himselfto learning and develop a new skill. “During hard times,” he notes, “Ioften feel the compelling need for new growth.” An amateur painter, heenrolled in a beginner’s class in Chinese painting at a smallstorefront art academy on San Francisco’s Clement Street, and theexperience confounded him from the start. No sooner had he arrived forthe first session than he discovered that all of his fellow studentswere between the ages of 5 and 7, Chinese American kids whose verypresence forced him to reconsider his expectations — both of the classand of himself. “I was a child in an old guy’s body,” Kohl recalls,”and when I sat down that day, my body disappeared and the child in meemerged once again. . . . I was on the ground again, asixty-nine-year-old six-year-old. What fun!” 

“Painting Chinese” is the story of that reemergence — a slim,discursive memoir that bears some of the matter-of-factness of Chinesepainting itself. What’s most interesting about the book is how themaking of art, which Kohl first thought of as a diversion, becomes morelike meditation, a way to reflect on the ebb and flow of life. Kohl isrefreshingly candid about the press of mortality, considering withoutself-pity what to do with the remaining time he has. “I could stillteach, write, and paint during the time left to me — fifteen, maybetwenty years,” he notes in one characteristically direct passage,adding, with a touch of wistfulness, that it “seemed such a short time.”

Read the rest, then get the book