“If you fall in love more often,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the road to eighty years, “if you can forgive and forget, if you can't help yourself from growing bitter, bored, bitter and doubtful… lick it a little.”
Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate. Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) tackled the same question of contemporaneity in a wonderful short story titled. “How to Grow Up,” written in his eighty-first year and later published in it Images from Memory and Other Essays (public library).
Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the elimination of one's ego in something greater. Drawing on the long-standing fascination of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until gradually the walls of the ego are reduced, and your life is more integrated into the life of the universe. Each person's existence should be like a river – small at first, slowly shrinking at its banks, and rushing past rocks and over waterfalls. Little by little the river widens, the banks recede, the water flows quietly, and finally, without a visible break, it merges into the sea, and loses each person painlessly.
Echoing the philosopher and comedian Emily Levine's provocative reflections on confronting her own mortality with equanimity, Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who jointly established death as the organizing principle of modern life, and concludes:
A person, when he is old, can see his life in this way, he will not be afraid of death, since the things he cares about will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, fatigue increases, the thought of rest will not be unacceptable. I should wish to die while working, knowing that others will continue what I can no longer do and be content with the sense that what could have happened has happened.
Images from Memory and Other Essays it is an extraordinarily powerful package of wisdom in its entirety. Complete this piece with Nobel laureate André Gide on how happiness increases with age, Ursula K. Le Guin on aging and what beauty really means, and Grace Paley on the art of aging — the most interesting thing I've ever read on the subject — and then revisit Russell's deep thinking, power-knowledge vs. the knowledge of love, what is the meaning of one life, the importance of “one life” the importance of “one life”, the meaning of “good life” and his wonderful response to the outrage of Fascism.
