We live in a culture that fears the entropic insecurity of aging, treats it as a disease to be treated with supplements and drugs, we kill it with botox and in silence, somehow forgetting that aging is a very great privilege – reserved for most of the people who fill the history of our potential species (to say nothing of the history of our young species).
“In older people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty is not found free of hormones, the way it is in younger people… It has to do with who you are.” Another way to say this, to hear it, is that being a person who deserves to grow old is a victory for life. Henry Miller, in his eightieth reflection, found victory in continuing to be able to “love again and again… forgive and forget… not grow bitter, angry, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley gave what remains the best advice on the art of growing up: “The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you have to take your heart in both hands. You have to do this every morning.”
Life is mostly a matter of how we hold ourselves – our hearts, our fears, our forgiveness – over the course of the years. Almost no one has provided a better and stronger grip protection Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in his 1970 book La vieillespublished in England as Getting old and in America as usual traditionally Coming of Age (public library).
Two years before considering how chance and choice combine to make us who we are, De Beauvoir observes that modern Western culture champions old age as a “little death.” From the point of view of the biological right to age, he writes:
Aging is not a necessary end to human life.
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Some value has sometimes been given to aging for social or political reasons. For some people – women in ancient China, for example – it was a refuge from the hardships of life in adulthood. Others, with a generally pessimistic view of life, settle comfortably into it… Most of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with a hatred greater than death itself.
And indeed, it is aging, rather than death, that should be compared to life. Aging is the game of life, while death turns life into an end: in a way it preserves you by giving you absolute greatness.
Only one thing can keep the last chapter of life from being a parody of itself. Aging, he warns, is not a project – not something one can try to do with effort, confidence. It's true – something that has to be faced in itself, something that we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to control surrender.
You write:
Growing up, maturing, aging, dying – the passage of time is predetermined, inevitable.
There is only one solution if old age is not a meaningless story of our past life, and that is to continue pursuing the goals that give our existence meaning—dedication to individuals, groups or causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we must wish to still have passions strong enough to prevent us from being accountable. Human life is beneficial as long as a person shows the value of life to others, with love, friendship, anger, compassion.
Train Bertrand Russell on how to grow old and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the last frontier of hope and the artist's task of liberating the present from the past.
