{"id":217741,"date":"2022-08-22T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2022-08-22T11:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=217741"},"modified":"2022-08-08T03:23:07","modified_gmt":"2022-08-08T02:23:07","slug":"how-to-keep-life-from-becoming-a-parody-of-itself-simone-de-beauvoir-on-the-art-of-growing-older","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/08\/how-to-keep-life-from-becoming-a-parody-of-itself-simone-de-beauvoir-on-the-art-of-growing-older\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cIn old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege \u2014 one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\u201cFor old people,\u201d Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means<\/a>, \u201cbeauty doesn\u2019t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young\u2026 It has to do with who the person is.\u201d Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty<\/a>, located the triumph in remaining able to \u201cfall in love again and again\u2026 forgive as well as forget\u2026 keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.\u201d Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older<\/a>: \u201cThe main thing is this \u2014 when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Life is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves \u2014 our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses \u2014 along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir<\/strong> (January 9, 1908\u2013April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse<\/em>, published in England as Old Age<\/em> and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"\"
Simone de Beauvoir by Barbara Klemm. (St\u00e4del Museum<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are<\/a>, De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a \u201csemi-death.\u201d With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:<\/p>\n

Old age is not a necessary end to human life.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

A particular value has sometimes been given to old age for social or political reasons. For some individuals \u2014 women in ancient China, for instance \u2014 it has been a refuge against the harshness of life in adult years. Others, from a pessimistic general outlook on life, settle comfortably into it\u2026 The vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.<\/p>\n

And indeed, it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life\u2019s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Only one thing can keep the final chapter of life from becoming a parody of itself. Growing old, she cautions, is not a project \u2014 not something one can endeavor to do industriously, to ace. It is a fact \u2014 something to be met on its own terms, something for which we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to control for surrender<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

Growing, ripening, aging, dying \u2014 the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.<\/p>\n

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning \u2014 devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work\u2026 In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One\u2019s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Bertrand Russell on how to grow old<\/a> and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years<\/a>, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the ultimate frontier of hope<\/a> and the artist\u2019s task to liberate the present from the past<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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