A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in order to begin the continuous creative act of holding on while letting go.

This is not easy in a culture that fetishes youth, that clothes us in an invisibility cloak as life strips us of time. We could use all the help we can get — a psychological equivalent of what Eva Perón set out to do politically with her constitutional decalogue for the dignity of growing old. Here is the best help I have encountered over the years — a kind of decalogue for the constitution of the inner country.

JANE ELLEN HARRISON

The first thing one must do in this culture is refute the romanticizing of youth, recalibrate the value metrics of the self, and no one has done it more concisely and creatively than Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928) — one of the most daring and underappreciated intellects of the past century — in her altogether superb disquisition on youth and old age:

People ask: “Would you or would you not like to be young again?” Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible. You cannot be — you that are — young again. You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no “you” except your life — lived. But apart from that, when you rise from what somebody calls “the banquet of life,” flushed with the wine of life, can you want to sit down again? When you have climbed the hill, and the view is just breaking, do you want to reclimb it? A thousand times no! Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

At the dawn of her sixties — that threshold moment when people, women especially, first begin to feel the cold shoulder of society, the small cruelties of daily dismissal, the subtle intimations of irrelevance — Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) took up the question of what beauty really means as one grows older, cutting through the collagen of our cultural ideology to celebrate the most beautiful thing about growing older: how it anneals personhood, chiseling away the marble of personality to reveal the sculpture of the naked soul:

For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.

[…]

There’s something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.

Also well worth reading is Le Guin’s meditation on change, menopause as rebirth, and the civilizational value of elders

BERTRAND RUSSELL

In the first year of his eighties, already a Nobel laureate who had lived through two world wars, the polymathic philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) wrote a short essay about how to grow old, anchored in this life-magnifying advice:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

HENRY MILLER

Upon turning eighty, Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) set down everything he knew about growing old and the secret to remaining young at heart, his long reflection best distilled in this one short passage:

If you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power… If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Wading into her sixties, Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) looked ahead to old age in a passage of her memoir and offered her characteristically passionate yet unsentimental advice, largely to herself, as the best advice to others tends to be:

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 — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

JOAN DIDION

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934–December 23, 2021) was only thirty-four when, thinking about the value of keeping a notebook, she found herself shining a sidewise gleam on what may be the most important orientation we can have to ourselves as the years advance, the most important thing we can do to keep the arrow of time from becoming a deadly weapon of revisionism and regret:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch… keeping those lines open to ourselves.

NICK CAVE

Not long after offering a thirteen-year-old some excellent advice on how to grow up, Nick Cave, midway through his sixties, considered the two qualities cultivating which ensures that growing older is a broadening rather than a narrowing of life, a way of seeing the world with more nuance and moving through it with more tenderness:

The first is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

Although Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) never lived past middle age, he was born an old soul and saw clearly the rewards of life’s later years. His excellent lyric meditation on the art of becoming yourself across the arc of life is anchored in the hard-earned self-trust that steels you against the winds of circumstance:

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.

PABLO CASALS

Shortly after his ninety-third birthday, the legendary cellist Pablo Casals (December 29, 1876–October 22, 1973) reflected on his life, locating the key to contentment in never ceasing to work with love, to live awake to wonder:

If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

Continuing to practice and perform, Casals approached his daily routine as a microcosm of that orientation:

I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!

GRACE PALEY

At the sunset of her sixties, Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) took up the question of “upstaging time,” ending her magnificent meditation with the parting gift of life-changing advice she herself had received from her aging father:

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.”

In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. This is not a matter of denying reality — it is a matter of discovering a parallel reality where joy and hope are equally valid ways of being. To live there is to live enchanted with the underlying wonder of reality, beneath the frightful stories we tell ourselves and are told about it.

Having lost his mother to suicide, having lived through two World Wars, the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte (November 21, 1898–August 15, 1967) devoted his life and his art to creating such a parallel world of enchantment.

In a 1947 interview included in his Selected Writings (public library) — the first release of Magritte’s manifestos, interviews, and other prose in English, thanks to the heroic efforts of scholar Kathleen Rooney — he reflects:

Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy for the eyes and the mind. It is much easier to terrorize than to charm… I live in a very unpleasant world because of its routine ugliness. That’s why my painting is a battle, or rather a counter-offensive.

Magritte revisits the subject in his manifesto Surrealism in the Sunshine, indicting the cultural tyranny of pessimism and fear-mongering — a worldview we have been sold under the toxic premise that if we focus on the worst of reality, we are seeing it more clearly and would be prepared to protect ourselves from its devastations. A quarter century before the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm insisted that “pessimism [is] an alienated form of despair,” Magritte writes:

We think that if life is seen in a tragic light it is seen more clearly, and that we are then in touch with the mystery of existence. We even believe that we can reach objectivity thanks to this revelation. The greater the terror, the greater the objectivity.

This notion is the result of philosophies (materialist or idealist), that claim that the real world is knowable, that matter is of the same essence as mind, since the perfect mind would no longer be distinct from the matter it explains and would thus deny it. The man on the street is unknowingly in harmony with this idea: he thinks there is a mystery, he thinks he must live and suffer and that the very meaning of life is that it is a dream-nightmare.

In his art and the worldview from which it springs, Magritte presents an antidote to this warped thinking — a backdoor out of our elective suffering. An epoch before we began to understand the neurophysiology of enchantment, he echoes his contemporary Egon Schiele’s exhortation to “envy those who see beauty in everything in the world,” and writes:

Our mental universe (which contains all we know, feel or are afraid of in the real world we live in) may be enchanting, happy, tragic, comic, etc.

We are capable of transforming it and giving it a charm which makes life more valuable. More valuable since life becomes more joyful, thanks to the extraordinary effort needed to create this charm.

Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is “the truth”, that this terror is knowledge of the “extra-mental” world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.

Creating enchantment is an effective means of counteracting this depressing, banal habit.

[…]

We must go in search of enchantment.

Complement with Viktor Frankl on saying “yes” to life in spite of everything and Walt Whitman on optimism as a force of resistance, then revisit Rebecca Solnit on hope in dark times.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed by a full stop to demarcate the terminus of life. It hovers there, so sure of itself, this punctuational emblem of an irrevocable end. And yet the surety of science about what happens when we die, like the surety of religion, is only speculative, for it is conceived by the living. Whitman — who often walked Green-Wood — knew this when he wrote that “to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Over and over we have mistaken our suppositions for sureties when both intellectual honesty and spiritual courage demand we concede that death is not a period but a question mark.

Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961) was only twenty and newly enrolled in medical school when he came to see death as a way of understanding life: His father, who had died six weeks earlier, appeared to him in a dream, announcing that he would be returning home after a holiday. Struck by how real the dream felt, Jung began devising a psychological cosmogony of death that would take him half a lifetime to formulate, its crux best articulated in his 1929 commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life:

Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life… For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal.

Five years later, Jung developed these ideas in his most intellectually elegant essay, titled “Death and the Soul” and included in Jenny Yates’s altogether magnificent anthology Jung on Death and Immortality (public library). Developing the idea that “life strives towards a goal and is determined by an aim,” he wrote:

The question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent or more agonizing than when we see the final breath leave a body which a moment before was living.

[…]

Life is an energy-process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. In the long run everything that happens is, as it were, no more than the initial disturbance of a perpetual state of rest which forever attempts to re-establish itself.

This perspective, Jung realized, is not one our consciousness readily takes, for it requires a counterintuitive understanding of the substance we are made of — time. It was his encounter with Einstein — the two dined together in the early days of relativity — that allowed Jung to violate his own creaturely intuitions in order to conceive of death not as the endpoint of a line across the Euclidean space of being but as a curve following the curvature of spacetime itself: eternity as a field in which all directions are relative. Einstein’s great revelation was that space and time are one, that spacetime tells matter how to move and matter ballasted by gravity tells spacetime how to bend. At the heart of Jung’s conception is the intimation that consciousness bends spacetime one way and we call it life, bends it another and we call it death, while the energy that does the bending remains inexorable. The question of where life goes when it goes, like the question of where love goes when it goes, may be a question not of termination but of transmutation.

Jung captured this idea in his response to a pastor who recounted having had a conversation with his brother at the time of his death, even though they were separated by a continent:

It is very probable that only what we call consciousness is contained in space and time, and that the rest of the psyche, the unconscious, exists in a state of relative spacelessness and timelessness. For the psyche this means a relative eternality and a relative non-separation from other psyches, or a oneness with them.

Recognizing that “no one knows what ‘psyche’ is, and one knows just as little how far into nature ‘psyche’ extends,” he observed:

It would seem to be more in accord with the collective psyche of humanity to regard death as the fulfillment of life’s meaning and as its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation. Anyone who cherishes a rationalistic opinion on this score has isolated himself psychologically and stands opposed to his own basic human nature.

Just as Jung was finishing “The Soul and Death,” his sister died. He coped by writing a psychological analysis of The Tibetan Book of the Dead — an ancient instruction for shedding karmic illusions, which Jung likened to psychological complexes, drawing a parallel between the Buddhist notion of enlightenment and the aim of psychiatry: withdrawing our psychological projections in order to see clearly. Our conception of death, he argued, is a projection of our own hopes and fears — the core complexes that govern our lives — lensed through our creaturely intuitions about space and time, intuitions that have regularly misled us about the realities of nature, from the shape of the Earth to the centricity of the Solar System.

Jung collided with his own creaturely intuitions when, in the fourth winter of the world’s deadliest war, he had a near-death experience himself: His heart stopped, then, miraculously, restarted. In the wake of the heart attack he wasn’t meant to survive, he wrote in a letter:

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it… The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.

A year later, he was still thinking about it, about the “glimpse behind the veil” it had afforded him, writing in another letter:

Whatever you do, if you do it sincerely, will eventually become the bridge to your wholeness, a good ship that carries you through the darkness of your second birth, which seems to be death to the outside.

Central to his thinking was the concept of synchronicity — the meaningful alignment of two events in space and time — which he had co-invented with his onetime patient Wolfgang Pauli shortly after the physicist was awarded the Nobel Prize. Decades later, in a letter penned as he himself was approaching death, Jung would insist that we must not rule out “the possibility that there is an existence outside time which runs parallel with existence inside time,” intimating that life is simply the alignment of consciousness and time, but the unconscious could exist on another temporal plane. Beneath the seeming self-contradiction — there are no parallels in curved spacetime — was Jung’s insistence that curves, not parallels, are the best way to understand death by understanding life. A century and a half after the forgotten visionary Elizabeth Peabody offered her abiding wisdom on middle age and the art of self-renewal, and half a century before Ursula K. Le Guin penned her magnificent meditation on menopause as rebirth, Jung wrote in “Death and the Soul”:

The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose. The psychological curve of life, however, refuses to conform to this law of nature… From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve.

Couple with Annie Dillard on how to bear your mortality, then let this spare, stunning poem teach you how to live and how to die.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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“An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls… A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.”

There is a form of being together that feels as easy and spacious as being alone, when your experience is not crowded out or eclipsed by the presence of the other but deepened and magnified. Such companionship is extremely rare and extremely precious. All other company, no matter how dear, inevitably reaches a saturation point and begins to suffocate. If one is an introvert, that point comes sooner and more violently. A return to solitude then becomes nothing less than a rapture.

Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) channels this ecstatic relief with great charm and poetic passion in a piece from Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library) — her 1935 collection of reflections kindred to, and a century ahead of, poet Ross Gay’s wonderful Book of Delights.

Despite publishing twenty-two books in twenty years, alongside numerous essays, poems, and newspaper columns — prolificacy only possible through the deepest and most undistracted solitude, haunted by Susan Sontag’s lament that “one can never be alone enough to write” — Macaulay was no hermit. She gave talks, attended events, threw parties, and appeared frequently on public radio to offer incisive commentary on the state of the world. During WWI, she worked as a nurse and a civil servant. During WWII, like Marie Curie a war earlier, she became a volunteer ambulance driver at the age of sixty. She regularly wrote to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary — her favorite book — with suggestions, corrections, and improvements. (“To amend so great a work gives me pleasure,” she writes in one of these essays on life’s littlest and deepest joys.) When her flat was demolished in the Blitz, all her books destroyed, it was the dictionary volumes she most mourned. When she rebuilt her home, she continued hosting friends for salons and soirees.

But despite her surface sociality, Macaulay embodied the true test of an introvert — not whether one engages in social activity, but whether one is charged or drained by it. In an essay titled “Departure of Visitors,” she exults in the pleasure of being at last left alone:

An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.

[…]

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.

What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.

Paradoxically, even Macaulay’s muse was a visitor from whom she eventually needed a break. In another essay, she offers a strikingly similar inner response to finishing a book — that moment when, upon setting down the last word on the last page, the mind becomes uncrowded again. She writes:

Leisure spreads before my dazzled eyes, a halcyon sea, too soon to be cumbered with the flotsam and jetsam of purposes long neglected, which will, I know it, drift quickly into view again once I am embarked upon that treacherous, enticing ocean. Leisure now is but a brief business, and past return are the days when it seemed to stretch, blue and unencumbered, between one occupation and the next. There are always arrears, always things undone, doubtless never to be done, putting up teasing, reproachful heads, so that, although I slug, I slug among the wretched souls whom care doth seek to kill. But now, just emerged as I am from the tangled and laborious thicket which has so long embosked me, I will contemplate a sweet and unencumbered slugging, a leisure and a liberty as of lotus eaters or gods.

Couple with May Sarton’s stunning ode to the art of being alone from the era of Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures, then revisit Olivia Laing on the modern art of being alone amid the crowd and Stephen Batchelor’s field guide to glad solitude.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

newsletter

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.