Old Age
- Author:
Simone de Beauvoir
Weidenfeld Andre Deutsch
…
In his sixty-fifth year George Sanders took his own life, leaving a note saying that he was bored. Writing in her sixty-fourth year, Simone de Beauvoir is determined that she, at any rate, will not be bored by old age.
This book is a tribute to her energy in researching the sociological, psychological and anthropological aspects of old age?historically and in the present day. Its length (over 500 pages) may however, bore some of her readers.
As in her novels and slices of autobiography, Mile de Beauvoir scatters her book with literary references culled from almost every century and country. She describes at great length the varying attitudes of societies in the past towards old age?but without being able to draw any major conclusions. She ventures?as usual?into the realm of theology, linking the dethronement of God the Father in Christian iconography with the Christian view of old age.
She gives some brilliant examples of old age being ‘the crown of life’? Michelangelo, Victor Hugo, Bertrand Russell, Cardinal Roncalli (Pope John XXIII)?showing in some cases the intellectual liberation said to be linked with advancing maturity.
The everyday problems of increasing decrepitude are as clearly pictured; ‘Decline and distrust beget not only insensitivity with regard to others in the old person, but also hostility. Age takes us by surprise and its sudden coming gives us an ill-defined feeling of injustice . . It is hardly surprising that, despite its erudition, the full impact of Mile de Beauvoir’s passionate pleas for the recognition of the reality of the state of old age is diluted by the wealth of inconclusive documentary evidence. But a passionate plea it remains?’We must stop cheating; the whole meaning of our life is in question in the future that is waiting for us. If we do not know what we are going to be, we cannot know what we are; let us recognise ourselves in this old man or in that old woman.’
Bridget E. Fann
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