The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Jane Ellen Harrison
13 min read
The article extensively quotes Harrison (1850-1928), described as 'one of the most daring and underappreciated intellects of the past century.' She was a pioneering classical scholar and feminist who revolutionized the study of ancient Greek religion. Most readers likely don't know her work despite her significant contributions.
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Eva Perón
13 min read
The article references Eva Perón's 'constitutional decalogue for the dignity of growing old' - her lesser-known political work on elder rights in 1940s Argentina. While readers may know her as a political figure, her specific advocacy for older people's dignity and constitutional protections is historically significant but rarely discussed.
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Simone de Beauvoir
15 min read
The article quotes extensively from de Beauvoir's reflections on aging from her memoir. While she's known for 'The Second Sex,' her profound work on aging - particularly 'The Coming of Age' (La Vieillesse) - challenged societal attitudes toward older people and remains deeply relevant to the article's themes.
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 ...
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