parody of life
wonder | wander | world is immersed in a deepening all-encompassing cycle of life and death. As our elders live bonus years in their 90s and 80s we celebrate our 60+ and 40+ birthdays. Multi generations in life’s second, third, and fourth acts.
Our culture dreads the inevitability of aging — treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetized in botox and silence — forgetting that growing old is a tremendous privilege not given to most.
Battling imposed external ageism obsessions with cosmetics and cosmetic surgery come by what scholar Kathleen Woodward calls “the youthful structure of the look” — a harsh gaze that turns the old into The Other.
The aged are subject to a “stigmatizing social judgment, made worse by our internalization of it.” Ram Dass summarized the condition by saying we live in “a very cruel culture” — an “aging society…. with a youth mythology.”
Simone de Beauvoir movingly describes conditions that were briefly evident in the media during the worst of the pandemic — the isolation, fear, and marginalization that older people face, especially those without means.
“The presence of money cannot always alleviate” the pains of aging, wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in her 1972 review of de Beauvoir’s book in translation. “Its absence is a certain catastrophe.”
The problem, de Beauvoir pointed out, is that old age is almost synonymous with poverty. The elderly deemed unproductive, unprofitable, a burden on the state and family.
“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young…. It has to do with who the person is.”
Only one thing can keep the final chapter of life from becoming a parody of itself. Growing old, de Beauvoir cautions, is not a project — not something one can endeavor to do industriously to ace.
Rather it is something to be met on its own terms — something for which we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to surrender. To become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life.
Don’t just pass through, drawing each breath, not being present. Instead value each moment and let it take our breath away!
Originally published at http://woaworld.blogspot.com.
