Image by National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons
Advice on aging often comes from mundane or unrelatable sources, so it’s safe to ignore it. Public health officials offering wisdom may have good intentions. Pharmaceutical companies that do the same may not. In either case, the message arrives in a form that can bring about the despair you are trying to avoid. In bright photographs, elderly people are seen strolling along garden paths, ballroom dancing, and doing yoga. Bulleted lists separated by dry quotes provide gently worded guidelines for wise living. Bland calm is a prescription for living well.
At the other end of the spectrum are the exceptional cases, the profiles of relatively enlightened individuals across the century. Their stories rarely match the model of abstinence imposed on us by experts. But we know that aging with dignity requires more than diet, exercise, or surviving to age 102. It requires us to face death the same way we face life. It takes a writer with depth, sensitivity, and eloquence to convey this message. Bertrand Russell says exactly that in his essay.how to grow old” was written when the philosopher was 81 years old (16 years before he eventually died at 97).
Russell is not pandering to the rationalist vanity of his readers by citing the latest science. “I have nothing useful to say about my health…I eat and drink what I like, and when I can’t stay awake, I sleep,” he writes. (Perhaps we are inclined to trust him for these reasons alone.) He begins with a wryly humorous exhortation to “choose your ancestors well,” before offering advice against dwelling on the past or becoming a burden to your children.
But the real kernel is his short essay, He says that the “proper recipe for staying young” came to him from the example of his maternal grandmother, who was obsessed with life. “I don’t think she had time to realize that she was getting older.” “If you have a wide range of passionate interests and activities, you can still be effective,” Russell writes. “You will no longer have to think about the mere statistical fact of how many years you have lived, much less the possibility that your future will be shortened.”
Such interests should be “impersonal,” he argues, and it is this quality that loosens our grip. As Maria Popova says, “Russell puts the dissolution of the individual ego into something greater at the heart of a fulfilling life.” This idea is well known. In Russell’s hands, it’s as timely a meditation on mortality as any oft-quoted passage from Donne’s book.Meditation XVII” Philosopher and author John G. Messary calls Russell’s concluding passage “one of the most beautiful reflections on death I have found in world literature.”
the best way to overcome it [the fear of death]— at least that’s how it seems to me — it’s about gradually broadening your interests and making them more impersonal until little by little the walls of your ego recede and your life becomes more and more integrated into the life of the universe. The existence of each human being should be like a river. Small at first, nestled tightly against the shore, they flow passionately over rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river widens, the embankments recede, the water flows more quietly, and finally merges into the sea without visible breaks, painlessly losing its individual existence. People who are able to view their lives in this way even after old age will not be troubled by the fear of death because they will continue to do what they value. And even if you start to feel more tired as your energy levels decline, it’s not unwelcome to consider taking a break. I should like to die while still working, knowing that others will take over what I can no longer do, and be content to think that I did what was possible.
read russell’s book Click here for the full text of “How to raise the elderly”. Also, check out more eloquent musings on aging and death by Henry Miller, Andre Gide, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Grace Paley. marginalian.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on the site in 2018.
Related content:
Bertrand Russell’s advice to people living 1,000 years from now: “Love is wise, hate is foolish.”
Bertrand Russell: The everyday benefit of philosophy is that it helps us live with uncertainty
Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of finding meaning in old age
We only get old as much as we feel: Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer shows how mental attitude can reverse the effects of aging
josh jones I’m a writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
