Letters to the Editor
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Very depressing...
This article was so depressing...the giving up or giving in syndrome...
I am 50 and have been able to find contentment and serenity only in the past 7-10 years...before that, an emotional mess..At 50, my back and knees hurt and my body is softer than it once was, but I can in no way relate that age doesn't beget wisdom..in my case, it certainly has.
My only regret is that it didn't come sooner.
MA
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60 is the new 40
And I think that really says it all, for me at least, and anyone else who would have it that way. Go out and play!
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Anti boomer voices!!
There is a toxic anti boomer voice that is rather comic. Who is so hateful of the boomers and why? Gee, Mr/Ms. non boomer are you jealous cause our music was better? Are you jealous cause you never invented new clothes? Are you jealous cause there were not as many of you in your generation? Are you jealous cause we did all kinds of things with few severe consequences, particularly sex? We made your youth way more fun than it could have been if we did not go around being such smart alecs.
Leave us alone. We are old and getting older. We will make a better path to your old age as well. You will get better food in the retirement home. You will have more choices on how to retire.
Remember like my father used to say about the boomers (a clever old Greek guy that he was)"you guys think you invented the female orgasm, homosexuality and drugs". So, let us have our delusions into old age. What did your generation invent? MySpace?
TO Gary and the other Boomers: Yes, old age happens. We did not invent it like we think we invented child birth, parental angst, etc...etc..etc. Guess what, death also happens. Every life event is not epiphanic, it's friggin life.
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Re: football
"what is the most important thing?" Hint, it's not football ;-)
Right. It's hockey.
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Accepting mortality
"I can't help but wonder what a different world this would be if Americans TRULY accepted their own mortality at 10, or 20...rather than waiting until 50 to struggle with a notion incongruent to their culture."
I suspect that if Americans could truly accept their own mortality and, as important, that of others, they would be far less likely to instigate wars and drop bombs on people around the world.
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Because I Do Not Hope To Turn Again...
It's certainly instructive to compare today's "mid-life crisis" with Dante's "dark wood" or the "dark night of the soul" of St. John of the Cross, and to see how far we have come since then. Kamiya recognizes that there's a deep spiritual disconnect in today's culture around issues of aging which comes across in our endless affairs of vanity and denial (the immortality industry, etc.) but he can't quite put his finger on what's behind it. Why does our modern society lack understanding about the most basic truths of life and death? What gives us the illusion that we could have complete control over our passage through life, including its end date? Kamiya seeks consolation in the imaginative spirit of literature and religion, but can't quite bring himself to take the risk of accepting it. Instead he hesitates over whether religion is a "fairy tale" and a "childish consolation" or something that "restores the tragic sense of life" before dismissing religion for personal reasons he prefers not to speak of: "For many of us, God isn't an option." Yet without faith of any kind, it is exceedingly difficult to execute the turn which Kamiya recognizes, to his credit, as absolutely necessary. And this is the turn towards freedom. There is a kind of exhilaration in aging as old preoccupations fall away, leaving behind only the sheer satisfaction of life itself, of experience brought to its deepest fulfillment. Kamiya reaches towards this when he writes about the comedic nature of aging, the hilarity that ensues when one realizes there is nothing left to lose. Such joyful moments can also lead to a place of serenity and acceptance, which is the subject of Eliot's Ash Wednesday. Kamiya's failure to understand this poem (he writes of the "terrible line" that opens the poem) is suggestive of his deeper unwillingness to engage with matters of faith. What Eliot discovered through this poem was the liturgical structure of time, its ceaseless ebb and flow, its strange exceeding of limits, concepts, best-laid plans, and above all, its eternal return to origins, its endless flowing forth from eternity in the form of the primal spirit of nature. If religion and the arts are a cultivation of this wildness, then they can also lead us back towards it, can open up the way into it which is also our way forward in the world. I have a feeling that what Kamiya really is seeking isn't the contradiction of a hopefulness without hope but rather a way beyond the bureaucracy and marketing which consumes every inch of our lives and promises false hope for our own deepest fears. The real problem with aging and death in our society is our insistence on thinking of ourselves as agents of consumption, and the answer is to realize once again that we are agents of creativity, of life, and of love.
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Song of the Sixties
The article put me in mind of a song I used to hear on WCLV, on a show called "Saturday Night", which went
"To grow old is to change
And to change is to be new
To be new is to be young again . . ."
I recite it to myself periodically, especially when I note that life has become increasingly defined by the physical issues it poses, and which have less and less space between them.
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a little too sentimental, but OK
The emphasis on taking comedy from from tragedy, or from the inevitable, or from... everything, redeemed the shortcomings in the article.
And the shortcoming was the over-the-top sentimentality. The endless musings on coping with middle age have begun to wear thin. Like the deluge of self-help books in the mid 90s.
Also, the author seemed to emphasize a passive acceptance of decay as the heroic path, while mocking those that resist physical and/or mental decline. Here, I couldn't disagree more.
That is all.