Peripheral Vision: Are the Grown-Ups leaving us?

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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Are the Grown-Ups leaving us?

I readily confess that one of the first things I turn to these days in The Guardian after the main news items are the Obituaries pages which, as the paper puts it, “traditionally describe and celebrate the lives of the great and good, the famous and infamous”.

But The Guardian has a very nice additional feature – “Other Lives” – to which members of public write in order to honour

“another type of life that deserves noticing: people less in the public eye, or lives lived beyond formal recognition”

My own father was such a person whom I celebrated a decade ago

Despite its rather sexist title, Britain is no Country for Old Men is one these rare sites which is generous in its praise of people doing remarkable work. And not just when they have died. – which is all too often the only time we publicly recognise good works

A poignant article sparked off by John le Carre’s death has me musing about how well we prepare for our mortality. Freedland’s own father had died a couple of years’ earlier (in his mid 8os) and he wondered whether that was a factor in the strength of his reaction to the news of le Carre’s passing. The article finishes by referring to a feeling I’ve long had – that

“we will have to face the future alone, without these older, wiser minds around to light the way….The grownups are leaving, one by one. From now on, it’s only us – guided by the lessons they taught us and the memories they left behind. And comforted by the thought that, perhaps, they once felt exactly the same way”.

The author is 57 and belongs, therefore, to the generation previous to mine (for what it’s worth I was 26 in 1968). The article's last sentence raises the very good question of nostalgia – for example are politicians the pygmies they are currently made out to be? Or do we judge them in less deferential ways – because of increased education, transparency and expectations??

We are certainly much more aware of our fragilities and vulnerabilities these days – not just as individuals but as a species. So perhaps it’s time to offer again a table I put up in 2019 – a brief overview of books about the approach of death

Books about Ageing and the approach of Death

Title	Year	Genre	Comment	Links
The American Way of Death; Jessica Mitford	1963	journalism	Analysis of the crematorium business	Her updated version of 1996 can be read in full here
On Death and Dying; Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross click to get the entire book	1969	psychology	The book that gave us the “five stages of grief”	This extended interview with the author is quite superb
The Coming of Age; Simone de Beauvoir	1970 French version	Breaks all disciplinary barriers!	The classic	Excerpts available on this Amazon version
The Denial of Death; Ernest Becker	1973	Cultural anthropology	A “psycho-philosophical synthesis” – all 330 pages	Hyperlink on title gives full book
The Loneliness of The Dying by Norbert Elias	1985	sociology	A short rather general book by an underrated Anglo-German	Note on his life and work. Click title for full book
The End of Age – BBC Reith Lectures by Tom Kirkwood	2001	Gerontology	Link on the title gives podcasts	Recent book review by Tom Kirkwood
Ammonites and Leaping Fish – a Life in Time Penelope Lively	2003	Memoir	Interview here	First chapter can be read in summary form here
Nothing to be Frightened Of; Julian Barnes	2007	Extended essay	Good on references	A rather gentle way into the subject nicely reviewed here
Somewhere Towards the End; Diana Athill	2008	Memoir	Marvellous writer covers latter stages of a long life	Click the title for the entire book
The Long Life; Helen Small	2007	Literary	Written by a Professor of English language and literature	Compendium of writing about ageing over 2000 years. A good review here
You’re Looking very well – the surprising nature of getting old; Lewis Wolpert	2011	Popular science	Professor of Biology Age 80 when he wrote it Good interviews here and here	got stick from this reviewer for having too many facts and quotations and insufficient analysis
“Immortality: the Quest to Live For Ever and How It Drives Civilisation” Stephen Cave	2012	philosophy	Philosopher who knows how to tell a great tale	Click on title for full book good review here
Out of Time – the Pleasures and Perils of Ageing; Lynne Segal	2013	sociology	Almost an update of de Beauvoir!	Good review here
Being Mortal – illness, medicine and what matters in the end; by Atul Gawande	2015	Reflective medical	a very literate and humane American surgeon,	See comments in Intimations of Mortality and Facing up to our Mortality
Growing Old – the last Campaign; Des Wilson	2014	Humour	was the most famous British campaigner of the second half of the century.
The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life; Raymond Tallis	2015	philosophy	retired British gerontologist, poet and polymath	See this Spiked Online review
The Worm at the Core: on the Role of Death in Life; by S Solomon, J Greenberg and T Pyszczynski	2015	psychology	American psychologists update and popularise Becker’s thesis about our repression of death	see this interview British philosopher John Gray reviewed
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematorium” Caitlin Doughty	2015	journalism		Review here
My Father’s Wake – how the Irish Teach us to Live, Love and Die; Kevin Toolis	2017	journalism	Poetic but doesn’t deal with issues
With the end in mind – dying, death and wisdom in an age of denial; K Mannix	2017	medical	A “palliative” doctor profiles in depth her patients	A review here
The Way we Die Now; Seamus O’Mahony	2017	medical	A Consultant “Gastroenterologist”