Originally Posted: December 17, 2016
‘Tis the season for well-meaning younger people to offer advice to elders who, they fear, are sad or uninterested in the holidays.
The blog Senior Care Corner claims that one geriatric specialist, worrying about senior depression, said, “I wish they would cancel December.”
True, the winter holidays may bring memories to elders of earlier, maybe happier — at least, more boisterous — times. And we who have lost someone we shared the holidays with may need to give expression to the empty space in our lives.
But as an alternative to unsolicited advice — eat and drink moderately at parties, catch another screening of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” drive around (or, preferably, get driven around) neighborhood light shows — how about immersing ourselves in our stage of life? To do this, we might skim or read every word of four new books written just for us.
I came to know about three of the four books because the Berkshires is age friendly. Retailers and service providers keep in mind that we elders form the only growing age group in the county, so they got the word out about these titles. See you at a bookseller or, in the case of Nos. 2-4, at the library.
1. “How to Grow Old: Ancient Wisdom for the Second Half of Life” by Marcus Tullius Cicero (Princeton University Press, 2016, 216 pages).
Originally published in 44 BC, when Cicero was 62, the 2016 version got a thumbs-up by Matt Tannenbaum on WAMC’s Roundtable. Tannenbaum has been owner of The Bookstore in Lenox for almost 41 years (yes, he’s 70).
The translator, professor of classics Philip Freeman, says in his foreword, “While acknowledging [old age’s] limitations, Cicero sought to demonstrate that the later years could be embraced as an opportunity for growth and completeness at the end of a life well lived.”
According to the current publisher, the 16th-century essayist Montaigne credited Cicero’s book with giving one “an appetite for growing old;” John Adams (1735-1826) “read it repeatedly in his later years.”
We have it easier: we can now read Cicero’s advice in English — although the Latin appears on every facing page.
2. “Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide” by Michael Kinsley (Tim Duggan Books, 2016, 160 pages).
Political journalist Kinsley, now 65, claims he entered old age at 43, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. That development gave him a preview of what we who have been spared his fate get to experience in later decades.
Reviewers see the book as Kinsley’s talking back to the disease while focusing on what he still does very well. The New York Times calls it a “generational cri de coeur,” and the Washington Post labels it “often wickedly funny.” Reviewers split on Kinsley’s end-of-book suggestion to give back to the future. Some readers appreciate the suggestion; others don’t.
The book’s foreword is by the younger financial journalist Michael Lewis, only 56.
3. “Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead” by Willard Spiegelman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, 208 pages).
This essay collection is another recommendation from The Bookstore in Lenox. Colin Harrington, events manager, reviewed the book for the Eagle in November, calling it “an affirmation of life as we get older.” That life, by the way, gets quieter, observes Spiegelman, 70, professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He’s also a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and eight years ago modeled for a fashion story in the New York Times Magazine.
The writer has his own connection to the Berkshires: in 2003-04, he worked undisturbed for several months in poet Amy Clampitt’s former home in Stockbridge. (Clampitt, whose first book of poems appeared when she was 63, became a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992.) Come spring 2017, look for the announcement of when Spiegelman will read from “Senior Moments” at The Bookstore. READ THE FULL LIST