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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewHelen Small, The Long Life The Long Life. Helen Small. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. viii+346.Amelie RortyAmelie RortyHarvard Medical School and Boston University Search for more articles by this author Harvard Medical School and Boston UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHelen Small has written a remarkable book, one that calls on philosophers, biologists, sociologists, novelists, and poets to attest to what age and aging brings to our understanding of the human condition. Approaching this most difficult subject without fear or sentimentality, she shows that our multiple and conflicting attitudes to age—to how we experience and understand its hopes and fears, its blessings and miseries—reflect our conceptions/fantasies of what it is to live long and well, to be a fully human and humane person in a just society.The range and the precision of Small's knowledge is extraordinary, encompassing philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Simone de Beauvoir, Derek Parfit, Norman Daniels, and—the real hero of her book—Bernard Williams. Unlike so many scholars, Helen Small does not drop names or contort authors' views to serve her own agenda. Her detailed analyses of philosophical arguments and her sensitive readings of Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, and Saul Bellow make one wish that one were an undergraduate learning to read difficult texts under her tutelage. Her perceptive reflections on the novels of Samuel Beckett, Philip Roth, and Michael Ignatieff show how our fears of dementia and Alzheimer's have absorbed the lifelong nightmare terrors of abandonment and mute isolation. Balanced with these literary explorations of the diseases of age are lucid and illuminating accounts of the biological and social sciences of aging, gerontology, geriatric medicine, and evolutionary theories of senescence. Small engages all her “witnesses,” weighing and evaluating their views with the straightforward clarity and exactitude of a friendly colleague. For all her astonishing erudition, there is nothing showy or flamboyant in her approach: she offers good, clean, honest prose to investigate one of the most significant, difficult, and strangely neglected subjects that concern the way we face and form the trajectories of our lives.With few exceptions, it is as if the denial of age that now affects most of us as individuals has also infected our cultural heritage. While a few philosophers and many novelists and poets have thought about what it is like to be old, and to be treated as old, very few have reflected on the place of age within the whole of a long life. Many elevating tracts have been written about the virtues of the elderly; many satires have been written about their foibles. But by and large they have been set apart, not only as living through a distinctive stage of life, but one that is different in kind, as enlarged or diminished examples of the species. Small has brought living a long life out of the shadows, showing how the dreams of youth and the responsibilities of maturity already reflect our expectations of age, whether we think being old is a curse or a culmination or, more likely, both. She demonstrates how our ordinary terms and criteria for respect and self-respect frame our attitudes to age, and how, in turn, our fantasies of age infuse our directions and energies of youth and middle age. And of course, these matters are not up to us: it is not as if, once our eyes had been opened to the “truth of the matter,” we could will our attitudes forthwith just like that. They—those attitudes, judgments, hopes, and fears—are built into our language, reinforced by every encounter and every image and book.In this superbly crafted study, Small has uncovered, analyzed, and evaluated the wide ambivalences of the founding texts, the substantive and constitutive texts that are embedded in our responses to the elderly—and to ourselves as we gradually recognize/imagine the processes of aging in ourselves. We see ourselves through the farces of the Decameron, the tender biographies of Iris Murdoch, the pathos of age in Balzac's novels, the poems of W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Our sense of ourselves and our children's sense of us are centrally affected by the policies regulating the (presumably) just distribution of medical care for the diseases of age, by laws governing the calculations of insurance companies, and by the subtle and omnipresent formative images of the advertising industry.With consummate critical tact, The Long Life traces the sources of our ambivalence to aging. Our attitudes toward age reveal our attitudes to what we consider essential to our identities, as individuals and as a species. We might have asked: Doesn't such ambivalence also pervade our thoughts of youth, friendship, marriage, and parenthood? Aren't these also set apart, with the formative images and expectations of luminal transitional rituals? Doesn't ambivalence attend the multifaceted character of our existence? There is, perhaps, this difference: we ourselves choose friendship, marriage, and parenthood, but old age is thrust upon us. And then, too, mention very old age, and you conjure up death and the many faces of nonexistence, the ultimate subject of denial among us. Our fears—and the relieved welcome—of death is the least of it.Since Small has given us an exceptionally rich and trustworthy book, a model for disciplined, multidisciplinary work, it seems churlish to wish for more. Perhaps we may hope that an anthropologist would write a complementary volume, calling on the resources of Chinese and Indian literature and medicine, on the images and practices of age—on the shapes and narratives of lives—in other cultures. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 1August 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/660270 Views: 19Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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