Active. Healthy. Positive. Productive. Successful. These adjectives and more, have all been planted in front of the word ageing to express or define some of our contemporary, forward outlooks or models on how the process of ageing could be better lived. Sometimes words are flipped and we can be found to be successful or positive people if we – “age gracefully” or too, “age fearlessly”.
Self-identity with any of these projections is certainly not universal, and the terms are often espoused by those who may be seen by others as the better advantaged, like the fifty-plus lifestyle coaches, or those faces captured in sporty ageing images in a media-sprayed western world culture. Fearless may be easy for you, but what about me – is another question at the far end of the attitude spectrum, where for some, their own ageist view of themselves is the challenge.
In this second review of the 2020 book Literature and Ageing, a set of essays and studies edited by Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen, I land on the second essay by Helen Small. Titled “On Not Knowing How to Feel”, here Small discusses the notion of positive ageing, our attitudes and self-perceptions, and how it counters with, as she describes, “…the general social picture of late life, made visible in statistical data from the social and medical sciences…”
Reading this essay more than once, while musing curiously about one generation’s (one in which I am included) almost incessant talking about ageing, I did gain an appreciation of the fact that in spite of all our sporty ageing images generated over the last twenty years, we all find some trial in having a realistic conversation about ageing that doesn’t snip at the fringes of ageism.
Helen Small speaks to the positive ageing movement in gerontology and to the writing about old age in the humanities “especially dominant in literary and cultural studies and in creative arts today”. There is, she says, “an obvious cultural rationale: a corrective offered to ageism; welcome encouragement for personal optimism.”
While that may be optimism it is not always enough of a corrective. As you read through the essay much ado about ageing bubbles to the surface, which invariably latches you on to the not knowing how to feel, notably as you encounter the aspects of ageing such as difference in gender experience, the role of caring, dementia and our path nearing to death.
One of the philosopher writers that Small carries through in her essay is Mary Mothersill, Canadian born, 1923, the same year as my mother as it goes. Mothersill’s 1998 speech to the American Philosophical Association titled Old Age in particular grabs attention. Reading the Mothersill speech after this essay, as I did, will help you to see why, as she trots out her questioning insights around what she sees as the dilemma between the old and new gerontology thinking.
Though some twenty-plus years ago since it was written, Mothersill’s speech, I would agree with Helen Small, still serves as a milepost for discussion on ageing which in many ways reveals today the same struggle with views on growing older that we’ve lugged along in our heads for years.
As Mothersill said in ’98 -“A number of specifically philosophical issues are suggested when we reflect on old age. Here is an example: does value, positive or negative, attach to longevity as such? In our culture people believe that it is bad to be old, but is the badness supposed to be intrinsic to old age?” Yes I hear some form of this question in one ear, while in the other I’m encouraged to be graceful or fearless.
As Small at one point half way through her essay summarizes it – “The emotional problem stands: how should we feel about old age, as we look to shape our expectations for ourselves in and against what we know will be the collective tendencies?”
For another excellent reference that Helen Small makes in her essay I would suggest the article from the academic journal The Gerontologist from 2014 (which you can pick up here) – The Emergence of a Positive Gerontology: From Disengagement to Social Involvement.
Helen Small is the author of The Long Life (2007), which also looks at ageing through discussion of works of literature from Plato to Dickens and Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice. My literary quest in this matter has now become it seems, an endless trail of Erudite Ageing.