Time's Bounty
Rethinking Aging
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“A guide to growing old with grace and wisdom.”—Kirkus
“An elegant rumination....Wise, unvarnished.”—Publishers Weekly
Change your perspective about aging. Here is a bracing view of the surprises that lie ahead, as age enkindles in us new expressions of life.
Our culture isn’t kind towards age. The dominant drive is to celebrate youth, and striving for more and more of everything, while age, we’re told, brings only depletion and loss. Even as Americans live longer, most consider old age with dread. It’s time to challenge these assumptions.
As author Philip Weinstein writes, “Old-age situations, assumed to announce the end-of-the-road, actually generate fresh life-moves. As we age, we tend to become ‘lighter’ in more senses than one....Indeed, we may find ourselves catapulted into late-stage ‘adventures’ the young never dream of.”
Time’s Bounty offers a view of age that differs greatly from our preconceptions—surprising, emancipating, sometimes even joyful. In five brief chapters, the author takes us from the generative discoveries that age occasions to the freedom that comes in life’s late chapters, when no company or institution or cause any longer owns us. At last, we are our own, in ways we could not imagine when younger.
Weinstein, a retired professor of English, draws not only on his own insights but on the insights found in writers he taught for decades: Shakespeare, Yeats, Proust, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, and others. Brief forays into their imaginative works add further illumination to the author’s own discoveries regarding the dramas—both the trials and the gifts—of old age.
Whatever your own life’s season, whether you’re still in the Spring or deep into life’s Winter, Time’s Bounty will change the way you think about age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English literature scholar Weinstein (Jonathan Franzen) offers an elegant rumination on the revelations of one's final years. He writes that "becoming old—approaching death—opens onto unanticipated scenarios that are interesting aesthetically compelling: emergent dramas that strike you with... their ‘rightness.'" Several of these revolve around the author's reassessment of events that struck him differently in his youth, such as funeral testimonials, which once seemed "false" but now appear heartfelt. Elsewhere, he discusses dormancy (i.e., latent memories that emerge as one ages because they take on new meaning) and experiences of "diminishment" ranging from the bad—less sleep, less health—to the beneficial: less distraction and more time for introspection. Regarding the latter, Weinstein admits that "a life spent in reckoning with works of art has... spared me from a good deal of self-reckoning." Now in the throes of that self-reckoning, Weinstein turns to those same works to illustrate his points, drawing passages from Shakespeare and Faulkner. These citations, unfortunately, serve to distance the author from the narrative and more closely resemble a college lecture. However, even the text's flaws embody its central struggle: that of an academic reflecting on a lifetime spent "keep my writing clear of my own experience," a practice that "ignored both my own depths and those of my reader." It's a wise, unvarnished retrospection on the life of the mind's pitfalls and pleasures.
