Skip to main content

The Art of Growing Old: Aging with Grace by Marie de Hennezel

I'd recommend reading the last chapter, "Knowing How to Die" and the conclusion. The remainder of the book, while sincere, is undirected, repetitive and platitudinous. The book would benefit from a significant rewrite. 

Further, readers interested in handling the various physical and existential challenges of aging would be better served reading the Stoics (specifically Epictetus) as well as literature from the Taoist and Buddhist traditions.

Notes: 
* I wonder if this author is a better writer in her native French?

* The author, a clinical therapist, is plainly not qualified to talk about biological aspects of aging, nor dietary science. As just one example, the author regrettably recommends consuming canola/rapeseed oil--at a time when dietary science consensus began pivoting away from industrial seed oils.

* Characteristics of successful old people (this is my basic summary based on this book):
+ resilience and "conation" which means intentional effort, actively directed energy focused toward the accomplishment of tasks.
+ radiance, and also note the idea that one can actively choose to be radiant: that radiance "is the fruit of deliberate, clear-headed work."
+ adopting other specific psychological strategies for aging: being adaptable, accepting your limits with good humor, saying no/setting boundaries, setting up an appropriate daily routine, having many close relationships, learning to be optimistic.
+ don't be needy: the ideal is not expect too much of others but simply to be receptive, "behaving so that people enjoy listening to us, meeting us, and communicating with us." In other words: cultivate the trait of agreeability. 
+ do not complain, ever. 
+ cultivate an acceptance that all you have will be taken away, eventually. Consider deeply the fundamental transience of all things.
+ avoid cynicism or an attitude of "I've seen it all before"; rather, cultivate a sense/mindset of wonder, of admiration, of curiosity.  

* The book is often all over the place, is it about teaching caregivers how to get better care to the elderly? Is it about Alzheimer's? Is it about housing for the elderly, or housing for the elderly with Alzheimer's? I thought this is a book about aging gracefully, but much of it reads more like a policy book, with all sorts of optimistic examples of how to do eldercare better...

* Examples of the author's sincere yet often platitudinous writing:
"Acceptance of old age begins with coming to terms with it." 
"It is time to convince women to love their aging faces." 
The author also has a tendency to pull platitudinous quotes from other writers and then further wrap her own platitudes around them.  

* So, what is it, exactly, that makes a platitude a platitude? As a reader, you know it when you see it, but what precisely makes it so? Is it an insight-free truism rendered in words? One that triggers a "meh" response in the reader? Or a series of truism-type sentences that just don't go anywhere, rhetorically or logically? 

* "I knew l a depressive, unpleasant man of eighty who changed completely after spending time in an intensive care unit. ...He made the decision never to complain again and to thank heaven every day for the joy of life."

* The Coué method, NLP, 

* Sex late in life hinges enormously on the woman's attitude. Taoist approaches to sex.

* The body you "are" vs the body you "have"

* Knowing How to Die: this final chapter has much more merit than the others, it addresses questions/ethics surrounding suicide and euthanasia, it discusses the generosity of actually dying in the presence of others, and how that act can communicate important values and truths.

* On the author's own mother-in-law who stopped taking food.

To read:
Ram Das: Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying
Mitch Albom: Tuesdays with Morrie
Sister Emmanuelle: Vivre, à quoi ça sert?
Marie de Hennezel: Intimate Death
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
Robert Dilts: Changing Belief Systems with NLP
Jolan Chang: The Tao of Love and Sex
Simone de Beauvoir: The Coming of Age
Crin Blanc (1953 short film)
The Ballad of Narayama (1983 film)


More Posts

Inflation: The Problems It Creates and the Policies It Requires by Arthur M. Okun, Henry H. Fowler, and Milton Gilbert

This book is a transcription of a lecture series on inflation given at New York University back in 1969 by speakers Arthur Okun, Henry Fowler and Milton Gilbert. These three men, all important "experts" in their day on managing the economy, and all speaking with great confidence in the correctness of their policy prescriptions, had no idea how wrong they would be--about everything. As a result, this book indirectly teaches humility, and it once again teaches how incredibly useful it is to read books outside of the time period in which they were written. Each speaker holds forth on various orthodox economic ideas of that era: presumed trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, how to "fine-tune" the economy, and (most hilariously) the critical importance of gold as the foundation of the international monetary system.  Today, we can look back on these confidently-given speeches with rich irony, knowing that in less than a year, the 1970s would dunk on all three sp...
Read more

Merchants of Grain by Dan Norman

[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.] Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility. Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and s...
Read more

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann R. Wyss

Reading this famous book opens a window into the cultural and ethical milieu of early 19th century Europe. We see an idealized family facing severe challenges in an unknown and exotic part of the world, and doing so without despair or pessimism. To a modern reader, the Robinson family might resemble  The Cosby Show : the father comes across as a bit of a pedant, the children speak in complete and grammatically-correct sentences [1] , and the family solves problems in the book-chapter equivalent of a 30 minute TV segment. Other dubious elements of the story might amuse the adult reader: see for example their island's impossible array of wildlife and botany, or the family's ability to MacGyver almost anything out of anything. And yet one can easily see how this would be a wonderful and ethically nutritious story for a young person to read (or have read to him or her), as it conveys a range of non-cynical messages that are rapidly disappearing from the modern era: on not being id...
Read more