[ExI] How to grow old with whimsy and wit...

John Grigg possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com
Mon Nov 21 00:17:23 UTC 2011


How to grow old with whimsy and wit
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228395.400-how-to-grow-old-with-whimsy-and-wit.html
16 November 2011 by Liz Else

Book information
Losing It by William Ian Miller
Published by: Yale University Press
Price: £18.99/$27
Self-styled "aged professor" William Ian Miller grows old gracefully
in Losing It with his reflections on the time when your faculties fail

"DESPITE the best efforts of transhumanists and purveyors of the
"singularity", we all face seeing our bodies eventually collapse and
our mental marbles depart singly, or rush out en masse.

Science has no cures for ageing. Mind gyms and brain games might not
work as advertised, and neuroscientists and doctors understand normal
function not much further than being able to provide generic health
messages about taking exercise, avoiding obesity and maybe learning
meditation.

So how are we to deal with the decline of our youth in an era of
death-denying baby boomers, botox addicts, and people seeking to gloss
over the decrepitude of old age? One solution is to throw all the
erudition, wit, and distemper you can muster at it. This is the
preferred route of law professor William Ian Miller, that unusual kind
of writer whose works genuinely and comfortably span academic and lay
worlds, largely because his mind is well furnished after years of
delving into anthropology, psychology, literature and history.

The book's subtitle sets up our expectations: "Losing It: In which an
aging professor LAMENTS his shrinking BRAIN, which he flatters himself
formerly did him Noble Service. A Plaint, tragi-comical, historical,
vengeful, sometimes satirical and thankful in six parts, if his Memory
does yet serve".

And we are off on a fast and furious journey through the riches of
Miller's brain: from the peddlers of positive psychology - "these
fields are either culpably moronic or a swindle" - to the ship in the
opening of the epic poem Beowulf, laden with goods for the use of
Danish king Scyld Scefing in the next world.

He poses body-blow questions such as: "Is wisdom a sop, a payment in
unverifiable coin to make up for the provable failings of focus and
memory...?", and cites truisms by the likes of Saint Bernardino of
Siena: "Everyone wishes to reach old age, but nobody wishes to be
old".

He conjures the great and the terrifying, such as the courageous king
of Troy during its famous war with the Greeks, against whose light the
glow of our own lives pales in comparison: "Priam was sitting on top
of the world at your age; so was Margaret Thatcher, before whom all
trembled. There is nothing saga-worthy about a nursing home and
dementia - or a retirement condo for that matter..."

The cumulative effect of such a tour of ageing ought to be depressing,
but it's actually bracing. Trying to keep up with the sheer breadth of
knowledge in Losing It and actually reading all the wonderful books
Miller weaves into this strange, dark, intellectual kilim will keep
you constructively engaged while you wait for science to throw up a
wild card that might just delay, or even cancel, your own miserable
end."




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