The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy

Author:Ariel Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

“Beats the alternative”; that’s what you’re supposed to say about getting old. Yet a strange thing was happening. As I trod ever deeper into the outer ring of oldness, my fears, nightmares I’ve nurtured the bulk of my life, began to lighten. I began to look upon my venerability not as a state preferable only to death but rather as an opportunity of a lifetime.

This new paradigm took hold as a scattershot succession of time-specific mini-epiphanies. One of these realizations came while thumbing through a book titled A History of Old Age. In addition to detailing Aristotle’s distaste for the aged, whom he thought to be excessively pessimistic, malicious, and small-minded owing to their extended interface with life’s grinding “disappointments,” A History of Old Age featured a number of Enlightenment-era drawings titled “The Stages of Man’s Life from the Cradle to the Grave.”

In this scheme, life is depicted as an eternal staircase; the steps ascend, reach a topmost platform, then go down. The traveler begins on the ground floor as “a lamb-like innocent,” then climbs upward, each step signifying a ten-year interval. The “eagle-like” twenties lead to the “bull-like” thirties, nearing the apex in the forties, when “nought his courage quails but lion-like, by force prevails.” (A companion chart notes a woman’s peak to be thirty, when she is said to be a “crown to her husband.”) From this upper perch, it is all downhill, through the grasping, Scrooge-like sixties; the languorous, ineffectual seventies; and ending in the largely symbolic “one-hundredth year,” when, “tho’ sick of life, the grave we fear.” In a French version of “The Stages,” called “Le Jugement Universel,” the final downward phases are known as l’âge de décadence and l’âge décrépit.

Probably even Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie couldn’t make l’âge décrépit sound sexy, but it was no great task to create a personalized, modern-age version of “The Stages.” A pattern of whiplash upheaval emerged. I was born in 1948; my “lamb-like innocence” was spent learning how to be a Cold War kid, schooled in the nuances of 1950s preteen reality, Have Gun—Will Travel and Gunsmoke on the tube every Saturday night. Then, just as I mastered my kidlike state, becoming a King of Kids, the rug was pulled out. Without warning I was thrust into a hormone-laced universe of spouting pubic hair and the Rolling Stones. It was back to square one, a whole new playing field to navigate. The ensuing “eagle-like” adolescent-cum-teen quake lasted through the lionization-canonization-commodification of youth culture during the 1960s and early ’70s, during which time I would grow to become an exemplar, warts-and-all specimen of my burgeoning bunch, who were on the cover of Time magazine every other week. This period also ended with unprecognitioned abruptness when I became a husband, a father, and a simulacrum of a grown-up. It was one more Sisyphean moment, a brand-new rock of unknown size and density to roll up the hill. This was the structure, a repeating push-pull of stasis and change requiring periodic recalibration of self.

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