Maybe you make a little money, people start to respect your competence, you feel positively adult. You get to vote, to drink, to drive, to go out all night and not tell anyone. From age 0 to 25, at least for many of us, you keep getting more power in life with little added responsibility. Status consciousness being the royal road to immiseration, you soon find yourself writing existentialist literature.Ī second idea is about responsibility. Middle age is a time when in our species you are naturally somewhat on the wane, and so you grow more status conscious. There are different theories on why this should be, but I’ll give three I like. It varies by country, but my understanding is that in developed countries this finding is pretty robust: peak happiness is around 20, the bottom is around 40, and then ever after, on average, happiness grows, even into very old age. An interesting correlation is that the statistical peak of misery is around 40 to 50. Let’s take for granted my theory that peak reflectiveness comes with middle age. I have a guess about why this should be, but it’s only a guess. The actual old authors I can think of seem to be more in the moment. I suspect if you want to meet a literary old man who’s battling these things, you ought to read an old man character written by a 45 year old. In fact, I don’t quite know why I have the stereotype that the elderly should be especially engaged in the Big Questions. I’m about at the beginning of middle age, I suppose, and I don’t know why the above should be true. EB white, as I recall is talking about world government and the nature of democracy in middle age, but his later essays are more apt to be about dogs and barns and grandchildren. Some, like Orwell, never get past middle age, and never got properly trivial. Some (CS Lewis is perhaps the ultimate example) write essays that don’t seem to change in style or tone, whose period in his life are only detectable from biographical knowledge. It occurred to me as I wrote this that I literally cannot think of an author who became more reflective in old age. But then we get to his very last book, written just past the age of 60, Trustee from the Toolroom, which is a light mildly comedic mystery story, which literally concerns an old man who likes building tiny things. And On the Beach is proper brooding melancholy about a post-nuclear war world where everyone is dying. Requiem for a Wren is complex, but I think of it as being fundamentally about people who were young and vibrant during that war finding that life afterward is unbearably hard and complicated and lonely and purposeless. Pied Piper is about an old man finding himself in the position of getting a large number of orphaned children to safety in World War II. And I find his two best books, Pied Piper and Requiem for a Wren were both written in his 40s and 50s, as was his more famous book On the Beach. It’s as if Shute got the thriller stuff out of his system, and was ready to write life as it was. I can’t remember which, but as I recall if you read his books in order, around the third or fourth book there’s a moment when the mediocre characters in a mediocre plot find themselves sharing a quiet moment poking at some coals in a small fire. Born in 1899, his early books are horrible 1920s spy thrillers. I find he tracks me theory of middle age expansiveness pretty well. Shute is a beloved author of mine, whose entire corpus I’ve read. A literary comparison springs to mind - Nevil Shute. In middle age, she is at her most reflective. Love, beauty, the nature of attachment, ideas of femininity and masculinity, childrearing, depression - everything. Contrast with her earlier book Condundrum (1974), which is all reflection and deep thoughts on just about everything. Almost like a description of the decor of her life. Even the subject of her wife’s dementia - surely a spur to thoughts on the nature of being - is mentioned with something close to dispassion. Much of it is about that day’s weather, favorite trees, how she talks to people in the neighborhood, being Welsh, current politics, and so on. I would say it’s almost startlingly in the moment for someone who anticipates dying at almost any time. It is almost entirely trivial, and hardly even reflective.
She wrote it when she was 91 and 92, and it was published in 2020.
I got to thinking about this reading Jan Morris’ recent book of published daily reflections, Thinking Again. Not necessarily peak quality or peak beauty - peak likeliness to concern themselves with big questions about things like sex, death, meaning, their place in the universe, and so on.
Coronavirus prank black man link.I have a theory about writers, which is they reach peak expansiveness around age 50 or so.