Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our weekly series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. This week, we brought back the literary critic Joseph Epstein, 88, for a return engagement to explain why his reading habits have changed as he’s gotten older.
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One often hears about those books people would like to have along if marooned alone on a desert island. The selection, at least among my fellow graybeards, doesn’t often contain many surprises: Homer, Dante, Michel de Montaigne, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, and a few other standbys are usually mentioned. Old age is a kind of desert island of its own. In old age one figures to have lost some friends and family to death and seen others of them lapse into ill health, perhaps even dementia. If one has arrived at old age with enough money to retire, reading, for some of us, becomes one’s main activity. That certainly includes me.
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries,” Immanuel Kant wrote. And so in a sense it is, but with the obvious qualification that it is a one-way conversation, the book speaking to you, not you to it. Kant himself of course had one of those finest minds, which may have limited his reading. I don’t, which makes my own prospects for reading material nearly endless.
But reading what? Or better, reading how? My sense is that one reads differently in old age than when younger. For one thing, some writers who once seemed vital, central, indispensable, no longer seem so. For another, with one’s time before departing the planet limited, one tends to have less patience. Then, too, after a lifetime of living, one’s experience has widened; and with any luck it has also deepened, and so one has a different perspective on the things one reads or has read, often holding them to a higher standard.
