Available:*
Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
---|---|---|---|---|
33607001065708 | Adult Nonfiction | 928 HEILBRU | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
As a young woman, Carolyn Heilbrun made a resolution not to live past "three score years and ten." Taking her own life at the age of seventy, she reasoned, would lend clean closure to a life well lived, and would keep her from the many tragedies of aging--becoming a burden to her children, witnessing the deterioration of her body, falling prey to a crippling disease. But on the advent of her seventieth birthday, she looked back on the past ten years and found, to her surprise, that her sixties had been the happiest decade of all: after fifty years, her marriage had matured into a happy balance of companionship and respect for solitude; she had developed deep friendships with her grown children and a small circle of peers; she had mastered a highly successful career as a scholar and writer. In the poignant, essayistic writing that best showcases her elegant talent and provocative mind, Carolyn Heilbrun celebrates the many pleasures of a mature life. Filled with wisdom, knowledge, wry humor, and literary allusion,The Last Gift of Timeis a moving book for all women invested in the pursuit of leading a woman's life to its fullest capacity.
Author Notes
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun was born in East Orange, New Jersey on January 13, 1926. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Wellesley College in 1947 and a master's degree in 1951 and a doctorate in 1959 from Columbia University. She spent almost her entire academic career at Columbia University, joining the faculty in 1960 as an instructor of English and comparative literature and retiring as the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities in 1992.
She wrote several books under her real name including Toward a Recognition of Androgyny: Aspects of Male and Female in Literature, Reinventing Womanhood, Writing a Woman's Life, and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. She wrote the Kate Fansler Mystery series under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. She committed suicide on October 9, 2003.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The word "gift" in German means "poison" and, to a linguist, the title might imply some bitterness. Heilbrun, former Columbia University English professor and noted literary critic, is a woman who obviously chooses her words well. Threading through the 15 essays is the theme of her youthful intention to commit suicide when she turned 70; several of the chapters convey the tone of an apologia for not having done so. The essays reflect and resonate with the general female experience of growing old: comfort in established family and home, loss of socially construed femininity, and a certain resentment at having been too often ignored or dismissed by the prevailing (male-dominated) culture. Heilbrun (The Education of a Woman) concedes that the past was probably not better than the present, only different, and looks to the young, especially her children, to teach the significance of those differences: "Those gentler times to which we old hark back imprisoned and excluded too many of us." In her most poignant chapter, "The Family Lost and Found," Heilbrun tells of her rediscovery of the courageous and intelligent immigrant women who were part of her father's family, although he had not seen fit to tell his only daughter about them. Her rediscovery of that lost half of her family, late in her life, was both encouraging and bittersweet. Heilbrun offers observations and stories, not lessons or polemics, but she is a perceptive witness to the vagaries of life. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
Heilbrun (The Education of a Woman, LJ 11/1/95) will also be known to many readers as mystery writer Amanda Cross. In these essays, on knowledge gained in her fifties and sixties, she often refers to "unmet friends," as the reader feels toward her persona here. The pace is suitably reflective, but this in no way diminishes her clarity, humor, or deeply held feminist conviction. Among other topics, Heilbrun examines the unexpected pleasures of E-mail, her love for her dogs, a declaration of freedom from dresses and heels, the perils of finally getting a longed-for "room of one's own," her relationship with poet May Sarton, appreciation for the wisdom of the young, and the company of men. Heilbrun decided years ago to end her life at 70 but now chooses to live each day that comes. These essays bear witness to her continued reasons for doing so. Recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/96.]Barbara Hutcheson, Greater Victoria P.L., British Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PREFACE Since [nature] has fitly planned the other acts of life's drama, it is not likely that she has neglected the final act as if she were a careless playwright. --CICERO, De Senectute LOOKING BACK, I can now perceive myself, a woman already in her sixties, engrossed in the question of what alterations in her life a woman might undertake upon turning fifty. In my writings, my public remarks, and my daily cogitations, I had concentrated on how a woman might best contemplate the start of a decade I had long since passed. This turning point of fifty, I had become convinced, ought to form as vital a milestone in a woman's life as graduation, promotion, marriage, or the birth or adoption of a child. At fifty, I had concluded, a woman might celebrate a rite of passage, a ritual as regularly marked as a confirmation. Trying to develop a ritual for this crossroads--the point at which a woman has lived thirty years of adult life in one mode and must discover a new mode for the second thirty years likely to be granted her--I wanted to suggest, to (if I am honest) urge women to see this new life as different, as a beginning, as a time requiring the questioning of all previous habits and activities, as, inevitably, a time of profound change. When I was already sixty-two, I published Writing a Woman's Life, a work in which I proposed that female lives be looked at differently than had been customary for those writing biographies of women, or for women writing autobiographies, or for women looking anew at their own lives. I mused not only on aging but on friendship, marriage, and the gambits women used to escape a conventional and defining life, maneuvers of which the motive was often unconscious. Later, in articles and speeches, I suggested that aging might be gain rather than loss, and that the impersonation of youth was unlikely to provide the second span of womanhood with meaning and purpose. What I had scarcely considered at all was the decade I was myself just passing through, the sixties. I, who had thought only of the rite of passage at fifty, have now discovered, at seventy, that the past ten years, the years of my sixties, were in their turn notably rewarding. (I am, of course, aware that my perspective is that of someone who has enjoyed many advantages. I have had a privileged education, worked for over thirty years as a professor of English at Columbia University before my retirement, and now enjoy a comfortable income. At the moment of recording this, I am in good health.) I was savoring a combination of serenity and activity that had hardly been publicly attributed, at least as far as I could discern, to women in their seventh decade. There seemed to be few accounts depicting the pleasures of this time of life. More familiar as an account of turning seventy was Doris Grumbach's Coming into the End Zone, a beautifully written journal about reaching her seventieth birthday that was a cry of despair and disillusion. She hated her aging body, she feared the streets of her city, she bemoaned the deaths of many beloved friends, and she created the impression, engraved on her narrative by her graceful, exact prose, that the better part of life had passed. Her sixties, it was clear, had led inevitably to this moment of disillusion. Why were my sixties different? Why were those years, against all prognoses, worthy of commemoration? Grumbach and I share certain biographical details: We both grew up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, the children of humanistic Jews; we both went to summer camps; we both had expensive educations. We had both married and had children, she four, I three; we both have grandchildren. At seventy, we were both living with longtime partners. We share certain quirks endemic to our age: an aversion to movies made from great novels, to ethnic food, travel, the doom-calls of dental hygienists, and women made over by plastic surgery, and a (daily) devotion to Progresso minestrone for lunch. And there, perhaps providing a clue to our different states of mind on reaching seventy, the similarities end. We have, as far as I remember, never met, although our mutual friend, the writer May Sarton, had offered us a tenuous connection. Our differences are significant. Grumbach is a famous critic, in both print and television; she has many writer friends, from this profession and from the writers' colonies MacDowell and Yaddo; she is an intimate of renowned writers; she was beautiful and a devoted swimmer. Almost all the friends and writers she mentions are men; with the exception of an admired woman professor who influenced her in college, Grumbach leaves the impression of life full of male companionship and collegiality. My sixties seemed to me, despite the usual setbacks and unkindnesses, so much luckier and more auspicious than Grumbach's that I felt impelled to seek the reason. That she suffered from deafness was not the answer: that condition, as she presented it, seemed almost a blessing to her in these noisy times. The most obvious difference was that I had acquired, in my late fifties and sixties, after a lifetime of solitude and few close and constant companions, women friends and colleagues, themselves now mature adults, whose intimacy helped to make the sixties my happiest decade. The men friends I had, all longtime familiars since graduate school, continued their welcome conversations; it was the newly befriended women, however, who made the significant difference for me. Perhaps I am one of those who are born (as someone, probably Oscar Wilde, is said to have remarked of Max Beerbohm) blessed with the gift of eternal old age. If, like the poet Philip Larkin, I now appear to have been born aspiring to the age of sixty, I did not, like him, perceive that age as doom. Alan Bennett wrote of him: "Apparently [Larkin] is sixty, but when was he anything else? He has made a habit of being sixty, he has made a profession of it ... he has been sixty for the last twenty-five years." As Larkin's biographer, Andrew Motion, observed about Larkin's sixtieth birthday, "Every word of praise told him his work was a thing of the past. Every mention of his birthday was a reminder of mortality." William Styron, writing of his terrible bout with depression, noted that it began at age sixty, "that hulking milestone of mortality." Is it death he fears, or age, or the loss of talent? Depression weighs upon Grumbach as she contemplates the death of so many young men from AIDS, a despair echoed in these lines from Marilyn Hacker's "Against Elegies": My old friends, my new friends who are old, or older, sixty, seventy, take pills with meals or after dinner. Arthritis scourges them. But irremediable night is farther away from them; they seem to hold it at bay better than the young-middle-aged whom something, or another something, kills before the chapter's finished, the play staged. The curtains stay down when the light fades.... The sixty-five-year-olds are splendid, vying with each other in work hours and wit. They bring their generosity along, setting the tone, or not giving a shit. How well, or how eccentrically, they dress! Their anecdotes are to the point, or wide enough to make room for discrepancies. But their children are dying. The young and middle-aged in Hacker's poem are dead or dying. And yet, the human irony is that those of us who have reached seventy are rarely grateful: since we did not wish to die, surely we must have wished to grow old? But, ill-satisfied, we tend to sneer at our flabby bodies and the inevitable fate that dumped old age upon us. We do not remember, as English writer Vera Brittain read in The Pink Fairy Book, that Destiny offers the choice of happy youth or happy old age, and that the choice of a happy youth is not always the wiser one. May Sarton, in her journal At Seventy, remarks on having been asked to speak on old age at a Connecticut college. In the course of her talk she said: "This is the best time of my life. I love being old." A voice from the audience demanded: "Why is it good to be old?" As Sarton recounts it: I answered spontaneously and a little on the defensive, for I sensed incredulity in the questioner, "Because I am more myself than I have ever been. There is less conflict. I am happier, more balanced, and" (I heard myself say rather aggressively) "more powerful." I felt it was rather an odd word, "powerful," but I think it is true. It might have been more accurate to say "I am better able to use my powers." I am surer of what my life is about, have less self-doubt to conquer. Turning seventy, enjoying what W. H. Auden (who, however, did not live to that age) called "obesity and a little fame," I found the revelation that I could look back upon my sixties with pleasure astonishing. Having supposed the sixties would be downhill all the way, I had long held a determination to commit suicide at seventy. Yet for a time the fact that my sixties had offered such satisfactions only confirmed my lifelong resolution not to live past "threescore years and ten." Quit while you're ahead was, and is, my motto. I had always considered this biblical life span to be a highly reasonable one. Having reached my seventieth year, I did not at once search for reasons to question its veracity. True, my life was good. But is it not better to leave at the height of well-being rather than contemplate the inevitable decline and the burden one becomes upon others? I have always been a lonely person, given to mild melancholy from time to time. But I had never before, however gloomy, seriously contemplated suicide; that was an option permissible, for myself, only at seventy. Now, turning seventy, I recalled a snatch of conversation from an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. One of the characters says: "Cassius was not of an age to die." "What is the age?" her sister asks. "About seventy," a brother answers, "when we have had our span, and people have not begun to think the less of us." Well, I thought, that's where I am. Excerpted from The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty by Carolyn G. Heilbrun All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.