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Title: The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty
ISBN: 0345422953
Author:
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Publicate Date: 1998-04-07
Publish: 1998-04-07
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $5.00
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1: Thought-provoking and Enriching
Heilbrun provides an up-close look into her accomplished, then increasingly unconventional life. The main theme of the book is that of re-evaluating her life beyond age sixty. After a thirty-year tenure as an English professor at Columbia University, she was fortunate to enjoy a comfortable income in her retirement. Yet this fact did not spare her from the questioning that often accompanies this momentous life passage.
At age sixty-two, she published "Writing a Woman's Life," where she mused on aging, friendship, marriage, etc. Always a woman of strong convictions, Heilbrun had professed she would commit suicide by age seventy. But she surprised herself when she found her sixties to be quite rewarding.
She credits close friendships with women and colleagues, for making her sixties her happiest decade. While happily married for many years, she also longed for solitude. It was that longing that led her, at age sixty-eight, to take the unusual step of buying what she referred to as her "small house." It was this haven that provided her the space to spend some of her free time contemplating, "To invite one's soul and encounter peace." She was fortunate that her husband understood her need. The first weekend after the purchase, she drove there accompanied by him.
While her life was quite different from mine, I was fascinated by her insights, and her daring to claim the life she wanted, in her later years. Upon learning that she did indeed, commit suicide at age seventy-seven, I was a bit disoncerted. But after digesting the news, I felt an undeniable sense of awe. She took her destiny into her own two hands, literally. Some call that "self-determination." I don't believe she suffered from depression, only that she had a realistic world view, in her own words, "feeling sad about the universe."
The book provides a lot of wisdom, from friends like May Sarton, and helps explain their close, but difficult, realtionship. There are many quotes and insights from other famous writers. Michael Norman, writing in the New York Times magazine, described the life of his eighty-eight year-old aunt. "It's no good," she said. "I'm living too long already. What's the point?"
Heilbrun ponders, "This harsh question, 'what's the point' is judged by some as cruel, unacceptable in our culture. To me, it is a very real question, the question that renders living too long dangerous, lest we live past the right point and our chance to die."
In a chapter "On Mortality" there is a poem by Christina Rosetti, "Song." This verse seems fitting for Heilbrun:
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain:
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That does not rise nore set,
Haply I may remember
And haply may forget.
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2: I discovered many kernals of wisdom....
Finding myself in my late 50's, unemployed and not likely to take on another full-time career, I was curious about Heilbrun's thoughts and opinions about life during her 60's.
Heilbrun was in her 70's when she wrote this book in 1998. Almost 10 years later, I found kernels of wisdom in almost every chapter despite being far removed from her literary and financial stature.
If you have can relate to the following, I think you will benefit most from reading this book: 1) have an understanding or appreciation of the stifling environment most women who were married during the 1950's-60's felt in their marriages or careers. 2) be near or in your 60's, and 3) understand the introverted personality.
I could relate to her comments about transitioning from a life-long career to having a life full of choices and feeling unsure about how or what direction to take all of this available free time. A friend once told me, "Enjoy your 60's while your health is still good. When a woman reaches her 70's, it's probably downhill from there." I think this outcome was what Heilbrun deeply feared and couldn't admit.
I found her admission of experiencing `political sadness' a foreshadowing. She seemed profoundly affected by the political and social damage our country (and probably the world) endures knowing the recovery could take generations, if it were possible at all. Perhaps her inability to cope or contribute toward repairing such damage was more than she could bear, which might have lead to her suicide in her late 70's.
Her writing can be a bit 'literary'. I had to re-read several passages to be sure that "I got it." That's the main reason I didn't give the book 4 stars. Although she is a prolific writer and probably quite talented in her craft, I didn't enjoy stumbling over many of her phrases.
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3: Too Little, Too Late
The titles of books Carolyn Heilbrun has written are exciting to those of us who are of the female persuasion and born before 1950, because women, especially older women, still get far too little respect in today's world.
However, Carolyn Heilbrun's extremely privileged and refined upbringing seems to have led her to come late and reluctantly to a contemplation of the problems of women in general. Her love of fingerbowls and the way of life they represent, her concern that no man's skin be visible between his socks and his pantlegs, her outrage at recent acquaintances being on a first name basis, and her preference for a house of her own, not shared by her husband of many years, are just a few of the things that define a huge gap between her and those of my generation, just 20 years younger.
At any age, it's best to either have a companion you cannot do without or for goodness sake have no spouse at all. Or suffer with your choice, no longer a happy one, but don't write a book telling us we should all profit from your example. It's sad she preferred to be apart from her husband, and I'm willing to pity her, but not to point to her as a model for the rest of us. Contrary to her experience and belief, a woman can be married--and actually living with a man--without losing her independence or her freedom.
Ms. Heilbrun did learn some lessons during her lifetime, and you can clearly see some progress in her beliefs between 1964 and 1997, but in all honesty, she was quite reactionary in 1970, compared to the students and faculty at Columbia, where she taught, so she had a lot of catching up to do. She was very far from the forefront of liberal feminism, almost the opposite, when you consider her exposure to (and resistance to) the intellectual ferment of the 1960s.
I'm 59 now, and I'm not about to take pointers in how to live out my sixties from someone as smug, self-centered, and superficial as this author. If the subject matter appeals to you, I strongly suggest you look elsewhere for intellectual stimulation.
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4: Good News Bad News
If you are in your sixties, seventies, or beyond - or even if you are a precocious fifty-year-old, there is much to be had in this ultimately enigmatic series of essays by feminist, scholar, activist and mystery hound Carolyn Heilbrun. Thoughtful, introspective, funny and only occasionally cantankerous, Heilbrun strikes many a familiar chord in examining the oddly satisfying process of aging, if not gracefully, at least with some unexpected zest.
Heilbrun wore many hats in her life - her book Writing a Woman's Life is now a classic feminist study. She has a huge and richly deserved reputation as a scholar of Virginia Woolf as well as the Bloomsbury era in general. In popular culture, Heilbrun is probably best known by the pseudonym Amanda Cross, author of the Kate Fansler mystery series. She spent most of her academic career at Columbia University and speaks in these essays of her dismay at her experiences there and her relief at finally retiring.
Heilbrun is generous in sharing her inner life but never quite explains the puzzles. She was an ardent feminist, patriarchal enemy to the core. She deplored society's requirement that women dress the role and ultimately gave up dresses altogether. She slants towards androgyny and regards bisexuality as just a moving point on a line. She devotes a whole chapter to May Sarton, the poet, novelist and essayist who was her contemporary and her friend. Sarton was a tempestuous, oft ill-tempered lesbian who, much to her own dismay, found most public appreciation with the publication of her numerous journals recounting her rural life in New Hampshire and Maine.
But despite all of this, Heilbrun was a wife and mother and lived a seemingly contented life with her husband. The fact that, at the age of 68, she bought a home of her own where she often stayed, sans husband, seemed to her quite ordinary. In her personal life, there seemed to be little of the cacophony that marked her work and her times.
But the enigma of Carolyn Heilbrun lies mainly in her oft-vocalized determination to commit suicide at the age of 70 when, presumably, all usefulness and joy would be gone from life and ending it would avoid all of the nastiness involved in the endgame. But 70 came and went and she makes much in The Last Gift of Time of her decision to go on. Life, it seems, still had a lot to offer and that is what she offers us. These later years can be so rewarding that many women are quite shocked by this unexpected gift.
But, having read the book, and being inspired by that message, it is a bit disconcerting to learn that in 2003, at the age of 77, Heilbrun actually did commit suicide. By all accounts, there was no hint that this was to happen. Her husband and children were profoundly shocked, as were her friends . On the day she died, a Tuesday, Heilbrun walked through Central Park with a friend - something the two had done every Tuesday for 26 years. All seemed normal. Heilbrun was her usual self. The only possible hint, and a very thin one, was that at one point Heilbrun said "I feel sad". When the friend asked what she felt sad about, Heilbrun responded "The universe". And then she went home and put a plastic bag over her head.
Knowing the eventual outcome of Heilbrun's journey certainly changes the flavor of this book but it is difficult to say whether the message is diluted or enhanced. I, personally, was taken aback and re-read the book to see what I might have missed but did not find anything significant. It is still a book well worth reading and it has a lot to say to us "women of a certain age". But, despite its insight and its wisdom, what it mostly affirms is the unpredictability of life. And that, I suppose, is a good thing.
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5: A Conundrum Wrapped in an Enigma
Carolyn Heilbrun wrote this celebration of life after sixty shortly after deciding not to carry out her long-determined plan to commit suicide at 70 and six years before killing herself at 77. To know that outcome increases the frustration and the spasm of anger at her -- how could she so exquisitely detail the joy she found in living over the last decade and a half of her life, and then one day slam the door on those joys through, I understand, an overdose of sleeping pills and a plastic bag around the head for good measure. The clue must lie in this book's last essay, On Mortality, and what Heilbrun seems to fear and foresee in that chapter, that at some increasing age indifference to life succeeds pleasure in life.
Obviously a woman of strong views -- I was not familiar with any of her writing before Gift --, Heilbrun is never shy about expressing those views, but does so with a humor and civility too often missing in writing and intellectual debate. She has scores to settle, but often, in these essays, matters of more compelling interest: a faithful dog; the fairly nondescript house she buys in the country; her enthusiam for email and England.
In the end I come away from Gift with two strong feelings, pleasure at being able to still enjoy some of those pleasures that Heilbrun enjoyed and an unsettling inability to understand why she later chose to stop doing so.
Recommended.
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