I'll start with an overview of the four books I've selected. (Later I'll tell you how I'm struggling.)
It makes sense for me to read the first two books. They're books an aging person should find interesting -- or so I thought.
The first book is entitled Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living 50 Until You're 80 and Beyond (Workman Publishing, NY -- 2004). As you see by the publication date and my present age (75), I came to this book a little late. But that's probably okay, because all my life, I've been a devote` of vigorous exercise and a sensible diet. The authors, Crowley and Lodge don't need to convince me.
Early chapters of this book are largely designed for sedentary, overweight people. That's not me! My problem is NOT that I've been sitting around gaining weight. My problem is that I've always exercised vigorously, but apparently my diet is inadequate. I'm only in early chapters of the book, but it appears already that I'm going to have to acquire broader knowledge about diet sufficiency and change my eating habits. I need to learn to cook, eat more and better foods.
Also, based upon their theory regarding body decay and growth cycles, it appears I need to exercise six or seven days a week instead of my current four-day regimen. I also need to buy a new heart monitor. I intend to visit the Saginaw Valley State University Recreation Center, where I can run challenging targeted weight machines three days a week. I'll use a low-weight-quick-multiple-repetition technique to avoid injury.
The other three or four days I'll work-out at home with my Airdyne Bike, treadmill, and weights. I'll continue beginning my every day with yoga and Priscilla Patrick. (No need breaking her heart!) Currently I'm having difficulty keeping my weight UP. I'm dwindling away. But if I learn to grocery-shop wisely, learn to cook a little better, I may be able to hold my current weight, become stronger, and reverse other troublesome problems related to aging.
May sound SELFish, but the second book is also all about me. I had to order this old book by Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age (G. P. Putnam, NY -- 1972.) This book runs nearly 600 pages. Makes me wonder if I will live long enough to read and study it thoroughly, apply the knowledge it offers, and become 50 before I'm 80. Hmmmmnnnn!?
I'm currently working through some of the early chapters:
Old Age and Biology
The Discovery and Assumption of Old Age
Old Age and Everyday Life
The Discovery and Assumption of Old Age
Old Age and Everyday Life
Not an entirely pretty picture. But so far it doesn't look much like the life I'm living. A good sign. Perhaps a bad sign is that much of this fat book appears to be about how the aging are ignored and/or abused, and live as outcasts. So far that's not been my problem. I may discover this book talks about the plight of the aged in modern societies. But I need to give the book a fair chance. It was a best-seller in its day.
The third book is Dexter Filkins' book about our current wars in Southwest Asia entitled The Forever War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). The flyleaf of this book promises a look at daily life for fighters and hapless and victimized common folk in ". . .the deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage. . . ." I'm wondering how this book may ultimately affect my current Americans-Come-Home point of view. No doubt this book will lead me to others which may help me to better understand why we are wasting blood and treasure in a land where we are apparently unwanted.
The fourth book is fiction, the sort of book I haven't read for some years. It's Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (University of Chicago Press, 1976. Forward by Annie Proulx, 2001.)
You may wonder why I'm reading what appears to be a fiction book, when my penchant has long been non-fiction. There are at least four answers to this question.
First, Norman Maclean's books -- which he began writing in his 70th year -- are based very closely upon the lives of his family. Or at least he said so. In this sense they are authentic chronicles rather than fiction.
Second, I have read the book six or seven times already. In fact, I customarily read it aloud. It runs about 104 pages only. The story is gripping, not the least because of Maclean's poetic voice.
Third, Maclean was a renowned professor of literature at the University of Chicago. His beloved wife of thirty-seven years died in 1968, very near the time I met my own wife who recently died in the thirty-seventh year of our idyllic marriage. In some strange way I feel I know Norman Maclean. His voice calls out to me. I read him aloud, as I read and recite poetry.
Finally, in this new publication of the novelette, two short stories appear that I have never before read. I fully expect that when I get bogged down or trapped in one of the other books in my reading cycle, I'll pick up either Norman Maclean or Emily Dickinson -- or both.
Which thought brings me to my current struggles with self-discipline. For the first time in my life I'm finding it difficult to read. In fact, during the month of January I found it nearly impossible to read. I couldn't discipline my mind. As my eyes flew over the pages, I saw the groups of words and sent them to my brain -- or whatever one exactly does in the magical process of reading. Yet, within fifteen or twenty minutes I awoke to the realization that I was not processing the substance of the text. I did the mechanical part. But nothing hit and stuck.
In fact, I had no sense of what had been on the pages I was turning. It was as if I had no interest in what was printed before my eyes. Part of me was interested. I wanted to read. But I generated no comprehension. Scary!
I think part of the difficulty was that I didn't want to read. I wanted to WRITE. As I tried to analyze the problem, it seemed to me that the difficulty may have been related to my preference to write, which is largely a right-brain, creative endeavor. Reading is largely a left brain, highly interpretive set of processes. But it seems to me that decoding and composing take place in both sides of the brain. So! I became determined.
What I did to attack the problem was begin reading poetry. I chose poets I have always loved, read poems aloud, then recited the poems. Such was the focus of this activity that I was soon acquiring new poems through disciplined reading. I would read a line or two of a poem (I had never before recited), then immediately turn away from the page and recite those lines from memory. I performed these tasks in a methodical way, as if I were working out, as if I were doing repetitions of sit-ups, push-ups, chins, or any other sort of physical exercise.
Soon I was able to read again, my eyes flying across lines of print in two or three leaps. In fact, that's how A River Runs Through It came to my hand, though in the case of this book I read it aloud. I read it carefully, as if I were reading to a group of listeners. Soon I was reading a paragraph aloud in my public recitation voice. I then read it silently, in the process I customarily use when reading silently -- and rapidly. In fact, I was actively proving to myself that I could do it. I mean, isn't it true there is something attitudinal about any disciplined process?
Or is it true that aging slips in quietly and spirits our skills away?
Be assured: I will NOT slip "quiet into that good night" as I once told Dylan Thomas. I told him all that good stuff, including "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age. . . ." Nor will I permit my good-green age to slip away without a struggle.
This is also how I came to select the two books about aging that are on this list. I want to better understand the mental and physical difficulties of aging -- now that I've embarked on journeys in this final phase of my life. My approach to aging has perhaps been oversimplified until recently.
Customarily, I've treated physical symptoms such as weakness, inflexibility, and problems with balance as if they were injuries. I didn't ignore them. And I won't. I'll continue to work through
them with yoga, stretching, and targeted weight-training.
In fact, the opening chapters of Younger Next Year deal with poor physical condition -- at least in part -- as under-use-syndromes. By contrast I intend to fight aging every stumbling step of the way with vigorous physical activity and good nutrition. I'd rather be dead than lazy, undisciplined, fat-and-over-fed! As long as I can, I intend to regard my weaknesses as character disorders.
The third book is Dexter Filkins' book about our current wars in Southwest Asia entitled The Forever War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). The flyleaf of this book promises a look at daily life for fighters and hapless and victimized common folk in ". . .the deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage. . . ." I'm wondering how this book may ultimately affect my current Americans-Come-Home point of view. No doubt this book will lead me to others which may help me to better understand why we are wasting blood and treasure in a land where we are apparently unwanted.
The fourth book is fiction, the sort of book I haven't read for some years. It's Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (University of Chicago Press, 1976. Forward by Annie Proulx, 2001.)
You may wonder why I'm reading what appears to be a fiction book, when my penchant has long been non-fiction. There are at least four answers to this question.
First, Norman Maclean's books -- which he began writing in his 70th year -- are based very closely upon the lives of his family. Or at least he said so. In this sense they are authentic chronicles rather than fiction.
Second, I have read the book six or seven times already. In fact, I customarily read it aloud. It runs about 104 pages only. The story is gripping, not the least because of Maclean's poetic voice.
Third, Maclean was a renowned professor of literature at the University of Chicago. His beloved wife of thirty-seven years died in 1968, very near the time I met my own wife who recently died in the thirty-seventh year of our idyllic marriage. In some strange way I feel I know Norman Maclean. His voice calls out to me. I read him aloud, as I read and recite poetry.
Finally, in this new publication of the novelette, two short stories appear that I have never before read. I fully expect that when I get bogged down or trapped in one of the other books in my reading cycle, I'll pick up either Norman Maclean or Emily Dickinson -- or both.
Which thought brings me to my current struggles with self-discipline. For the first time in my life I'm finding it difficult to read. In fact, during the month of January I found it nearly impossible to read. I couldn't discipline my mind. As my eyes flew over the pages, I saw the groups of words and sent them to my brain -- or whatever one exactly does in the magical process of reading. Yet, within fifteen or twenty minutes I awoke to the realization that I was not processing the substance of the text. I did the mechanical part. But nothing hit and stuck.
In fact, I had no sense of what had been on the pages I was turning. It was as if I had no interest in what was printed before my eyes. Part of me was interested. I wanted to read. But I generated no comprehension. Scary!
I think part of the difficulty was that I didn't want to read. I wanted to WRITE. As I tried to analyze the problem, it seemed to me that the difficulty may have been related to my preference to write, which is largely a right-brain, creative endeavor. Reading is largely a left brain, highly interpretive set of processes. But it seems to me that decoding and composing take place in both sides of the brain. So! I became determined.
What I did to attack the problem was begin reading poetry. I chose poets I have always loved, read poems aloud, then recited the poems. Such was the focus of this activity that I was soon acquiring new poems through disciplined reading. I would read a line or two of a poem (I had never before recited), then immediately turn away from the page and recite those lines from memory. I performed these tasks in a methodical way, as if I were working out, as if I were doing repetitions of sit-ups, push-ups, chins, or any other sort of physical exercise.
Soon I was able to read again, my eyes flying across lines of print in two or three leaps. In fact, that's how A River Runs Through It came to my hand, though in the case of this book I read it aloud. I read it carefully, as if I were reading to a group of listeners. Soon I was reading a paragraph aloud in my public recitation voice. I then read it silently, in the process I customarily use when reading silently -- and rapidly. In fact, I was actively proving to myself that I could do it. I mean, isn't it true there is something attitudinal about any disciplined process?
Or is it true that aging slips in quietly and spirits our skills away?
Be assured: I will NOT slip "quiet into that good night" as I once told Dylan Thomas. I told him all that good stuff, including "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age. . . ." Nor will I permit my good-green age to slip away without a struggle.
This is also how I came to select the two books about aging that are on this list. I want to better understand the mental and physical difficulties of aging -- now that I've embarked on journeys in this final phase of my life. My approach to aging has perhaps been oversimplified until recently.
Customarily, I've treated physical symptoms such as weakness, inflexibility, and problems with balance as if they were injuries. I didn't ignore them. And I won't. I'll continue to work through
them with yoga, stretching, and targeted weight-training.
In fact, the opening chapters of Younger Next Year deal with poor physical condition -- at least in part -- as under-use-syndromes. By contrast I intend to fight aging every stumbling step of the way with vigorous physical activity and good nutrition. I'd rather be dead than lazy, undisciplined, fat-and-over-fed! As long as I can, I intend to regard my weaknesses as character disorders.
Could be I may very well blow out,
But I refuse to rust out or wear out.
Or give up!
But I refuse to rust out or wear out.
Or give up!
With your best efforts I'm thinking you'll experience your best to 100 and up!
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