Philosophy of Longevity

Last April 2021 I received an announced gift from Ediciones Siruela, the essay An eternal moment. Philosophy of longevity by the writer Pascal Bruckner. It was the long-awaited Spanish translation, by Jenaro Talens, of Une brève éternité (Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2019). The copy, so generously sent to me by Antonio Basanta Reyes (advisor to Editorial Siruela and CENIE collaborator), was already from the second edition, launched in March 2021, barely a couple of weeks after the publication of the first, which was sold out almost as soon as it saw the light of day. It was accompanied by an endearing letter in which Basanta acknowledged that he could not help thinking of me when he read the manuscript. These little details make any avid book devourer salivate. I promised to write a review as a thank you and here it is, at last. It arrives with an undeserved delay, but in time to commemorate Bruckner's visit to Spain on 10 November, when he will present his philosophy of longevity at the "Conversations in Salamanca" organised by CENIE, with the collaboration of FGUSAL, Interreg and the Programme for a Longevity Society. 

Many people resent the fact that a book review is a book review that is full of a biographical sketch of its author. In this case, it would be impossible to understand the nature of Un instante eterno, "an intellectual autobiography and, at the same time, a manifesto" (p. 18), without carrying out this exercise, albeit very briefly. Pascal Bruckner is a seventy-two-year-old Parisian writer, educated at the Sorbonne and the Diderot, under the supervision of the philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankelevitch - to whom he dedicates the book - and the semiologist Roland Barthes, respectively. The work I am about to dissect is the last of a prolific output that began in the mid-1970s. Bruckner has brought to the world some thirty essays, novels and short stories of fiction and non-fiction, and some of his creations have been adapted for theatre and film (see Lunas de hiel, converted by Roman Polanski in 1992). When he published An Eternal Moment he was in his seventies. 

Age seems to matter when it comes to introducing a book about how to make life worth living after fifty, now that we are - and will be - older for longer, thanks to science and medicine. Bruckner is at the perfect time to answer this question. However, it is not his age that puts him in that position, but his philosophy of practising death. Yes, An Eternal Moment is one of those books on the philosophy of practising death. The quote with which the essay opens, from Bertolt Brecht, is a statement of intent from the outset: "One should be more afraid of a bad life than of death". The ancients said that philosophy served to distance us from the sensible, material world and to bring us, while still alive, as close as possible to the intelligible world, to the beyond, losing the fear of transcending the flesh, the fear of the approaching end of known existence. Bruckner is practising death in writing his philosophical essay and invites us, the readers, to join him in this adventure to learn to value life through the awareness of its necessary cessation, even - or, above all - in the moment before the last goodbye. 

We should not worry about dying, but about dying in life; a risk that the new longevity has brought to the fore. We are all demanding - unceasingly - a certain meaning to life in order to make it worth living. That is why we are always gestating and exploring new projects, reinventing the path on which we advance and retreat, changing course in mid-sail, capsizing between ideas that are at the antipodes, reinventing ourselves, being reborn. We know what we need to feel good, that is, to avoid stagnation, which is alien to our nomadic being, to maintain the balance between carpe diem and planning for the future and to outwit boredom. Yet we often deprive ourselves, for the most absurd reasons, of this acquired right to resurface and feel good in the wreckage. Bruckner does not decipher why we do this, why we boycott ourselves. Perhaps this practice responds to the same purpose of chasing away the unbearable excess of stillness and over-adaptation. What it does do is to show - and dismantle - some of the clichés and prejudices with which we put up barriers to ourselves when it comes to making sense of existence. 

The worst are related to what is expected of each age period, those that give rise to ageism. Bruckner knows them well: that of the older man who assumes he is too old to try a change of look, that of the cougar woman who goes about experiencing carnal pleasures with a boy thirty years younger than her, that of the young man who acts like a sexagenarian, all day leveraged, instead of making the most of life... We are all discriminated against on the grounds of age at one time or another, but those who suffer most are especially those whom the society of the cult of youth tries to deprive of desires and projects when they have reached old age. 

Old age has its own limitations, like any other stage of life, which, in his case, are mainly due to health issues - "the body rules" (p. 34)-. But most of them are self-imposed and nurtured by society, which does not accept "senility, loss of strength and dependence" (p. 32) as a natural part of the life cycle. It is not tolerated that the will to live persists as we grow older and the - increasingly distant - end approaches. For example, we assimilate old age to a period of rest, contemplation, reward, passivity. This is a completely false stereotype: who wants to rest when you can make a revolution? Is observing what is happening incompatible with participating in its course? What kind of gratification is it that puts an end to our wanderings and forces us to be distant witnesses to the decline of our flesh? The "reasons for living at 50, 60 or 70 [are] exactly the same as at 20, 30 or 40" (p. 66), Bruckner explains.

Another turning point lies in the delicate issue of retirement. Beyond the fact that it is unsustainable, in economic terms, to maintain the current pension system in a society in which working time is close to equalling retirement time, it is hard to understand why the elderly are condemned to "the nightmare of compulsory idleness" (p. 42), when many of them wish to continue working as long as their bodies allow. This is something that, as I once said, has neither sense nor reason. It seems as if we want to punish those who, after a certain age, still have the desire to take on the world and prove their worth, just because of their packaging or their date of birth. Why prohibit the act of resurrection in new professional projects?    

The same goes for another of the key elements that give life meaning: love and sexual relationships. Bruckner rightly complains about how frowned-upon it is in our society to start a new life at a certain age, especially if it takes place with much younger people, and even more so if the one doing the scorning is a woman. Why do we deprive ourselves of the option of blossoming in a possible sentimental union at an advanced age? To limit the expression of Eros and Agape in old age is, in Bruckner's words, to let Thanatos win the game. It is suicide - we are killing ourselves! 

"The last chapter of a book can be as exciting as the preceding ones" (p. 29), Bruckner writes. Indeed, it must be, it has to be, especially if it is to last so many pages. But if we rob ourselves of the possibility of continuing to live a full life, in the end what remains is an amalgam of empty years, marked by tedium, listlessness, disillusionment and frustration, loneliness and a sense of futility, a living death. Although many of us still have time left to reach old age, we do not want the last chapter to destroy the book we have worked so hard to write. Some things have to change then. As a starting point, Bruckner recommends "renouncing [...] the imperative that equates age with the gradual extinction of our desires" and that contributes "to the impoverishment of existence" (p. 38). 

If "we have the same emotions, the same sorrows, the same crazy aspirations" (p. 101) in all times, why, instead of dismantling prohibitions and prejudices, do we do our utmost to fit into this canon of beauty and youthful attitude, submitting ourselves to successive operations and forgetting to enjoy life in order to extend youth a few seconds longer? These kinds of projects that strive for eternal life are flawed from every point of view and do nothing but contribute to the pathologisation of ageing in an unconscionable way. They are based on an unhealthy avoidance strategy rather than a responsible and realistic coping strategy. What is needed, Bruckner warns, is to stop chasing "the death of death" (p. 167), and thus to start avoiding death in life. 

Bruckner's book not only analyses the present reality, but also proposes formulas for healthy ageing. One must "grow old without allowing the heart to grow old, maintaining a taste for the world, for pleasures, avoiding the double trap of preoccupied introspection and disgust", letting the child within put us "in a position of wonder at petrified and fossilised life" (p. 86); "you have to keep climbing as if the ascent will never stop" (p. 90); "now; it is now or never! (p. 139). But these prescriptions are not only for the over-fifties: they teach us all, young and old, a valuable lesson about the importance of growing old, continuously, having projects and illusions, recognising the possibilities within our reach and maintaining the capacity to be surprised by the miracle of being alive, despite the obstacles of each age - or precisely because of them. 

Prolonged old age is the fate that awaits many of us, "no longer just the lot of a few survivors, but now the future of a large part of humanity" (p. 25). We are all in the same boat. Those who have grown old are the representation of the harbour in which, hopefully, we will ever drop anchor. In conclusion to this reading, I am left with the conclusion that intergenerational contact may be the key to mitigating the effect of the prejudices embedded in our education and cultural tradition, which prevent full and free ageing. Loaded to the brim with philosophical and literary references of all times, Un instante eterno makes us stronger in the face of a kind of vulnerability from which no one is exempt - regardless of age or status -: the fall into meaninglessness. If Bruckner is true to what he preaches, it is to be hoped, fortunately, that this will not be his last publication.