Midlife
As I watch the gentle, rather silly new crime drama McDonald & Dodds, several of the actors seem middle-aged; but when I look them up on IMDb, I learn they are much younger than I am.
What is more disturbing, the actor who plays Detective Sergeant Dodds – the show’s “doddering old man” – is only fifteen years older than I am.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I didn’t intend to, but I seem to have begun a “philosophy of the stages of life” binge: not only Kieran Setiya’s Midlife, but also Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age and John Martin Fischer’s & Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin’s Near-Death Experiences.
Perhaps Dante is my subconscious inspiration.
Perhaps it’s just that these books are written for a popular audience, and reading them has been an easy way to meet my daily quota of philosophy.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I actually think the “stages of life” approach is overblown. Life is less like a journey, more like a series of Peanuts strips, in which each character plays out endless variations of a core individuality. Even the extremes of the natural lifespan – the beginning and the end – are more like waking up and going to sleep, or growing and shrinking, than like starting and ceasing to be. I was in a class in which the teacher surveyed what each philosopher thought happens when you die. What about Leibniz, someone asked. The teacher said, Leibniz thinks that when you die, you get very small. And then, of course, you grow again (Leibniz believed in resurrection). The “oscillating universe” theory of cosmology may not be fashionable these days – I wouldn’t know, I stopped paying attention after Carl Sagan – but an “oscillating self” theory seems plausible to me (until it doesn’t, until it does).
What is more disturbing, the actor who plays Detective Sergeant Dodds – the show’s “doddering old man” – is only fifteen years older than I am.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I didn’t intend to, but I seem to have begun a “philosophy of the stages of life” binge: not only Kieran Setiya’s Midlife, but also Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age and John Martin Fischer’s & Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin’s Near-Death Experiences.
Perhaps Dante is my subconscious inspiration.
Perhaps it’s just that these books are written for a popular audience, and reading them has been an easy way to meet my daily quota of philosophy.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I actually think the “stages of life” approach is overblown. Life is less like a journey, more like a series of Peanuts strips, in which each character plays out endless variations of a core individuality. Even the extremes of the natural lifespan – the beginning and the end – are more like waking up and going to sleep, or growing and shrinking, than like starting and ceasing to be. I was in a class in which the teacher surveyed what each philosopher thought happens when you die. What about Leibniz, someone asked. The teacher said, Leibniz thinks that when you die, you get very small. And then, of course, you grow again (Leibniz believed in resurrection). The “oscillating universe” theory of cosmology may not be fashionable these days – I wouldn’t know, I stopped paying attention after Carl Sagan – but an “oscillating self” theory seems plausible to me (until it doesn’t, until it does).