TIME'S BOUNTY

Old age’s “compelling dramas.”

Weinstein has been writing and teaching about literature for six decades. Now in his 80s, he returns to the great works that have sustained him to write a guide to growing old with grace and wisdom. Aging liberates him. He feels no need to apologize for celebrating literary genius and its hold on human emotion. The late poetry of Thomas Hardy, for example—with its understated ironies and autumnal wit—inspires readers to live on past loss. He writes, “Even as death marks our inescapable creatureliness, it fuels creative departures.” Surviving the Covid-19 pandemic prompts a turn to T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets become a guide to self-reckoning. “Eliot articulates, exquisitely, the drama of defenses crumbling, of our later recognizing self-interested moves that had earlier, cunningly, passed themselves off as ‘exercise of virtue.’” Weinstein looks back on his academic career: one of “reckoning of literary values [and] teaching students how to recognize and assess those values.” Proust and Joyce, Faulkner and Dostoyevsky, come back to him. Like a man at sea in an increasing fog, the greats ring out as buoys guiding him to harbor. King Lear and Waiting for Godot take us to the edge of self-awareness. “Our greatest writers take us into the presence of what can hardly be borne—but can be written.” This is a memoir of professional privilege: Ivy League degrees, a Swarthmore career. Readers of less refinement may find the book (for all its brevity and seeming quietude) repetitive and self-congratulatory. But there is no questioning his sincerity. This is a book for his contemporaries in age and sensibility. If today’s students and teachers can get past its armchair judgments, they may find it, at best, sweetly elegiac.

A professor argues that great literary works can guide us to appreciate virtue, honesty, and self-awareness in old age.