How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”

We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who...