Word: beauvoirs
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...young or grow old-so far there seems to be no other option. Yet society regards old age as "a kind of shameful secret," complains French Novelist and Treatise Writer Simone de Beauvoir, now in her 65th year. Old people, she argues brilliantly and bitterly, are condemned not only to decrepitude but to poverty and loneliness. In the face of this, they are also asked "to display serenity" so that their juniors will be spared guilt...
With the same tough panache she showed in pioneering Women's Liberation (The Second Sex), Miss de Beauvoir now sets out to champion what might be called the Old Age Revolution. Characterizing the old as "the most unfortunate, the worst-used of all," she suggests that trying to take care of them properly would bring about a healthy moral and monetary upheaval in our society...
Seal Meat. In a fascinating spot survey, Miss de Beauvoir reviews how the old have fared in other places, other times. For example, among the Chukchee, a Siberian fishing tribe, an elder who outlived his time was given a farewell feast of seal meat and whisky, after which his son or younger brother slipped behind and strangled him with a seal bone...
...large, Miss de Beauvoir finds that the aged have been honored more in theory than in practice. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon pronounced old age a disease, and few men before or since have disagreed. As for the present, she writes: "It is common knowledge that the condition of old people today is scandalous." Any pretense to patriarchy has been mocked by the urban-industrial dispersal of the family; the attitude of children toward aging parents, she writes, is profound duplicity under a veneer of official respect...
...Mystical Twaddle." Turning subjective in the last half of her book, Miss de Beauvoir forces readers to confront the old age that every man contains within himself, "just as," in Rilke's phrase, "a fruit enfolds its stone." How does old age feel? To Juvenal, it was "a perpetual train of losses." To Jonathan Swift, it meant "a state of permanent anger." Even the master exulter of all, Walt Whitman, was finally brought, in his own words, to "whimpering ennui...