Contemplating the End

Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End is indeed about old age, which means that it's about death, but it's a bracing book that avoids many of the cliches about same, especially given that Athill is 91 and thus might be expected to indulge herself in a few. For example, on the subject of last words, she notes that although most of the famous examples are probably "apocryphal," one "likes to imagine oneself signed off in a memorable way." She makes no bones about her regret that her sensual life is over and has a lot to say about the nature of same and her relationships with various men. Her account sounds honest enough so that one truly believes it is--a rare thing it seems to me given that honesty is difficult to achieve in sexual matters. She regrets what she terms "that nub of coldness" at her center and laziness. But she claims that she will stop at those two "because to turn up something even worse would be a great bore," besides which she's not sure that "digging out past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them." Amen, and bravo--there are far too many memoirs clogged with self-indulgent self reproach.
Athill also writes well about her lack of religious faith and makes some nice points about the difference between contemporary and medieval religious art, asserting that from the "seventeenth century on there is always a taint of sentimentality or hysteria in religious art, however splendid the technique." It is, she says, "the selflessness of [medieval] art that is magnetic" because the "person making the object wasn't trying to express his own personality . . . he was trying to represent something outside of himself for which he felt the utmost respect, love or dread." I'll remember this when next looking at medieval or Buddhist or any other kind of art made at a time of religious belief.
All in all I enjoyed listening to Athill's sensible voice. As for myself, I am 71, which she identifies as the moment one steps over the threshhold into old age. She describes herself as realizing then that she was "aground on that fact," a fine phrase for the realization that one is not middle-aged any more and a good example of Athill's willingness to accept the inevitable without succumbing to it more than one needs to.