Image by Nation­al Por­trait Gallery, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Advice on how to grow old fre­quent­ly comes from such banal or blood­less sources that we can be for­giv­en for ignor­ing it. Pub­lic health offi­cials who dis­pense wis­dom may have good inten­tions; phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies who do the same may not. In either case, the mes­sages arrive in a form that can bring on the despair they seek to avert. Elder­ly peo­ple in well-lit pho­tographs stroll down gar­den paths, ball­room dance, do yoga. Bul­let­ed lists punc­tu­at­ed by dry cita­tions issue gen­tly-word­ed guide­lines for sen­si­ble liv­ing. Inof­fen­sive bland­ness as a pre­scrip­tion for liv­ing well.

At the oth­er extreme are pro­files of excep­tion­al cases—relatively spry indi­vid­u­als who have passed the cen­tu­ry mark. Rarely do their sto­ries con­form to the mod­el of abstemious­ness enjoined upon us by pro­fes­sion­als. But we know that grow­ing old with dig­ni­ty entails so much more than diet and exer­cise or mak­ing it to a hun­dred-and-two. It entails fac­ing death as square­ly as we face life. We need writ­ers with depth, sen­si­tiv­i­ty, and elo­quence to deliv­er this mes­sage. Bertrand Rus­sell does just that in his essay “How to Grow Old,” writ­ten when the philoso­pher was 81 (six­teen years before he even­tu­al­ly passed away, at age 97).

Rus­sell does not flat­ter his read­ers’ ratio­nal­ist con­ceits by cit­ing the lat­est sci­ence. “As regards health,” he writes, “I have noth­ing use­ful to say…. I eat and drink what­ev­er I like, and sleep when I can­not keep awake.” (We are inclined, per­haps, to trust him on these grounds alone.) He opens with a dri­ly humor­ous para­graph in which he rec­om­mends, “choose your ances­tors well,” then he issues advice on the order of not dwelling on the past or becom­ing a bur­den to your chil­dren.

But the true ker­nel of his short essay, “the prop­er recipe for remain­ing young,” he says, came to him from the exam­ple of a mater­nal grand­moth­er, who was so absorbed in her life, “I do not believe she ever had time to notice she was grow­ing old.” “If you have wide and keen inter­ests and activ­i­ties in which you can still be effec­tive,” Rus­sell writes. “you will have no rea­son to think about the mere­ly sta­tis­ti­cal fact of the num­ber of years you have already lived, still less of the prob­a­ble short­ness of your future.”

Such inter­ests, he argues, should be “imper­son­al,” and it is this qual­i­ty that loosens our grip. As Maria Popo­va puts it, “Rus­sell places at the heart of a ful­fill­ing life the dis­so­lu­tion of the per­son­al ego into some­thing larg­er.” The idea is famil­iar; in Russell’s hands it becomes a med­i­ta­tion on mor­tal­i­ty as ever-time­ly as the so-often-quot­ed pas­sages from Donne’s “Med­i­ta­tion XVII.” Philoso­pher and writer John G. Messer­ly calls Russell’s con­clud­ing pas­sage “one of the most beau­ti­ful reflec­tions on death I have found in all of world lit­er­a­ture.”

The best way to over­come it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your inter­ests grad­u­al­ly wider and more imper­son­al, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increas­ing­ly merged in the uni­ver­sal life. An indi­vid­ual human exis­tence should be like a riv­er: small at first, nar­row­ly con­tained with­in its banks, and rush­ing pas­sion­ate­ly past rocks and over water­falls. Grad­u­al­ly the riv­er grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more qui­et­ly, and in the end, with­out any vis­i­ble break, they become merged in the sea, and pain­less­ly lose their indi­vid­ual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suf­fer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will con­tin­ue. And if, with the decay of vital­i­ty, weari­ness increas­es, the thought of rest will not be unwel­come. I should wish to die while still at work, know­ing that oth­ers will car­ry on what I can no longer do and con­tent in the thought that what was pos­si­ble has been done.

Read Russell’s “How to Grow Old” in full here. And see many more elo­quent med­i­ta­tions on aging and death—from Hen­ry Miller, André Gide, Ursu­la K. Le Guin, and Grace Paley—at The Mar­gin­a­lian.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish”

Bertrand Rus­sell: The Every­day Ben­e­fit of Phi­los­o­phy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncer­tain­ty

Simone de Beauvoir’s Phi­los­o­phy on Find­ing Mean­ing in Old Age

You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Har­vard Psy­chol­o­gist Ellen Langer Shows How Men­tal Atti­tude Can Poten­tial­ly Reverse the Effects of Aging

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

Each cul­ture has its own say­ings about the unique­ness and tran­sience of the present moment. In recent years, the Eng­lish-speak­ers have often found them­selves remind­ed, through the expres­sion “YOLO,” that they only live once. (The ques­tion of whether that should real­ly be “YLOO,” or “You Live Only Once,” we put aside for the time being.) In Japan, unsur­pris­ing­ly, one some­times hears a much more ven­er­a­ble equiv­a­lent: “ichi-go ichi‑e,” which some read­ers acquaint­ed with the Japan­ese lan­guage should be assured has noth­ing to do with straw­ber­ries, ichi­go. Rather, the say­ing’s under­ly­ing Chi­nese char­ac­ters (一期一会) can be trans­lat­ed as “one time, one meet­ing.”

The Bud­dhis­ti­cal­ly inflect­ed “ichi-go ichi‑e” is just one in the vast library of yoji­juku­go, high­ly con­densed apho­ris­tic expres­sions writ­ten with just four char­ac­ters. (Oth­er coun­tries with Chi­nese-influ­enced lan­guages have their ver­sions, includ­ing sajaseon­geo in Korea and chéngyǔ in Chi­na itself.) It descends, as the sto­ry goes, from a slight­ly longer say­ing favored by the six­teenth-cen­tu­ry tea mas­ter Sen no Rikyū, “ichi-go ni ichi-do” (一期に一度).

One must pay respects to the host of a tea cer­e­mo­ny because the meet­ing would only ever occur once — which, of course, it would, even if the cer­e­mo­ny was a reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled event. For we nev­er, to bor­row an ancient Greek take on this whole sub­ject, step into the same riv­er twice; no two events, sep­a­rat­ed in time, can ever tru­ly be iden­ti­cal.

One impli­ca­tion, as not­ed in the explana­to­ry videos above from the BBC and Einzel­gänger, is that we should savor what­ev­er moment we hap­pen to find our­selves in, how­ev­er imper­fect, because we won’t get a sec­ond chance to do so. And if it offers lit­tle or noth­ing to enjoy, we can find solace in the fact that its par­tic­u­lar dis­plea­sure, too, can nev­er revis­it us. With the past gone and the future nev­er guar­an­teed, the present moment, in any case, is the only time that actu­al­ly exists for us, so we’d bet­ter make our­selves com­fort­able with­in it. Though these ideas have per­haps found their most ele­gant and mem­o­rable expres­sion in Japan, they’re hard­ly con­sid­ered exclu­sive cul­tur­al prop­er­ty there. The Japan­ese title of For­rest Gump, after all, was Fore­su­to Gan­pu: Ichi-go Ichi‑e.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What is the Secret to Liv­ing a Long, Hap­py & Cre­ative­ly Ful­fill­ing Life?: Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Con­cept of Iki­gai

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

Marie Kon­do v. Tsun­doku: Com­pet­ing Japan­ese Philoso­phies on Whether to Keep or Dis­card Unread Books

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

Memen­to Mori: How Smil­ing Skele­tons Have Remind­ed Us to Live Ful­ly Since Ancient Times

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Sto­icism, the Ancient Greek Phi­los­o­phy That Lets You Lead a Hap­py, Ful­fill­ing Life

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Bertrand Rus­sell, the great British philoso­pher and social crit­ic, appeared on the BBC pro­gram Face-to-Face in 1959 and was asked a clos­ing ques­tion: What would you tell a gen­er­a­tion liv­ing 1,000 years from now about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned? His answer is short, but pithy. You can read a tran­script below:

I should like to say two things, one intel­lec­tu­al and one moral:

The intel­lec­tu­al thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed, but look only and sole­ly at what are the facts. That is the intel­lec­tu­al thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more close­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way, and if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er we must learn a kind of char­i­ty and a kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

No truer words have been spo­ken. You can watch the com­plete 1959 episode below.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Let­ter of Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing in the Year 2088

Bertrand Rus­sell: The Every­day Ben­e­fit of Phi­los­o­phy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncer­tain­ty

Bertrand Russell’s Improb­a­ble Appear­ance in a Bol­ly­wood Film (1967)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Oth­er Big Thinkers in BBC Lec­ture Series (Free)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More