The Socrates Express

13. How to Grow Old like Beauvoir

1:42 p.m. On board the high-speed TGV, Train No. 8534, en route from Bordeaux to Paris.

A blur of green—farmland, presumably—streaks past my window. On the horizon giant white windmills circle lazily in the hot, still air. Sitting across from me is a teenage girl wearing a sweatshirt that reads “Reality Sucks.” Ah, but what is reality? I’m tempted to say, if I could muster the French.

I look around and discover I am the oldest person within sight. This has been happening a lot lately. I find this sudden abundance of adjacent youth disconcerting. I can’t explain it. I’m certain it has nothing to do with me, though. I am not old.

A few weeks ago, I decided to write at a coffee shop near a university. Big mistake. I was awash in a shiny sea of youth: perfect specimens with perfect teeth, perfect hair and perfect, wide-open futures. They wore studied sweatpants and expensive headphones and greeted one another with explosive fist bumps.

Fuck them, I almost thought, but caught myself, for that is exactly the sort of thought a bitter old man would have, and I am not old. When the chirpy young barista announced my Earl Grey was ready and I didn’t reply because I was thinking about existentialism or Plato maybe and she had to repeat herself, I worried she concluded I was old, and I am not old. Not like that geezer who requested a copy of the New York Times—the paper version!—which the barista retrieved from underneath the counter, like pornography; or like that sad shrub of a man with a calculator—a calculator!—propped on his table like some ancient artifact. No, that is not me. I am not old.

Our train is late arriving in Paris. The conductor announces a twenty-minute delay, then an hour, then two. The young people on board grow restless, compulsively checking their watches, as if that will hasten our arrival. The older passengers do not check their watches. When the conductor announces, regrettably, a further delay, I twist my wrist and stare purposively at my watch, for, you see, I am not old.

Old age is a large, immovable object, and closer than it appears. Encounters with it are never gentle. You do not brush up against old age. You do not sideswipe old age. You collide with it head-on.

One morning Simone de Beauvoir looked in the mirror, as she did every morning, and saw a stranger staring back. Who was this person? This woman with “the eyebrows slipping down toward the eyes, the bags underneath, excessive fullness of the cheeks, and that air of sadness around the mouth that wrinkles always bring.” It couldn’t be her. Yet it was. “Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?” she wondered.

Beauvoir was fifty-one years old at the time and beautiful, but age, as she’d argue in her book on the subject, is in the eyes of those who behold us. She worried those eyes didn’t approve of what they saw or, worse, saw nothing at all. For the twenty-year-olds, she surmised, she was “already dead and mummified.” The final, piercing blow came when, not long after her mirror episode, a young woman stopped her on the street and said, “You remind me of my mother.”

Beauvoir felt confused, and betrayed. Time, once her friend, now schemed against her. She had always lived prospectively, “stretched toward the future,” planning her next great project or expedition, but now she was doubling back, looking over her shoulder at the past. Beauvoir had collided with her age.

You’d think she’d have seen the collision coming. She had obsessed about growing old since she was a young girl. She feared old age even more than death. Death is “absolute nothingness” and therefore oddly comforting, she reasoned. But old age? Old age is “life’s parody.”

Old age is what her longtime partner, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, called an “unrealizable.” An unrealizable is a state of being we inhabit but never fully internalize; only others do. We may look old, act old, and, by any objective measure, be old, but we never feel old. We never realize our elderliness. Thus, a dozen years after she collided with her age, Beauvoir notes: “I am sixty-three: and this truth remains foreign to me.”

There are few road maps for old age, and even fewer role models. Sure, there are plenty of old people impersonating young people, but they are role models for old people impersonating young people. They are not role models for growing old.

Simone de Beauvoir, novelist, philosopher, and feminist hero, is an unlikely candidate, I concede. Her writings on old age make for grim reading. She did not age gracefully. She aged reluctantly, combatively. She raged, raged against the dying of the light, and against those who denied her this rage, too. Yet in the end she made her peace with old age, came to accept it, and, though she’d probably deny this, came to love it.

I could use a role model, for I sense my collision coming. The warning signs are there. Just this morning a small brown spot materialized on my left cheek, joining its twin on the other cheek, its siblings on my head, and its distant cousins on my neck. It wasn’t there yesterday. I don’t think it was there. To be honest, I don’t look at myself in the mirror very often. When I do, it is more of a squinty glance than an actual look. Just enough visual data is imported from mirror to brain to confirm my continued existence in the physical universe but not enough data to register inconvenient truths, like this newborn spot. Now that I think about it, I haven’t actually seen myself in years.

Can you blame me? I am not a man of a certain age but an uncertain one. Older yet not old. What to call this awkward interval? “Late middle age” is not ideal, owing to the word “late,” but is far preferable to “early old age,” owing to the word “old.” And I am not old.

When I see an actual old person, I see what Beauvoir calls the Other: someone so alien we view him as an “object; the inessential.” He is old, I tell myself. I am not. Implicit in that statement is and I never will be. It is a lie, I know, but a useful one, for it allows me to get out of bed each morning, like Marcus, and continue the fight.

It is a losing battle, I know. Already my retreat has begun. When my beard first turned gray, I dyed it brown every week, lest I become a graybeard. Now one week slides into two, then three. I can envision the day when I surrender to the gray. I can see my collision coming. But not now. Not yet. I am not old.

My capacity for self-deception didn’t begin with the first wisps of gray. As the Roman philosopher Cicero noted, many of the deficiencies we blame on old age are really failings of character. Old age does not produce new personality traits so much as it amplifies existing ones. As we age, we become more intensely ourselves. Usually, not in a good way. The fiscally cautious young man grows into a miserly old grouch. The admirably determined young woman grows into an infuriatingly stubborn old lady. Must this character amplification always trend negative? Can we reverse the trajectory as we age? Can we become older, better versions of ourselves?

Most philosophers are curiously silent about old age. I say curiously not only because aging is such an important part of life but also because so many philosophers lived long, productive lives. Plato was still hard at work when he died at eighty. Isocrates lived until ninety-nine and wrote his most famous work at ninety-four. Gorgias made them all look like young bucks; he lived until 107, and worked up until the end.

Good for them, you say, but do we really need a philosophy of aging? After all, there’s no shortage of scientific research about “successful aging.” (Such a ridiculous term. Oh, now I have to age successfully, too? Great. Something else to feel inadequate about.) There is no shortage of books on diet, exercise, preventative medicine, and no shortage of glossy brochures touting the good life at “senior living communities.” What can philosophy contribute to the conversation?

Quite a lot. Philosophy doesn’t teach us what to think but how to think, and we need a new way of thinking about old age. The truth is we don’t really think about growing old. We think about staying young. We don’t have a culture of aging. We have a youth culture to which an aging cohort desperately clings.

Old age is not a disease. It is not a pathology. It is not abnormal. It is not a problem. Old age is a continuum, and everyone is on it. We’re all aging all the time. You are aging right now as you read these words—and not any faster or slower than an infant or a grandfather.

Philosophy helps us define our terms, à la Socrates. What do we mean by “old”? Chronological age misses the mark. It is meaningless. It tells us nothing about a person, says the philosopher of aging, Jan Baars. “Chronological age is not the cause of anything.”

The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is chronological time: the minutes on your watch, the months on your calendar. Kairos signifies opportune or appropriate time. Ripe time. When you say “it’s now or never” or “now’s not the time,” you’re speaking of kairos.

This seemed like the right time for a father-daughter journey. My daughter no longer finds my jokes funny (she insists she never did) and no longer hugs me, but we’re still on speaking terms. In an uncertain universe, who knows how much longer that will last?

Our children are like those rings arborists use to date trees. Empirical evidence of years passing. They grow, and change, and we know we are changing, too, even if it’s less obvious. As an older father, the rings matter more. I sense their concentric accumulation more acutely than most. I resist the temptation to postpone joy. Why not Paris? Why not now—before the rapids of adolescence sweep her away? The cincher was that Sonya, unlike me, speaks French. If this wasn’t kairos, I didn’t know what was.

I had it all figured out beforehand and, as Socrates warned, that’s always dangerous. In my mind, it would be a touching father-daughter journey to Paris. I pictured us exploring Beauvoir’s haunts. I pictured us discussing the precepts of existentialism while sipping chardonnay and Sprite at a Left Bank café. I pictured me and my thirteen-year-old daughter getting to know each other better.

This trip was my “project,” a favorite existentialist term. Projects enable us to transcend the circumstances of our lives and go beyond ourselves. But, Beauvoir warns, our projects are forever bumping into other people’s. Our freedom is intertwined with theirs. We are only as free as they are. My project—tender father-daughter trip to France—collided head-on with Sonya’s project: eat at McDonald’s and text friends back home.

I’m having trouble operating the ticket machine at the subway station. It’s not a linguistic issue but a digital one. I can’t seem to press the right buttons in the right sequence.

“Let me do it, Old Man,” she says. Sonya has begun calling me Old Man. As in, “Let’s get some nugs, Old Man.” She’s joking. I’m not old. Her fingers fly across the keypad and, boom-boom, our tickets are dispensed and we’re through the turnstiles in a flash.

We arrive at our destination: the Sorbonne. Existentialism is a fuzzy philosophy, more than most. I need something solid to grab on to, so I, a creature of place, zeroed in on the elite university where Simone de Beauvoir studied.

Sonya takes one look and declares herself unimpressed with “the big beige building.” Worse, we discover casual visitors are not allowed. We stand for a few minutes in the cold drizzle, gazing inside like children waiting for a candy store to open. At least I am gazing. Sonya is eye-rolling.

I reach into my satchel and retrieve a sheath of paper. A guide to Simone de Beauvoir’s Paris. It is a slim sheath. Beauvoir receives far less attention than Sartre, France’s philosopher-hero. There is, though, a pedestrian bridge across the Seine named after her. This sounds promising. Bridges, in my experience, refresh the body and stir the intellect. Also, they make excellent metaphors.

“We are going to the Simone de Beauvoir Bridge!” I announce, as if I were de Gaulle declaring Paris liberated. Sonya’s reply is nonverbal, a roll of the eyes as cutting as it is subtle.

We walk along the Seine, bundling ourselves against the unseasonable chill in the spring air.

“Dad,” says Sonya. “I have a question.”

A question! The seed of all philosophy. The root of wonder. Perhaps she’s wondering whether the world is an illusion, or how we can lead authentic lives in an inauthentic age. Or maybe it’s Kant’s Categorical Imperative—the notion that the upstanding person acts ethically regardless of circumstances or motive—that intrigues her. In any event, I am delighted, and poised to impart parental wisdom.

“Yes, Sonya. What is your question?”

“When did your hairline start to recede?”

“Uh, when I was about twenty-four years old, I think.”

“Why didn’t you just shave it off entirely?”

“I guess I was holding out hope.”

“That’s not how it works, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

Okay, not exactly a Platonic dialogue. But a start, I suppose.

As we walk, I take the initiative and dadsplain about existentialism. I dadsplain how it is a philosophy, as the name implies, focused on existence, and thus represents a return to the original, therapeutic mission of philosophy. Not a what but a how. How can we lead more authentic, meaningful lives?

The good news, existentialists say, is that the answer is entirely up to us. Not God or human nature. There is no human nature, only possible natures. Or, as Beauvoir said: “Man’s nature is to have no nature.”

This is incredibly empowering—and terrifying. We are, in the famous words of Sartre, “condemned to be free.” We yearn for freedom but also fear it, for if we are truly free we have no one but ourselves to blame for our unhappiness.

For the existentialists, we are what we do. Period. We are no more and no less than our projects fully realized. There is no such thing as love in the abstract, only acts of love; no genius, only acts of genius. In our deeds, we draw our self-portrait, one brushstroke at a time. We are that portrait “and nothing but that portrait,” Sartre said. Stop trying to find yourself. Start painting yourself.

We can become anything we want, I dadsplain. Just because you’re a waiter in a café, to use one of Sartre’s best-known examples, doesn’t mean you must remain a waiter. You have choices, and it is through these choices, consciously made and rigorously pursued, that we create our essence.

When I finish dadsplaining, I turn to Sonya. She had been listening quietly. I take this as a good sign—dadsplaining works!—but the look in her eye tells me she’s not buying it.

“So I can be anything, just by choosing?”

“That’s right.”

“What if I want to be a chicken? I can’t be a chicken just because I choose to be one. I can sit on eggs all day and I can cluck like a chicken, but I can’t be a chicken. Do you see me growing feathers?”

“Ah, no, but that’s because it’s not in your facticity to be a chicken.”

“Facticity?”

Facticity is another existentialist term. It refers to elements of our life we did not choose. You didn’t choose to be born in this country at this time to these parents. You have no control over your facticity. The good news, I dadsplain, is you can transcend it and go beyond your facticity, and beyond yourself, too.

“Facticity? Really, man? This Simone de Beauvoir is overrated. What about Shakespeare?”

“What about him?”

“He invented a crap-ton of words. Like ‘eyeball’ and ‘awesome.’ You couldn’t say, ‘Awesome eyeball, dude,’ if it wasn’t for Shakespeare. Think about it.”

“You have a point.”

“See, I could be the next Simone de Beauvoir.”

“You could. You’ll need some philosophical terms, though. All real philosophers have them. Let’s see. How about ‘awesome-icity’?”

“What does it mean?”

“Well, uh, it is the state of being awesome. It is the notion that everyone has a little awesomeness in them.”

“Do some people have more awesomeness than others?”

“No. Some people, though, are more attuned to their awesomeness than others. When you tap into your reservoir of awesomeness, it’s known as awesome-icity.”

Sonya says nothing, nor does she roll her eyes. High praise.

As we walk, sunlight breaking through the clouds, it dawns on me that we were just doing philosophy. Not reading philosophy or studying philosophy but doing it. We wrestled aloud with an important aspect of our shared humanity—experiencing awesomeness—and invented a terminology designed to illuminate it. I realize awesome-icity isn’t on par with Plato’s Theory of Forms or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but it’s a start. Who knows where it might lead?

At last, we reach the Simone de Beauvoir Bridge. It is, I think, an extremely philosophical bridge. You enter the bridge from one of three ramps, then, after crossing the Seine, exit the bridge from one of three additional ramps. You needn’t enter and exit on the same level; you can switch levels at any time.

I dadsplain how life, like the bridge, consists of a series of endless choices. We select one direction but are always free to change course. We never stop choosing our ramps, our essence, and to pretend otherwise is an abdication of our agency. The bridge is existentialism rendered in steel.

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what a hysterical pregnancy is?”

“Um, no,” I reply, not sure where she is going with this.

“It’s when you have all the physical symptoms of pregnancy, only you’re not pregnant. You’ve just convinced yourself you are.”

“That’s interesting, Sonya, but I’m not sure what it has to do with—”

“You’re having a hysterical thought. You think this cool-looking bridge is a metaphor for some big idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a cool-looking bridge.”

Philosophers are prone to overreach. Eager for profundity, they run the risk of intellectual hallucination; sometimes the shimmering light is not an oasis but your mind’s eye playing tricks on you, and sometimes the simplest explanation is the best. This is why Socrates believed philosophy is best practiced in pairs. The buddy system. You need someone else, another mind, to keep you on track. Sonya is my Socrates. She questions my assumptions. She sows doubt.

Simone de Beauvoir, lover of cafés, was born above one. The family’s flat had a balcony overlooking the Café de la Rotonde on the Left Bank. One day, when their parents were away, Beauvoir convinced her younger sister they should sneak downstairs for a café crème. “The utter daring! The audacity!” recalls her sister, Helene.

Beauvoir was, by her own account, a “bossy little girl.” Curious, too. She devoured books—all kinds, but especially tales of voyages, sparking a wanderlust that would stay with her. Then one day a teacher suggested she study philosophy, and that was that. She was hooked.

At a young age, before she was an existentialist, before the term existed, Beauvoir said, “My life would be a beautiful story come true, a story I would make up as I went along.” This is existentialism. There is no script to follow, no stage directions. We are author, director, and actor of our own life story.

Beauvoir passed the demanding agrégation exam in philosophy at the age of twenty-one, the youngest ever to do so, finishing second, behind Sartre. Beauvoir was so industrious, and humorless, one classmate dubbed her Castor, the Beaver. The nickname stuck. She wore it as a badge of honor. The word “work,” say her French biographers, “seems to have some magic in it, it rings out with a special brilliance, a special tone. It has been her password to life.”

Beauvoir was always working on something, often several somethings simultaneously. When she was in a serious car accident, she worked while recuperating in the hospital. During Sartre’s long illness, she worked on her book about aging. “My defense is work,” she said. “Almost nothing can prevent me from working.”

Philosophy, as I said, has mostly ignored the subject of old age, but with one notable exception: Cicero. He was sixty-two years old and in terrible pain when he wrote his taut and optimistic essay “On Old Age.”

“Everyone hopes to reach old age, but when it comes, most of us complain about it,” he says. Why? Old age isn’t so bad. Advancing years makes our voice more melodious, our conversations more pleasurable. “There is no greater satisfaction to be had in life than a leisurely old age devoted to knowledge and learning,” he concludes.

Bollocks, says Beauvoir. She had no patience for Cicero’s cheery assessment. She was determined to stare down old age, and not blink. The result: The Coming of Age, a 585-page tome that is tough slogging. Here is a sample:

A limited future and a frozen past: such is the situation that the elderly have to face up to. In many instances, it paralyzes them. All their plans have been carried out or abandoned, and their life has closed about itself; nothing requires their presence; they no longer have anything whatsoever to do.

It gets worse. The elderly, she says, are “walking corpses… condemned to poverty, decrepitude, wretchedness, and despair.” Beauvoir enlists anthropology in her bleak cause, noting that the Nambikwara people have a single word for “young and beautiful” and another for “old and ugly.” She’s got history on her side, too. Old people have been mocked for as long as there have been old people and younger ones to mock them.

A thought experiment: Imagine a woman growing up on a desert island entirely alone. Does she age? She will develop wrinkles, and inevitably health problems. She will slow down. But is this aging? Beauvoir didn’t think so. For her, aging was cultural, a social verdict rendered by others. If there is no jury, there is no verdict. The girl on the island will experience senescence, biological deterioration, but she will not age.

Beauvoir’s grim treatise on aging was surely influenced by her own circumstances. She wrote the book at age sixty, when her health, until then “embarrassingly excellent,” began to flag. Her step slowed. She was often out of breath. She sneered when anyone mentioned “life’s golden years.” She was determined to write about old age “without glossing it over.”

Beauvoir fell into a cognitive trap, I think, a version of Hume’s Guillotine. Not an “is-ought” problem, but what I call a might-must problem. Just because I might expose my rear end in public like Rousseau doesn’t mean I must. Just because older people might slip into despair doesn’t mean they must. They have choices, something you’d think an existentialist like Beauvoir would recognize.

No wonder people like contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum reject Beauvoir’s grim fatalism. “I don’t recognize my own experience at all, nor that of my friends of similar age,” Nussbaum writes in her own book on aging.

Beauvoir, I think, overcompensated for Cicero’s sunniness. She traded the Roman’s rose-colored lenses for dark sunglasses. They protected her from harmful rays but also blocked the light. And there is light. Old age need not be the dismal slow-motion death Beauvoir makes it out to be. It can be a time of great joy and creative output. And the best person to make this case? Simone de Beauvoir.

One evening, over a meal of Le Nuggets, I broach the subject with Sonya. Talking to a thirteen-year-old about growing old is like talking to a mermaid about mountain climbing.

“It’s just not my thing,” she says, as if growing old were optional, like playing pachinko or attending the ballet. Something she might do if the mood strikes, but she just can’t see it striking.

I remind Sonya she’s getting old, too, just like me.

“Yeah, but you’re getting bad old and I’m getting good old.”

“Good old?”

“Yeah, soon I’ll be able to go to high school, and drive.”

“So what exactly is the difference between good old and bad old?”

“Good old is getting closer to liberty. Bad old is getting closer to death.”

I pursue a different line of questioning. I explain how I’m trying to find an upside to aging. Surely there’s an upside, right?

“No, actually, there isn’t,” she says.

“What about knowledge? Old people know stuff.”

“Not necessarily. Actually, young people know more because they have the old people’s knowledge along with the new knowledge.”

I change tack, again. “What about memories? Old people have more memories than young people. It’s like having a bigger selection of Netflix movies to choose from. Surely that’s good.”

“Not everything is worth watching, Old Man.”

Then, sensing my despair, she throws me a bone.

“It’s a bit of a struggle, I can see. You’re writing about how to grow old gracefully but you don’t know how. Why don’t you just do a fliparoo and write a different chapter: How not to grow old? Not physically but mentally.”

It’s not easy, she concedes. When young people wear checkered pants or listen to vinyl records, it’s called “retro,” but if an old person dresses like a teenager it’s called “pathetic.”

So, I ask, if growing old is a bummer and society won’t allow me to act young, at least not without being brutally mocked, where does that leave me?

“That leaves you at acceptance.”

“Acceptance?”

“Yeah, you should write ‘How to Accept Being Old,’ or some crap like that.”

The kid might be onto something.

“So how does one accept being old? What would you advise?”

“You just go with the flow, don’t disrupt the brain waves.”

“Brain waves?”

“Figurative brain waves, Old Man, figurative. If your brain is telling you, ‘Hey bro, we’re old. Let’s chill out,’ you should chill out.”

What Sonya is suggesting is very Stoic. If the heart of wisdom is, as the Stoics believe, distinguishing what’s under our control from what is not, changing the former and accepting the latter, then old age makes an excellent training ground for Stoic wisdom. As we age, the balance shifts, from control to acceptance. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. Resignation is resistance masquerading as acceptance. Pretending to accept something is like pretending to love someone.

“Acceptance” appears infrequently in Beauvoir’s work. The Beaver was so busy choosing and becoming and working her projects she rarely had time to simply be. Projects can take many forms, though. Sometimes they demand beaverlike industriousness, but not always. Learning acceptance—not resignation but genuine openhearted acceptance—is itself a project, perhaps the most important one of all.

I am at the Café de Flore, on the Left Bank. Two compelling reasons bring me here. One: I’ve had my fill of Le McDonald’s. I can’t take it anymore. (I’ve left Sonya to her devices and her nugs back at the hotel.) Two: This was one of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s favorite cafés. They conversed here, drank here, thought here.

They wrote their books here, too—at first because the café, unlike their postwar apartments, was heated, and later because, well, they liked writing in cafés. Existentialism is a philosophy grounded in lived experience and nowhere is experience more lived than in a Parisian café. You couldn’t ask for a better laboratory of human failings and possibilities. That was true in Beauvoir’s time, and is true today. One glance at the café’s inhabitants reveals life in all its manifestations. The young couple swooning over their espresso; the older men embroiled in intellectual fisticuffs; the elegantly dressed woman, alone with her chardonnay and her thoughts.

Inevitably, café life seeped into Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophy. Consider the waiter, says Sartre, in a passage about the importance of authenticity.

A waiter is not a waiter the way a glass is a glass or a pen is a pen. There is nothing in his nature that makes him a waiter. He didn’t simply wake one day and say, “I am a waiter in a café.” He chose this life, and voluntarily succumbs to its customs. He doesn’t have to wake at 5:00 a.m. each day. He could stay in bed, even if it means getting fired. To view his job as anything other than a choice is to deceive himself—to act in “bad faith.”

Sartre observes the waiter more closely. He is a good waiter, a little too good, a little “extra,” my daughter would say. “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid,” says Sartre. “He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.” He is not a waiter in a café, concludes Sartre. He is playing at being a waiter in a café.

A lot of us sleepwalk through life like this. We confuse our social roles with our essence. We get “taken hold of by others,” says Sartre, and see ourselves only as they do. We forfeit our freedom, and lack authenticity (a word derived from the Greek authentes, meaning someone who acts independently).

This abdication is particularly true, I think, of the elderly. Others see them as helpless and inconsequential, and soon they begin to see themselves this way, too. They play at being an old person. They order the early-bird special and take Caribbean cruises and drive for three miles with their left-turn-signal indicator on because, well, that’s what old people are supposed to do. Hold on, says Sartre. Do you genuinely like the early-bird special? Is it a choice you made consciously, purposively, or one you simply slid into?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Consider retirement. After a lifetime playing a certain role—banker, journalist, waiter—we’re suddenly stripped of this identity. Who are we then? Maybe, like Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s novella, we come to the realization our life has been a lie—and, worse, one we told ourselves. Confronted with finitude, we’re more willing to discard our roles, like an actor stepping out of character as soon as the show is over. We might, like Ivan, experience a moment of liberation, even if it comes too late.

I decide to reread Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age. Maybe it’s not so dark after all. This time I mark passages with either a “B,” for bummer, or a “G,” for glimmer, as in glimmer of hope. Afterward, I review my markings. The “B”s outnumber the “G”s by a wide margin. Case closed, right?

Not so fast. I am a free and authentic being, acting in good faith. I can choose what to focus on. I cannot not choose. So I choose to focus on the “G”s.

Taken together, they form a much shorter but considerably cheerier book. I also read Beauvoir’s memoirs, all four of them, as well as several biographies.

What I discover is a story within a story, like one of those messages written in invisible ink, only visible when you hold it up to a certain kind of light. When I hold Beauvoir up to the light, I see someone who aged extremely well. Her fear of old age faded, replaced by quiet acceptance and even joy.

Beauvoir, proud French intellectual that she was, would never deign to compile a list of the “Top Ten Ways to Grow Old.” I, neither proud nor French, have no such qualms.

1: Own Your Past

What to do with our past? That is a knotty question for people of any age but especially the elderly. They have more past than the rest of us. Everywhere they turn, they’re bumping into their past, tripping over it. It takes up precious closet space. They might be tempted to discard their past, or donate it to charity. That would be a mistake. The past is valuable, and in two distinct ways: one therapeutic, the other creative.

“There is a kind of magic in recollection, a magic that one feels at every age,” says Beauvoir. The magic traces its roots to the past but blooms in the present. We always experience our past, no matter how distant, in the now.

Our past animates our present. Beauvoir couldn’t imagine a present life without a rich past. “If the world behind us were bare we would hardly be able to see anything but a gloomy desert.”

Recall is not replay. Memory is selective. It requires not only retention but forgetfulness, lest we end up like poor Funes, the character in the Borges story who, after being thrown from a horse, recalls everything in great detail, and suffers terribly.

We are, the existentialists remind us, free to choose which memories to activate. Why not recall the good? Why not be more like the ancient Greeks, who had a category for words expressing retrospective joy but none for its negative counterparts: guilt and regret?

There is another kind of recollection, one more creative. I call it the Great Summing Up. The old, standing near life’s summit, can see further. They discern hidden contours of their past, narrative arcs that eluded their younger selves, and see their life whole. They also begin to notice benign coincidences—“the meeting-point of many converging lines,” says Beauvoir.

As I begin to trace my own narrative arc, I, too, notice serendipities. The new friend who materialized when needed most. The dream job that appeared at precisely the right time, and the subsequent firing from said job, which wasn’t so dreamy after all. I’m reminded of what an Icelandic composer named Hilmar once told me: “I met everyone I needed to meet when I needed to meet them.” That is a wise observation, one accessible only to someone who has lived awhile.

In the Great Summing Up we don’t merely trace our narrative arc. We construct it, one memory at a time. Beauvoir describes it in tactile terms, deploying the language of the craftsman. “At present I am concerned with recovering my life—reviving forgotten memories, re-reading, re-seeing, rounding off incomplete pieces of knowledge, filling gaps, clarifying obscurities, gathering scattered elements together.”

Too much recollection isn’t good. We risk remaining shackled to our past selves: forever the heroic soldier or beautiful young woman. This kind of past is frozen, and a frozen past is a dead past.

Another hazard of recollection—one that trips up Beauvoir for a while—is the “what-if trap.” Looking back, she ruminates on choices not made, paths not taken. What if she were born in a different era, or to a different family? She might have fallen ill and never completed her studies. She might have never met Sartre. Such thoughts, she eventually realizes, lead nowhere. So she lets them go. “I am satisfied with my fate and that I should not want it changed in any way at all,” she says, answering Nietzsche’s demon with a resounding Da capo. Again.

2: Make Friends

The latest research confirms what Epicurus observed two millennia ago: friendship is one of our greatest sources of happiness. The quality of our relationships is the most important variable in the happiness equation. Beauvoir knew this intuitively. “My relations with others—my affections, my friendships—hold the most important place in my life,” she writes in her memoir, All Said and Done.

Friends matter when you’re young. They matter more when you’re old. In addition to the usual benefits—shared interests, a shoulder to cry on—friends link your present self with your past self. That’s why losing a friend is especially painful when you’re older. You’re losing not only a friend but a piece of your past, too. A piece of yourself.

Beauvoir’s friendship with Sartre, spanning half a century, was her most important, but another, begun much later in life, came a close second.

Beauvoir guarded her time jealously but was a sucker for entreaties from students. So when a letter arrived from one Sylvie Le Bon, a seventeen-year-old philosophy student from Brittany, Beauvoir readily agreed to meet.

They connected instantly and soon were inseparable. They saw each other nearly every day. They read the same books, saw the same shows, and on weekends went for long drives in the French countryside. They had season subscriptions to the opera and took vacations in Europe and beyond.

Beauvoir felt rejuvenated by the friendship with this woman forty years her junior. “There is such an interchange between us that I lose the sense of my age: she draws me forward into her future, and there are times when the present recovers a dimension that it had lost.” (Beauvoir bristled at suggestions the two were lovers. “We are very very very good friends,” she said.)

It was Sylvie who lifted Beauvoir’s spirits when she stumbled across a negative review. It was Sylvie who helped her navigate the world of young feminism. And it was Sylvie who rescued Beauvoir from depression after Sartre’s death.

She and Sylvie took a cruise through the Norwegian fjords. She began to write again. Says Sylvie: “It was as if she had put it all behind her. She talked about our relationship and said it gave her a taste for life, a reason to live. She said, ‘I don’t live for you, but I live thanks to you, through you.’ And that was the kind of relationship we had.”

3: Stop Caring What Others Think

Something curious and wonderful happens when we age. We no longer care what others think of us. More precisely, we realize they weren’t thinking of us in the first place.

And so it was with Simone de Beauvoir. She grew more sure of herself, more accepting of her idiosyncrasies. More humble, too. She had her Copernican Moment, losing “the childish illusion of standing in the very middle of the world.”

This came as a tremendous relief. We are planets, each of us, not suns. We absorb the light, reflect it. We do not create it.

This sort of de-caring helps explain why old age can be intellectually liberating. “By a curious paradox,” says Beauvoir, “it is often at the very moment that the aged man, having become old, has doubts about the value of his entire work that he carries it to its highest point of perfection.” This was true for Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Verdi, Monet, and others. No longer seeking praise, they were free to doubt their own work and thus, as Beauvoir puts it, “go beyond themselves.”

Consider the fate of one of Beauvoir’s last books. A collection of short stories, The Woman Destroyed, was published on her sixtieth birthday and universally panned. Critics dismissed it as “the bitter expression of an old woman who nobody wanted anymore, either in life or literature.” Beauvoir, unfazed, continued to write.

4: Stay Curious

The problem with the elderly is not that they act too young but that they don’t act young enough. They act like twenty-seven-year-olds when they should be emulating seven-year-olds. Old age is a time to reconnect with curiosity or, better yet, wonder. What is a philosopher, after all, but a seven-year-old with a bigger brain?

“None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm,” Thoreau said. Beauvoir never outlived enthusiasm. She never stopped wondering. She talked about cinema and opera like a professional critic. She read newspapers regularly and discussed world events with authority and genuine passion. She developed a new interest in the Americas. She despised Ronald Reagan. (Nothing keeps decrepitude at bay like a healthy and vigorous hatred.) She met with scholars and journalists, dispensed favors, and saw friends, usually in her trademark red bathrobe.

Pursuits she had abandoned a decade ago interested her again. At age fifty-two, she claimed no interest in seeing a world “emptied of its marvels,” but a decade later was on the road again, confident that “travel is one of the few things that can bring novelty back into our lives.” She subscribed to the playwright Eugène Ionesco’s formula: two days in a new country are worth thirty in familiar surroundings. Travel enabled her to remain open to the world, receptive to its beauty. On the road, she was at peace. “I live in a moment that embraces eternity,” she said. “I forget my own existence.”

5: Pursue Projects

Old age, Beauvoir believed, should rouse passion, not passivity, and that passion must be directed outward. Have projects, not pastimes. Projects provide meaning. As she says: “There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning—devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.”

Beauvoir was more politically active in her seventies than in her twenties. After decades of hesitancy, she lent her name to many causes. She protested the French wars in Indochina and Algeria, the American one in Vietnam. She intervened on behalf of imprisoned rebels, censored artists, evicted tenants.

She was following a long tradition of elder activism. Voltaire, so bold on the page, only translated that boldness into action late in life. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, at age eighty-nine, was jailed for seven days for taking part in an antinuclear demonstration. (The magistrate offered to exempt Russell from prison if he promised to behave himself. “No, I won’t,” he replied.) Benjamin Spock, the renowned American pediatrician, was convicted in 1968 on charges related to his protesting the Vietnam War. He was eighty years old. “At my age, why should I be afraid to make public protests?” he said. This is one of the advantages of old age: you have more to give and less to lose. “A blazing, fearless passion in an old man’s frail body is a moving sight,” says Beauvoir.

6: Be a Poet of Habit

We think of the aged as creatures of habit, and pity them for it. But should we? Beauvoir didn’t think so. Habit isn’t necessarily bad, and possesses a beauty of its own.

We need habits. Without them, our lives threaten to splinter into a million meaningless pieces. Habits tether us to this world, to our world. Habits are useful, provided we recall why we formed them and continually question their value to us. We must own the habit, and not the other way around.

Beauvoir gives the example of a man who plays cards every afternoon. He freely chooses to play cards at this café at this time. The habit has meaning. But if he grows angry because, say, “his” table is occupied one day, then the habit has eroded into a “lifeless” demand, one that restricts his freedom rather than expands it.

A habit is not a rut. Think of it as a container—or, if you will, a bag. A bag enables us to hold the pieces of our lives. This makes a bag useful. We get into trouble when we confuse a bag with its contents, habits with the meaning they contain.

In her sixties, Beauvoir embraced the poetry of habit. She did what she always did: she wrote, she read, she listened to music. But she did not read the same books, listen to the same music. “In their rhythm, in the way I fill them, and in the people I see, my days resemble one another. Yet my life does not seem at all stagnant to me.” Beauvoir owned her habits.

7: Do Nothing

There is a time for activity, and there is a time for idleness. Kairos. As a culture, we value the former but not the latter. Beauvoir and Sartre were certainly prolific, but they could occasionally stop doing and just be. Their summers in Rome were a time of expansive nothingness. Beauvoir set aside her projects and her endless striving and “bathed” herself in Rome. The Beaver at rest.

And though “acceptance” is not a word she used often, Beauvoir did achieve something akin to that. On the eve of her seventy-fifth birthday, she said: “There is something to this getting old after all.” Like Nietzsche, she had no regrets. “I have enjoyed everything as much as I could and as long as I could.”

8: Embrace the Absurdity

When I was growing up, a single cartoon adorned our refrigerator. I don’t recall when my mom posted it there. In my mind, it was always there. The cartoon depicted a mad scientist in a room populated by monsters of all shapes and colors. Sitting dejectedly alongside his giant laser machine, the scientist says to his assistant: “Twenty-seven years making monsters and what does it get me? A roomful of monsters.”

Albert Camus would chuckle at the cartoon. The French-Algerian writer was a leading proponent of a philosophy called Absurdism. The world is irrational. It makes no sense. All our accomplishments crumble under the unforgiving boot of time. Yet we persist. This is Absurdity. This is life. An elaborate stage production performed enthusiastically and repeatedly to an empty theater. Beauvoir was wrong, the Absurdists would say. Old age isn’t life’s parody. Life is life’s parody. Old age is simply the punch line.

How to respond to such absurdity? We can ignore it, for a while. Our Fitbits and 401(k)s give the illusion of progress, of meaning. We monitor calories burned, interest earned, and assume we’re getting somewhere. My life has meaning. I can see it flashing brightly on this tiny screen. But Sisyphus wearing a Fitbit is just as absurd as Sisyphus without one. More absurd, in fact, for he is seduced by the illusion of progress while the Fitbit-free Sisyphus is not. Absurdity quantified is more, not less absurd.

Interesting, but what does this have to do with growing old? Isn’t life just as absurd when we’re twenty-five years old as when we’re seventy-five? Yes, but at seventy-five we’re more aware of it. We’ve amassed enough accolades, saved enough money, to know how meaningless they are. Sisyphus at twenty-five still holds out hope that maybe, maybe this time the rock won’t roll down the hill. Sisyphus at seventy-five has no such illusions.

Sisyphus’s task, and ours, too, is to accept “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it,” says Camus. We must imagine Sisyphus happy. But how? How can a conscious, intelligent being find happiness in such a monotonous, pointless task?

By throwing himself into his task, despite its futility, because of its futility. “His fate belongs to him,” says Camus. “His rock is his thing.… Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

Beauvoir didn’t subscribe fully to Camus’s Absurdism, but she did embrace a “passionate heroism,” as she called it, delighting in the magic of work for its own sake. Standing in a roomful of monsters, she continued, until the very end, to create more.

9: Disengage Constructively

As we age, we cling more tightly to life. We must learn how to let go. We need to practice what I call Constructive Disengagement. It is not apathy, a turning away from the world. It is a gentle stepping back. You are still a passenger on the train, still care about your fellow passengers, but are less unnerved by each bump and shimmy, less concerned about reaching your destination.

Bertrand Russell, who lived until the age of ninety-seven, suggests expanding the circle of your interests, making them “wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”

Think of a single life as a river. At first, it’s narrowly contained within its banks, rushing past boulders, under bridges, 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.”

This, I think, is the final task of old age: not a narrowing of our waters but a widening. Not raging against the dying of the light but trusting that the light lives in others. The wisdom of kairos. Everything has its time. Even this.

10: Pass the Torch

What the French critic Paul Valéry said of poems applies equally to our lives. They’re never finished, only abandoned. Unfinished business isn’t a sign of failure. The opposite. The person who departs this world with no unfinished business hasn’t lived fully.

As our future shrinks, other futures grow. Our unfinished business will be finished by others. This thought, perhaps more than any other, takes the sting out of old age. As Beauvoir said: “I love young people and if in their schemes I recognize my own, then I feel that my life will be prolonged after I am in my grave.”

There are no guarantees, of course. The young generation might make a mess of our projects, just as we did the previous generation’s. We stake no claim. We are like travelers at an inn, just passing through, observing the “No Smoking” sign, leaving the room the way we found it, and perhaps dropping a note or two in the suggestion box.

I’m not ready to pass the torch. Not yet. I am not old. But if—no, when—I collide with old age, what note would I leave for my daughter?

Traveling with her on yet another train, I glance at this girl on the verge of womanhood. Earbuds firmly inserted, fingers flying across her smartphone, she doesn’t notice when I reach for my Old Man notebook and my Old Man pen, and write:

Dear Sonya:

Question everything, especially your questions. Gaze at the world with wonder. Speak to it with reverence. Listen to it with love. Never stop learning. Do everything, but make time for nothing, too. Cross bridges on any damn level you want. Don’t curse your Sisyphean rock. Own it. Love it. Oh, and cut back on the McDonald’s.

Or not. It is your choice.