book: On Aging: Revolt and Resignation

book: On Aging: Revolt and Resignation | Jean Amery ...

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	• On Aging: Revolt and Resignation Jean Amery Indiana University Press, 1994 - 164 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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One of the great men of the 20th century

Amery was not French. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to Belgium and joined the resistance in the late 1930s. He was captured in 1943 and tortured in Auschwitz, but survived to make the experience the subject of his greatest work, published in English as "At the Mind's Limits." After the war he moved permanently to Belgium and discarded his German name (Hans Mayer), replacing it with the French-sounding anagram under which his subsequent works were published. Like so many survivors of Nazi torture, he ended his own life. The essays in this collection are not profound in the same way as his Auschwitz book, but they describe the workings of a brilliant mind confronting a universal experience. They are worthy of our highest respect.

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"On Aging", the first of Jean Amry's books after "At the Mind's Limits", is a powerful and profound book about the process of aging and the limited, but real defenses available to those experiencing the process. Each essay covers a set of issues about growing old. "Existence and the Passage of Time" focuses on the way aging makes the old progressively see time as the essence of their existence. "Stranger to Oneself" is a meditation on the ways the aging are alienated from themselves. "The Look of Others" treats social aging - the realization that it is no longer possible to live according to one's potential or possibilities. "Not to Understand the World Anymore" deals with the loss of the ability to understand new developments in the arts and in the changing values of society. The fifth essay, "To Live with Dying," argues that everyone compromises with death in old age (the time in life when we feel the death that is in us). Here, Amry's intention, as encapsulated by John D. Barlow, becomes most clear: "to disturb easy and cheap compromises and to urge his readers to their own individual acts of defiance and acceptance."

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