Tag: aging and the arts

  • Seamus Heaney

    Learning, today, of the death of Seamus Heaney, I first thought of his magnificent essay  contrasting two views of dying, “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin,” in his 1995 volume The Redress of Poetry.  Heaney speaks of Larkin’s stark poem “Aubade” as “treating as mystification any…

  • Music for the Aging Mind

    “Music is the healing force of the universe” -Albert Ayler, the late jazz saxophonist Coincidentally or not, on the day after my last post, “Two Zorbas on Aging“, was published, I happened upon a column by Zorba Paster in the Lacrosse, Wisconsin Tribune titled “Patients need help with noisy hospitals,” that discusses a recent study…

  • Two Zorbas on Aging

    Summer reading recommendations are a feature of many publications. I have two for readers of Over65. For some reason, I didn’t read the novel Zorba the Greek when I was younger. Nor did I see the popular movie or musical based on the book. Fortunately, our book club chose it recently. In retrospect, perhaps it…

  • “Still Alice” and the Ethics of Dementia

    Several friends had urged me to read “Still Alice,” a novel by Lisa Genova about a 50 year old Harvard professor and mother of three who develops early onset Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve finally read it. My friends were right. I’d urge you to read it as they had urged me.

  • Amour or Love Among the Ruins

    Nominated for five Academy Awards, Amour is a film about love and death. (Read no further if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to know who dies and how.) The setting is Paris, the language French, but any resemblance to a conventional French film about light-hearted romance or a ménage a trois ends…