Light on Aging and Dying: Wise Words

by Helen Nearing

A treasury of wisdom on growing old gracefully-featuring the words of Ovid, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry James, Carlos Castenada, Annie Dillard, Anatole Broyard, and many others-compiled by the renowned coauthor of Living the Good Life just before her death at age 91.

Genres: Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

Helen Knothe Nearing was an American author and advocate of simple living. She and Scott Nearing started a relationship in 1928 and married nearly 20 years later, on December 12, 1947.[3][3] The couple lived in rural Vermont where they grew much of their food and erected nine stone buildings over the course of two decades. They earned money by producing maple syrup and sugar from the trees on their land and from Scott Nearing's occasional paid lectures. (from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT -
RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT.
Dylan Thomas

THE WAY UP IS THE WAY DOWN.
Heracleitos

Helen Nearing compiled this fresh, clear and hopeful collection of time-tried aphorisms on aging and dying, as she lay awake but dying at the spiritually active age of 91.

With her equally active husband, Scott - who had shortly before packed it all in at 100 - she was the great-Grand-doyenne of the epochal American Homesteading movement.

What a lady! You can still see videos of their eternally-industrious home life together on YouTube, and I recommend that you do.

Helen and Scott believed in working their land tirelessly, and producing a bountiful harvest of common sense and food for their table - as well as for the enjoyment of others nearby, who may otherwise have gone without.

Their uncluttered, basic and frugal no-nonsense lives, far from the madding crowd, have inspired many new generations of young people to practice the same kind of lifestyle.

Inspiring, too, was Helen’s acutely intelligent taste in reading material. What an incredible library of books she must have owned.

While Scott immersed herself in writing studies of how our economic environment and our lives must move in a much more sharing and altruistic direction, Helen became an early follower of the nonsectarian mysticism of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Both being advanced liberal thinkers in the years when America was heedlessly dancing the Charleston and flinging itself into worldliness, they foresaw the yawning void ahead in the thirties and sought economic self-sufficiency, even while the lemmings around them partied on.

And this is a sampling of the words Helen Nearing borrowed from great writers in her vast collection - as their neighbours may have borrowed the Nearings’ time and resources so many times in tough times as well - to contentedly sum up a long life of sharing, in simple joy.

You know, all that glitters is not gold in our golden years. Unless we’ve constructed a fortress of spiritual self-sufficiency for ourselves - in the critical years when the cruel winds, as the fairy tale says, from the palace of the Ice Queen howl, and send a shiver of sharp uncaring ice into our hearts - we are doomed.

But Helen had built an enduring fortress from such lapidary words as the following...
•••

We live horizontally. We do not live vertically, probing deep and aspiring high in our unconscious.
Louis Anspacher

Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
Dag Hammarskjold

I think that the dying pray at the last, not “please” but “thank you”, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
Annie Dillard

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheering and hopeful than to be 40 years old(!).
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Without the awareness of death, one would be an ordinary man involved in ordinary acts (without) the necessary concentration that transforms one’s ordinary time on earth into magical power.
Carlos Castaneda

In many ways, it is the old that are to be envied by the young - they have so much less to lose that (they have more) commitment to the values.. which provide meaning to all our lives.
Abraham Kaplan

Age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.
Longfellow

I want to die with a premonition of death a week beforehand, with my mind serenely unshaken and free from attachment to my body.
Chuang Feng

For my part, I would like to die serenely conscious that I am dying... slowly enough to allow death to insinuate itself into my body and slowly unfold, so as not to miss the ultimate experience - the Passage.
Marguerite Yourcenar
•••

All in all, this is a very fine book.

Five full stars, for the book, its wonderful unerring taste, and for the inspiration and encouragement the Nearings gave so many of us...

Square pegs in a round hole, just like them!

May God rest the two of you, and reward you amply for the bountiful harvest you gathered for his granary!

[Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nearing spent over two decades collecting quotes about the interplay between aging, wisdom, spirituality, and dying. She supported her husband through his choice to control his own death by means of starvation. (He was 100 and felt as though he had lived a full life.) She then lived another 12 years as a widow. They had lived together for decades. He was a noted political theorist who lost his job because of his radical ideas. They moved to Vermont and adopted some of the habits of farmers. However, they both still read, wrote, and thought deeply about their life choices. (And note, they both received large sums of cash annually that helped them "live off the fat of the land.")

So in my mind, Helen Nearing was more of a pensive intellectual than a farmer's wife. Her book of quotes bears out her far-ranging reading habits. These quotes are drawn from several centuries, several continents, and several world religions. She also read 20th century texts about aging in an era when one's health fell apart sometimes a decade before one's life ceased. In that gap between full health and loss of life there are many writing about what it means to physically decline, what it means to die, and what it means to be an older adult who can still have purpose, vigor, and social connection in ways that differ from a twentysomething.

These are powerful quotes worth reading and rereading. I'd offer a sample, but I wouldn't be able to choose among so many gems. Pick up a copy and see for yourself. This is not JUST a hodge-podge of pithy sayings. This is evidence that Helen Bearing really wrestled with these topics. This collection is a witness to her ability to make a meaningful contribution through her 80s and into her early 90s.

[Sevenponds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Light on Aging and Dying is a collection of sayings Helen Nearing assembled in the spirit of her life following her husband’s death. The Nearing’s were New York City intellectuals who in 1932, during the worst of the Great Depression, walked away from city life to buy an old run-down farm in Vermont. With their own hands, they built their house, garden and diet around their (at the time) radical beliefs. The impetus for their life change had more to do with Scott, an economics professor, having been terminated for his “Socialist Pacifist” beliefs. They made a living by producing maple syrup as part of a local community effort they coordinated, and when it fell apart they moved to Maine and started all over again. They both wrote a number of books along their life journey and when Scott was just 18 days past his100th birthday, he died. He appropriately chose to end his failing life by abstaining from food, intentionally avoiding doctors, hospitals, pills or force-feeding. At the very end Scott was a pioneer of self-empowerment because of his beliefs.

[Continued]

Full SevenPonds Review:
http://blog.sevenponds.com/sharing-su...