Winter Light: On Late Life's Radiance

by Douglas J. Penick

196 pages, Paperback

Published February 27, 2025

About the author

For a long time, I’ve been committed to work that might help renew a culture of inwardness, particularly in reflecting on the relationship between society and nature. To this end, I worked on Emilio Ambasz’ visionary Universitas Project at MOMA in NY (which explored new alignments within the forces capable of re-designing the man-made environment). I then withdrew from that arena to study, practice and later teach Buddhism in the Karma Kagyu/Nyingma traditions. After twenty years, this evolved into making, with composer, Peter Lieberson, new pieces invoking various Central Asian epic traditions of spiritual and cultural renewal. The results were: King Gesar, premiered at the Munich Biennale (Sony CD), and Ashoka’s Dream about the Emperor Ashoka at the Santa Fe Opera. I’ve worked at presenting the nexus of loss and re-birth in a number of written and theater pieces centering on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (a series for the National Film Board of Canada -Leonard Cohen,Narrator), a piece at the Asia Society with Music by Philip Glass and a later one with Butoh master, Katsura Kan).

I then wrote two novels: A Journey of The North Star, an account, told by a eunuch-slave, of the third Ming Emperor’s struggle to re-create traditional Chinese culture (Publerati in 2012), and Dreamers and Their Shadows, about a revolutionary spiritual teacher, his erratic students, and their strange if lingering fate (2013-Mountain Treasury Press). In 2015, Hammer and Anvil Press published From The Empire of Fragments, a collection focused on the lives of the culturally displaced. This spring, Wakefield Press will bring out Charles Ré and my translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace in Rome.

Shorter work has appeared in Cahiers de L’Herne, Agni, Chicago Quarterly, New England Quarterly, Parabola, Tricycle and Kyoto Journal among many others .

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Folks, this is one of the best and informative books I have read in my entire life and I am not exaggerating.

In the proper context, this book truly is a life changer, or it could be. Also, I wish this book had been around when I was 20 or I at least read such similar material. This book is a roadmap to aging that would illuminate the future to the young and prepare people for what is certain to happen if able to lead a long life.

Douglas Penick so wonderfully (and painfully, as well) writes about late-in-life aging in such an eye-opening way. He clearly states early on, this is not a self-help book, but rather an informed and well-researched book on late in life aging, and which is further illustrated by featuring how the vastly artistic adapt when their creative skills are in decline.

I simply can't recommend this book enough, and that includes for young people, too. Some may think this is hyperbole, but if I had read such a thing when a teen, my life would be drastically different because it would have allowed me to prepare better for the future - but then again, maybe much of this is beyond the grasp of the young due mainly to other life endeavors.

[Harriet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and urgent and true. Thank you for this book.