An Ageing World: Simone de Beauvoir on Old Age

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1:06Today it's the final episode in our series about living in an aging world. I'm talking to the literary scholar and writer Lindsay Stonebridge about the person who is perhaps the most interesting writer of all on the subject of old age. Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist philosopher whose reflections on age and living in an aging world connect and challenge many of the things that we've talked about in this series. Lindsay Simone de Beauvoir wrote a remarkable amount about the experience of aging about old age. In a whole range of different genres, she wrote a book called Old Age, which is kind of an ethnographic sociological literary study. She wrote about her own aging and the fourth volume of her autobiography. She wrote about Sartre watching him age. She wrote about watching her mother age. Was she unusually preoccupied with this question? Or do you think we, in a way, we all preoccupied by it.

2:08She's just unusually writing about it so much. I think she was very unusual at the time for writing about it so much. As you said, she wrote her mother's account of her mother's death, a very easy death extraordinary text. And then she followed up with two, what would be cool today, Medipold's novels, but today never be published as Medipold's novels because they're so miserable. And even in the Mandarin's, and she's like 39, she's writing about aging. So it's always been haunting her the question of age. Prematurally, in some ways, she kind of leaps into it. I think a lot of us do do that actually. But I think also it's kind of useful to sort of set the context here because she was used to being youth. I mean, do you think about the existentialist Paris post-war, you know, the red coat, the red lipstick, the motorbike, the films, the cafes. She was used to simulating youth. And that lasts, as she says, about five minutes.

3:08And then you're suddenly looking ahead. So I think she was unusual, but I also think she was very... I mean, not, I wouldn't say prophetic because that was tricky. But she saw that age would be both an existential, a sociological and a political question in the future. And I think she saw that a long time before lots of other people did in the West. Yes, we're saying not only by our standards, was she not that old when she was writing about her own old age. So the book, Old Age, I think she was 62 when it was published, but she references herself as one of the old in that book, in the volume of whole typography she was 64. This is the early 1970s, more than 50 years ago, in the demographic story of our time, that's before the great aging in a way. And yet, particularly in Old Age, I was struck by... I think prophetic is... I'm fine with that as a word, because she says in 1972,

4:09we are in a world now where aging is going to be the central question of our time. And the number of old people is just going to grow and grow. This is at a time where most people worried about the population bomb, wrongly as it turns out, the idea that we are about to be drowned in all these babies. She's the one who's saying, this is the future. I think it is prophetic. Yes, I'll give her a prophetic. And she's merciless with it as well. I mean, I think that's why the coming of age, Old Age, is a book for our time. I mean, she's not going to sugarcoat this in any way. She's talking... She says, we're dishonest about aging. We are profoundly dishonest about aging. And I think if anything, we're now more dishonest about aging than we were in the 1960s and 1970s. And so she gets that... She also sees it as a political issue. If you think France, again, late 20th century, you have the post-war boom, you had industrialization, you had glamour, you had youth, you had the future, you had teenagers.

5:11And you did have the beginning of... You had the kind of growing welfare state in France and around Europe. But old people were right at the end of that list of who needs to be looked after. And her lot of her thing is saying, look, we were a veer Old Age, but look at the state of old people. I mean, there was compulsory retirement then. The poverty in both the city for old people, in the cities and particularly in the countryside, was apporning. She refers to the aging in her book, As Useless Mouths, which is a word phrase, as you know, which was used during the Holocaust. So she did that quite deliberately. She said, we are consigning people to misery. And we're lying about how civilized we are. We're lying about what a great thing the Fifth Republic is, and Europe now is, and how democratic it is. And the proof of that is our treatment of old people. And in that book, there's a surprising amount. Again, like with the Second Sex, not having read it before. If you're not used to it, these are really detailed, scholarly,

6:14well-researched, historical accounts of the phenomenon that she's writing about. And in this book, a lot of it is about other societies other times. And one of the things I was struck by, she says, as you just mentioned, that we are duplicitous about old age. And she describes earlier societies where they tend to go one way or the other. They either revered it, or they left the old people to die. And she's implying we pretend that we're revering them, but we're actually doing the other. At least they were honest, in those ancient societies where the old were considered to be an incumbrance. They didn't sugarcoat it. They left them out on a hillside to die. But in other ancient societies, they did rever them. They gave them authority and power. We pretend that we respect old age, and we just hide it away. And she does, I think, say we French. I mean, at various points, implication is there's something particularly French about this. And it did remind me of that notorious summer,

7:15hot summer, nearly two decades ago in Paris, where it turned out that the less than old left the city in an unbelievably hot summer for their usual August holidays came back to find the old people dead. And I remember thinking of the time that's very French. And now it feels like, again, it was a harbinger of all of our futures. I mean, there's so much to go back to the second sex. I mean, people think when they see some under-boveoir on Instagram, she's a sexy, bitty person. But actually, she is a formidable scholar. So this is a way to tone, as you say. And the comparison with the second sex is absolutely right. I mean, people don't know that she did two times. She's set aside a long period of her time to do that level of research, ethnography, history, literature, philosophy. I mean, it's massive. As she did it twice, she did it once with the second sex and once with old age. And she puts the two together. She says, well, yeah, I was a woman. I wanted to understand the state of being a woman. I was on the threshold of age. I want to understand that. This is what you do.

8:16And one way, this is why we need the humanities. The social science is to do this kind of work. But why is she's doing it? One of the reasons is the same as the second sex. It's demystification. So the more knowledge we can find out about this thing we call gender or age or whatever. The more relativistic judgments we need to make, the more things seem not natural or sacred or whatever, the more we can make comparisons. And there's a lovely story that she tells and when she first started to study old age, she went to the biblioteque national, which is never the coziest place to work in the first place. Certainly, it wasn't then. And there was nothing all know people. There was just nothing there. So she had a friend, I had a wife with her friend, called Lady Strasse, who's the great ethnographer. And I've got a really good life in the college of France come and play. So one of the reasons why the ethnography is so good in this book, is because she's been playing in Lady Strasse's archive, which was a legendally huge, massive thing. And she was doing that to demystify the experience of a to make comparisons, to denaturalise what we think of as inevitable.

9:17You know, every time someone says, oh, it was her time. And actually she's there. Actually, behind those sentiments, there's all this. Is that clear? The same. But she also says, which is an existential point, and one that abuts on aging. We become who we are, gender, black, old, through what she calls a plurality of experiences. And the phenomenologist's task is to describe those experiences, so we can make sense of where we are amidst that. But then she also says, the trouble with age, it's not like gender, race or class. Old age just happens. She's not going to do anything to change. When you might, you know, feminist emancipation, decolonial emancipation, these are the things you can do stuff about. You know, and this is where we are now, which I think is in a more profound state of denial than we were 50 years ago. Only the extremists will deny the fact of aging. It just happens. So you need a phenomenological account of this thing that happens without will.

10:20It is, as you say, a fact. And she writes about it as a fact, her own aging, Sartre's aging, her mother's aging. I mean, these are things that she experiences and she tries to be dispassionate about them. But she's also writing about it as an existentialist, philosopher. And old age is the other. I mean, that is a phrase she uses. Sartre used it. There's a famous interview with Sartre at 70 where he talks about old age as the other. I think I'm right in saying you're going to have to, if I get this wrong, I get a bit. I feel like I'm on shaky ground when I try existentialism. But it feels like she's saying, though this is a bodily phenomenon. It is still a category which is essentialized by people. And the internal experience of it is always at odds with the way in which you are described. So you are told you are old and it's a category and it relates to things that are happening to you and happen to all of us. And yet seen from the inside, you never experience it in the way that you are told it is a fixed category. And so a lot of her writing feels like it's about the difference between,

11:20and this is a commonplace observation. People say I don't feel. I mean, people are always saying I don't feel. I look in the mirror, I see somebody 75, but I feel 25. This is like the existentialist philosophers understanding of that. And it's the way age is the truth of the existentialist putting. I mean, existentialism starts with the kind of sense that the core of being is nothing. Existentialists like Beauvoir and Arant and Sartre love this because I think this is the way for you have to be able to accept that. But then there's this other stuff, the facticity, how you're seen, how you're perceived, worldly living. And those two things are always intention. And if you're appropriate, it's essential, you're going to struggle to overcome your facticity. But with age, nothing becomes rather literal at that point. But the truth of our kind of being in different spaces at the same time is particularly apparent in old age and is also she says, and I think again, this is incredibly prophetic is why we can't tolerate age. It's not just the vulnerability and death and things like that.

12:23It's this in terrible sense of the nothingness that is actually revealed and somehow you're going to be objectified, whatever, whatever you put in place. So having said she's profiting, I want to suggest two ways in which it feels like 50 years ago is a long time ago compared to now. Two things that just reading her writing on this and it is, I mean, I recommend it to anyone. It is unbelievably bracing, apart from anything else. But one was her assumption that the great injustice of aging is that our bodies age faster than our minds. In relation to Sartre, that's your one example of it, but that she sees around her, these people who are still her friends, still capable of thinking, but their bodies are letting them down. And I'm not saying that's turned around now, but one is much more likely to hear now in an age where medicine can keep our bodies going forever. The great injustice of aging is you see people

13:25who look healthy and in some ways are healthy, but the great tragedy of their lives is dementia, their minds have gone. And there is very little of that in her account. The people around her, and they are aging by our standards relatively young in their 70s, it's sort of like in your 70s, your body's just going to let you down. Sartre goes blind, he becomes incontinent, but he's still thinking these thoughts and he can't read, but his brain is still there. And that to me, I'm not saying it felt dated, but it felt like that was a different version of our 21st century anxieties. Yeah, I think that's so true. I think you about the moment when Iris Murdoch died, and John Bailey took out some of the famous film, Iris, was the moment when we culturally saw that, because it was Iris Murdoch who became patient ex for contemporary dementia, and it burn at 11, the conservative thinker had dementia at the same time as she did Margaret Thatcher, and there wasn't that kind of

14:26fixation, and it probably was because Iris Murdoch was a woman, and she was a philosopher. And so the pathos of that moment of this great philosopher suddenly sitting there in her woolly tights, grinning at Tally Tervis, was I think the moment in our culture where that we became conscious of that moment, that our brains would go, and our bodies would be kept alive. So the question becomes very different, and also questions very different, because we still rely on things like reason and rationality to make more decisions about aging and dying, and you cut that out. There's no surprise that our generation and below what people fear, even more than cancer now is Alzheimer's. That's the number one, as you're getting old, what's the thing you worry about most? It's not stroke, heart attack, cancer now, it's Alzheimer's. And the question of what we then how we care for people with our assignments, which is so interesting. I mean, what we're just so infuriated about the Murdoch example is that that question was kind of closed down, because she became a symbol of pathos, whereas, you know, a lot of people who've got earlier our assignments,

15:29and now doing really interesting work, I mean, actual work, about the experience, what happens to your mind? I mean, they can talk about it, they can, early stages, they can describe it. And to me, intellectually, that's where we need to, you know, we need to understand what it means to disappear in your mind. And these people are telling us we're just not listening to them. That image of Iris Murdoch in the film trying to write, and the words not making sense on the page, giving a TV interview and blanking. And then you have both while writing about Sartre, Sartre describing his old aging. And the image there is he has to be read to. His mind is still completely active, but he can't see the words on the page. He has to be read to. In the interview that he gave on turning 70, saying he couldn't read anymore. And this was, you know, the great loss of his life. And he was asked, what are you going to do? He said, they're going to make TV programs. I'm going to give interviews on TV, because I can still do that. It's in direct contrast to the, and it's like these iconic images of writers, one, he can't see, but he can think, the other,

16:32she can see, but she can't think. Both I would say, as will nearly every age sociologist in historian, that, you know, that a really bad thing about aging is where we generalize. We see this in the boomer discourse for a start. But actually, aging population are some of the most diverse people by definition, because we're unable to think about age and dying. We tend to homogenize the question of age. And it's very interesting. Both were made a film with a woman called Mariana Ahern, Swedish filmmaker, based on this book, based on a book on old age called A Walk in the Country of the Old. And it's a really fascinating film. And that certainly needs to be brought out of the archive and looked at it again. And you see in the film things you don't see so much in the book, which is like the connection between old age and poverty. So all the way through, both are a character in this film. And she's the lucky one. You see her in her apartment with all her trinkets about where she's been and her books and her radio, and she's going out with her friends. And then they compare, you know, they go down to non-taire where there's this huge old people's

17:37hospital. I mean, it's something, some should make a dystopian movie about the old people's hospital in non-taire. It's grim beyond belief. And there's segregated wards, public bathing, and all-round non-taire, they're banned from the municipal park. Oh, there's no old people. Partly because the old people are nothing to do so they're going, and getting drunk, or they're in a local cafe. So they're being really disruptive. The film compares that. It compares, you know, both are with a woman who's been in her flat six months because she's had a fall and can't move, literally dying in squalor. Or she goes out to the countryside where old age poverty actually is still quite extreme in France, which is, you know, every time he could play in about the French and their pensions, they're doing it with a live memory of what it looks like to be really poor and old about the suffering there. Then you really get a picture. She's not just talking about old people. She's talking about all the divisions, class and gender that are already in society become amplified in old age. It's intensely moving film as well. The last scene shows an old woman being

18:42scootered through, I think it's sort of the harb, it's somewhere on the coast. On a scooter with a big picture of Charlie Taplin on the handlebars and her grandson is driving, but it looks like she is, she's got this sort of headscarf on and she's just sort of giving this other vision. It's like that wonderful film made at the same time, 1971, I think Harold and Maud about a 19 year old has a love affair at the 79 year old and they do the same thing. It seems to me like the other difference the other way in which it's not exactly dated, but it feels like it comes from an earlier time. As you say, she is very eager to emphasise the variety of the experience of aging, but this is primarily social or economic, must with the rich or poor man or woman. The physical experience is coming for all of us and in a way it's that classic view that the physical experience is the great equaliser. In the end, you can delay it a bit, you can ameliorate it, you can live in much more comfortable surroundings. I'm increasingly struck in our world how the physical experience is the great inequality of our time and that feels different in

19:51that people simply are not aging in the same way because of medical advances, because money can actually buy you health. I think we all have this thing that you meet someone who is 75, you meet someone else who's 75 and it's not just one is rich, one is poor, one is man, one is woman, but one is old and one isn't. I mean that in a physical sense, people of the same age look like they could be each other's parents and children. I think for her one of the consolations in a way is that it was the great equaliser and even that now we've lost. I think what's happened with age in our time when someone writes the equivalent old age for our time, it's going to be very interesting. Book is sometime around the 80s positive aging came about. I mean, partly because of both our book and in the US you had the great panthe movement who by the way is still going pretty down impressive. There was a lot of sort of pro-aging stuff as the generation of activists got old, but that also coincided in Europe and in the US with the withdrawal of the state in terms of care,

20:54in terms of wealth, orism in terms of provision. And so you get this sort of positive aging thing happening at the same time as the state is pulling away from questions of social care. So when we talk about social care today, we should be doing a lot this week because people don't really think it refers to them. I think it refers to other people in some ways they're right because there's this positive aging message. It was basically, I mean, Jane Fonda 1982, that exercise video. She was in her 40s. This was the beginning of saying, how you age is up to you. If you're going to get really old and incontinent and really bad, that's your fault because you did not do your weight training. You did not do your poor Pilates. You did not eat your damn beans. Sometimes because I've been writing a book on age. So Instagram thinks, you know, you're really into old women and it's like a nightmare. If a Martian came and said, why are you torturing your old running? She got a, this is 87. There's this woman kind of climbing a mountain or doing a marathon. The Martian was saying, why are you torturing your old people? And the odds would be so we don't have to kill them so they can keep fit and they can keep going. And it's bloody exhausting because

21:58the crucial body is failing at the same time. When we get old, it'll be our fault that we just didn't try hard enough. And then you've got mass inequality, which came in covert when you saw or you didn't see the whiteboard incident where someone had written, who should we not save and when you damn well, who that was. It was the people in care homes, the people in care homes run by private equity. There are no one wants to end up in. It's completely schizophrenic gauging the moment. The one hand there, the, you know, the war party ladies. And this is what 65 looks like. And then you've got this kind of real problem of what we call social care, but actually is about dying, about vulnerability, about our responsibilities to one another. There's a great moment in the old age book. We're both, I think this again is very impressive. It's, I mean, aging is the political question of our time because the core of our politics is always who speaks for who? And every liberal politics, every democratic politics is about I speak for myself. I pay

23:01my taxes. I speak for myself. I vote. I speak for myself. Liberation politics. I speak for myself as a woman, as a repressed minority, as, et cetera. But with old people, there will come a point where someone else is speaking for you. And that's kind of the political black hole, if you like. And they've got no reason. It's not like, yeah, we always speak for children. So that's an equivalent up to a point. But we do so because we know that they're going to speak speaking for us. Maybe there's a future there. But there's a kind of black hole around aging, which is, she says quite clearly, there's no aging liberation movement. I'm not going to fight for the right to have my failing liver. Aging is not a form of political emancipation in the terms of our culture. So the question always, and it's a question of our time, it's like who speaks for people who can't speak for themselves? And it feels to me that's part of this great inequality as well, because even among the very old, the ones who are physically healthy, better off do continue to speak for themselves, do continue to dominate our democratic politics, do continue to say you're

24:02not taking my pension, you're not taking my house, you're not taking this, not taking that. And so within the old, a big category in itself, there is a big divide between the ones who are not simply still vocal, but increasingly vocal. And the many people who have to be spoken for and are often forgotten. The Boomer Discourse, which is actually a discourse about wealth inequality, and it's the biggest wealth inequality and it's unsustainable. We're just mad, we're doing this. But within that, you know, you could say that 27% of single women over 65 are below the poverty line in Britain. So if you turn someone says Boomer Discourse to them, they're going sorry, and it's so divided, partly because we think in political athletes, these days, we can't actually see that. Yeah, so when people talk about the triple lock on pensions or pensions in general, and they think it's a category, the old is a category, pensions is a category, the politics of it is always going to open up as many divisions as it closes down. So I want to ask you now, so I said at the beginning,

25:07both while in this remarkable range of registers about aging. So one of them was internal. So we've been primarily talking about the writing, some of it watching others, Sartre, her mother, some of it, ethnographic, sociological, political. I think we both feel in many ways prophetic. But she wrote about her own experience of growing old. And again, it needs to be said, she wrote about it when by contemporary standards, she wasn't that old, 62, 64. But it is still fascinating. And she's very, I think she's honest and she's reflective. She's honest about her own privilege. I mean, she says, I've had this amazingly lucky life, but she's also baffled by it. I mean, she's baffled by many of the aspects of it about the pace at which it happens, how you feel no different. I think she says from sort of 54 to 64. The big difference, she says, is not how you view your own age, but how you view other people's age. So she says, you know, the biggest difference in her life is not how old she feels,

26:07but how she views women of 40. She used to view them as old and now she views them as young. She others them. What's your takeaway from the internal account? What are the things that strike you? Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. And the topic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at clawd.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking, that's clawd.ai slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Subaru. You know that place your mind always wanders to? The lake, the mountains, the homes of the people you love most. The completely redesigned 2026 Subaru Outback is built to help you get there. With legendary capability, standards and metrical all-wheel drive and the confidence to go further. The 2026 Subaru Outback love never looked so good. Visit Subaru.com slash Outback to learn more.

27:12It's massively moving. She says in the Mandarin, back to Mandarin, she said, everyone gets so old at the same age, 40. I have to remember, extension and feminism was so new and they were her life, and they were both discourses about becoming. Both discourses about love of life, actually. Nothingness at the center. Patriarch, she was demolished in We Go Girls. And she really embraced that. And she says, I think it's an all said and done, I can't remember. In the end, I realized how much I was cheated. She feels sort of cheated by the experience of age. She just couldn't carry on becoming and becoming and becoming. There'll be this moment of loss. I think she found that really difficult because she loved life. There's a very moving moment in a very easy death where she colludes with her mother with the idea that her mother's not dying. And you think, this is someone to bone for. For God's sake, she just tells truth to everything, all the time. She's merciless. And she says, Rinsh, she did it because it affirmed, and they

28:14had this difficult relationship. It affirmed her love of life, which I share. And so this is sort of tenacious. I mean, the other person who does it so beautifully is Jean-Genez, Prisoner of Love, which he wrote in his 60s. And where he goes out, joins the Mujahideen in Jordan and Palestine in his 60s and talks about their future and the future of revolution, blah, blah, blah. And he says, I can't help it. I'm a Prisoner of Love. I still, we still have this capacity to think about a future, and joy, and love, and dammit. Yeah, it's that realisation. She also has, I think I can't remember where it is. It's wonderful expression where you always miss the moment of your life. And she's, it's like a mathematical equation. It's like the X. And you suddenly realise that it's gone and you weren't there. It was kind of happening without you being present to it. She also says that one of the things that comes to you as you age, as you become old, is a sense of how completely contingent your life was. It was just a series of chances. And you see all these paths not taken. If this hadn't happened to me as a child, and she

29:17writes about it herself, her own life, the accident by which she became a world famous writer and philosopher meeting Sartre, the rest of it. It's completely contingent, and yet it doesn't feel like that at all, because it's your life. It's not like you have any experience of the paths not taken. So you have this completely double experience of age, which is it's all random and none of it is. And what's left is narrative. And we very interestingly, before she died, Hannah Rant had been reading reviews of Beauvoir's book and rereading Cicero because she was like a lot of people interested in extantism. She was interested in the Stoics of teachers that we must respond to what was given us. I mean, they're the great beginners of contingency. And she was always rival with Beauvoir. She was going to write a book on old age, which would be I imagine for what else she was writing a celebration of contingency. But the political pathos of that is as contingency and they're the things you can't control. And our culture is so into control.

30:20The letting go that comes of age, particularly impacts the woman you people say, she let herself go. And actually aging is letting yourself go is so difficult for us to think about and dying so difficult for us to think about. Norbert O'Layers wrote a wonderful book about the same time, bit later. And the early eight is just saying, you know, after the dynasty, we just cannot conceive of endings and diets. And the cruelty of that is why we medicalize death, why we push it away, why we allow dead people to suffer because we can't imagine our own deaths. I mean, all the palliative care and death activists will say this. It's just like one of our amazing deceit is that we don't think we're going to get old and we don't think we're going to die. Therefore, we don't look after that bit of the future. We don't invest in that. We tuck it away. We talk about it, timey deaths. We allow people to live in wretched conditions and die alone because we just can't imagine our own deaths. In the same way, our culture doesn't like things

31:23getting old. I think it was Annie I know in the years, which is a wonderful political novel about our time. One point she says, nothing's allowed to get old anymore. There's no aging in our culture anymore. Everything has to be new. Everything's built in obsolescence now applies to us as well. And there's going to rage about that as well. If you look at the maga face and the botox and the second-wabel for a share ends or whatever you want to call them, there's a heavy, heavy aged denial in there, which is quite genuinely mad. It's genuinely mad. It's a genuine kind of rejection of the human condition, which I don't think has been this extreme before now. Both of our rights about death in the way that you've just described. But as always, it's everything is double. And I was really struck by the fact that she says two things about the relationship of herself in her early 60s, herself and her body to death, one of which is she says, old age is the antithesis to life, not death. Old age is the contrast to life. But she also says,

32:24I feel as an old woman much closer to myself as a young woman. Even though I am so distant from that, then I do to myself as dead because I cannot imagine being a corpse. So there's this two things going on, one of which is she recognizes death is not the antithesis to life. She feels that it is the running down of the capacity to live. She says the difference between being 60 and even being 40 is when your 40, your life still has a sense of direction to it and when you're 60 it doesn't. That's it's the end of life, she says it. And she also says, it's unimaginable that life will end because it's not possible. I mean, there's that Damien her the shock, isn't it called something like the impossibility for a living being of imagining it's own death where you walk through the shock. And she says that the corpse has nothing to do with me. So it's always double. Since the Songtag published Dere say about a year after Bovaw's book came out called The Double Standards of Aging, which is actually about gender, but she has a very interesting distinction

33:25which is exactly the same as Bovaw's between aging death is sacred death is the end of a life so it gives meaning to life in our culture. And it doesn't affect us death because we're not there with death. So that's why it has all the indifficultures as well these sacred meanings. When Songtag says, and I think Bovaw would have agreed, old age is the profane to the sacred. She says old age is a parody of life, death isn't a parody of life, it gives life meaning. But old age is like the Martin Dress de Islam. You know the old guy thinks he's still got it blah blah blah. It's parody, it's profane, it's comic. I mean she talks a lot about why are old people always the butter jokes in the coming of age. And I think even at the end of this movie there's a great scene where she walks out of Peloshet's of the cemetery in Paris and says, you know, I'm not frightened of death it's aging, the fright has been a black cat because before her feet and you get the sense that death still has meaning. Old age is not meaning looks but doesn't have that kind of gravitas. I think the question for our time now is, does death still

34:30have sacred meanings in our culture? You know, it's why I'd like anyone who's involved in the assisted dying debate on whatever side to engage with Bovaw's book and certainly of the very easy death. Does death still have those meanings? What meanings does it have? Is it another question of our time but it's not the same question as the question of age? You're right. So I want to ask you about something that I'm nervous raising it because it always sounds judgmental and I absolutely do not mean it in those terms. Bovaw did not have children. She writes about her relationship with her mother. She writes about her own experience of aging. She writes about her relationship with Sartre who also so far as we know did not have children and she says in the book Old Age that she is living at a time where she thinks there's another not baby boom but after a period in which it looked like there'd been a slowdown in the birth rate it was growing again. Turned out to be an illusion.

35:31I mean maybe in the back of her mind she had some of that population bomb stuff there but actually this was the beginning of the great decline in the number of children that are being born. So I'm not saying this is prophetic at all but her experience is the experience of growing old without children. Does she reflect on whether that is different? Does she reflect on whether that makes her at the time she was writing unusual? I ask that as an open question as I say without any judgment at all to be clear because I know what people here they hear. David is not saying she'd have been happier or she'd had children. He's not saying that. I think she didn't explicitly but I think she always I mean she adopted young people and I like a lot of politically engaged older people she surrounded herself with young people and she does talk. Talk about it more in political terms than personal terms. So she'll talk about I believe in youth I believe in the future.

36:35This is why I can't bear us to be thinking about age like this. She hated Cicero with a deep deep passion. Cicero made a great case about the wisdom of old age purely for his class to make grab back power from the Roman Senate and she just thinks he's a bogus stoic not to be trusted ever. So it's not that. And she also will say you know one of the things as well as getting old that is a great tragedy of her late life was Algeria. Her inability to hold on to an idea of France she managed to hold on to until that point. But she also does say when she writes a woman destroyed which is two novellas about aging one of one's a menopause novel. I'd hate that word once a novel of the woman in the middle years and the other is like a woman in her six years. And she got so much bad press for that. People actually said if you're such children if you have grandchildren you'd be much happier. You're just a miserable old existentialist lady. And she's just said this is amazing because they're these were the same people who loved what I said about gender,

37:39loved what I said about Algeria, loved the fact. You know remember she did the campaign for abortion very successful as she was writing this book on an old age. You know she was always looking forward. But she also she doesn't join things up so there's the second sex and there's the old age book and she actually says aging is more difficult for men in that time because they have more to lose. Basically women are used to being dependent on vulnerable and other it's just another level of othering whereas the men they really feel it because this is the first time they've actually but she doesn't do the kind of what happens to old women because feminism was already changing those questions about children and stereotypes and midlife. But she saw them as it saw the second sex project in the old age book has very separate projects. There's a great little appendix in old age which is called the centenarians it's just about the little group of and it's a tiny number of people so for context Japan has just passed a hundred thousand people over the age of a

38:41hundred. When she was writing there were maybe three hundred in France and they they tended to congregate particular place all women their husbands had predeceased them like 30 40 years ago they'd outlived many of their children particularly their male children and it's a sort of amusing little tale of liberation what it is to just outlive all of it and she says they're all tiny very thin quite perky looking forwards you know not hung up on anything it's almost like a little comic vignette of a one version of liberation I want to ask you about her experience of Sartre aging did she see her relationship with Sartre at the end of his life as care was she his carer she read to him and their relationship is astonishing because it does go from meeting as young people through all of the various vicissitudes of their lives to the fact that at the end I that interview with Sartre Sartre at 70 he talks about her in every single answer I mean it's astonishing

39:45it's it's like they have almost become one person but partly because she is caring for him did she see herself as his carer she did she saw herself as care and truth because Sartre of course I quite love other one so she was still fixing up for him to go and taking it as young woman down to a cafe blah blah blah blah she would fix that up for it she was definitely carer in chief I mean if anyone want to read any both what read this because it's heart-wrenching so this is goodbye to Sartre goodbye to Sartre farewell to Sartre when she details his everyday indignities with Sartre care incidentally she also does the same but all her friends have got old and died in all said and done and she's really quite cruel you about the alcoholic one who let herself go and she's grim beyond belief she's grim beyond belief with Sartre but the level of tenderness in this and she sees it as her duty to write it down so I think in the last fact in the last lines of the book she says you know we will not be together in death this is the reality this is age and his death is related my death will be a

40:47reality there's no kind of will be together isn't it wonderful that's it and I thought that's her last love letter to him the actual facing up of reality which is so important to her and to him but it's so beautiful she also describes in that book and actually as a whole set of photographs Paris match took of when she got to his grave site she had to she she dragged herself up she was absolutely desperate she had to ask for seat so she was sat at his grave site and there is astonishing photographs where she's surrounded by other women actually a couple of men and she is it's like something out of a sort of classical notion of sheer grief and then she says because she's you know she will tell the truth she said we don't run out to dinner and I had to be carried down the stairs I was so drunk and I was also unfiling but she's kind of saying well this this kind of profane clumsy beautiful heart is the meaning of love and death in the end it's not

41:47dignified and that's what makes it human and did she think this was part of her great good fortune she says she was one of her great good fortunes is that she just met Sartre when she did and they were able to form that relationship but did she think this was she was therefore describing something universal or that actually her relationship with Sartre for all of the negative aspects of it was not unique but profoundly unusual in the way in which it was able to come to that conclusion I think she did think that but also I think she thought everyone could have access to make their own meanings in the world potentially and those are the menopause books she uniformly miserable and she says that's not the point the point is your life could have been different that's the point I'm making not like I was in it terribly left me it's like you're what you felt that was the tragedy that you're ending like this that's you because not not not kind of you and it's your

42:48society that's condemned you to this existence so I think she she did think of herself which very lucky but her political project was that we should be able to sort of think for ourselves make decisions become live in a sea of contingency and make ethical choices and become more human in the existential post-existatulist world so yes she did think she was lucky but I don't she wanted everyone to have the same exceptionalism this is part of a series called an aging world about the politics the economics the psychology of living in societies where it's not just that we are all getting older but the societies themselves have a different profile they have a different character and some of the things that we've talked about the way you've described it the way both while writes it it feels like aging poses a really big challenge to being human it's a kind of existential challenge because the doubleness is so innate to it and though death may be the thing

43:49that brings it back into focus again much of the experience of aging is going to be profoundly alienating and we are going to lose touch with what it means to be alive so to be in societies in which this is becoming I don't know how else to put it but more widespread I'm describing it like a disease it's not a disease but there's just much much more of it the things that she writes about were rarer experiences then than they are now is aging a kind of existential challenge crisis for societies as well as for individuals in both wise terms that's absolutely right but I think also you know I think aging is the critical tool we never didn't see coming because it does suddenly you know door assessing has a wonderful essay called old and she says no he says this no one says everything becomes more interesting again it's like being a child she was 94 and she yeah she was both I was 78 so I drew 74 both I was 78 less thing is a glimpse of that next thing that's coming

44:51which is the fourth age fourth age yeah although she just made herself old and her fifties one moment there's a young less thing and the next time you see photographs all her hair's green she's wearing that granny bun and that skirt and she's still looking like that when she wins the Nobel Prize when she gets out of the taxi she has an A-tune tool but to go about your question I think there's several things happening once is one is there are more old people and there is more age to nihilism and this is now kind of getting spookly extreme and the political economy of that needs to be investigated further because I think it we could end up in a very very bad place quite quickly which is to say you know the view now as if you've got old that's your fault you didn't try hard to know that's where that's going but on the other hand you do have people and you have the thing that people never think of you know the discourse around booming is it's the boomer generation so even people say that in their forties you're like well what's going to happen to you guess what's going to happen to you that's the problem you know is you're going to be aging in a far more unequal situation and from a position of disadvantage so there's that but there are more

45:54obvious kicking up the turf I think without doing the kind of positive aging isn't it great because there's not about aging but it's not and it's it's a lie to say it can be dealt with it can be done positively also of course it can't so I think we're in a really interesting critical junction that could go either way and I'd also think the relationship we have with age our generation of old and dying people is the first one who might leave the planet not knowing whether the planet will survive we're talking about sort of not just the time of one biographical life we're talking about planetary time we're talking about existential time we're talking about theological all those times are being messed about at the moment not just the age one and I think it's something else to die literally happening in the nuclear age as well that's one thing to die and you think well it'll go on I'm part of this religious time is another thing it's another thing to die and get ill I mean your ex-alple of old people and especially older women with the climate

46:56crisis the statistics are terrifying I mean it's like you know 67 percent or something like that of old women over 65 are a real danger of he-related illness and lots of hits win the party because that we live longer just but for other reasons too so that kind of says the being on a dying planet with a dying population is a really interesting question of how we're going to imagine that negotiate it put it into political this call put it into moral discourse and I think we've even begun to do that work I've just been watching 70 up and people you don't know based in the UK but I think it's got a global audience it's the program that began with a group of seven-year-olds in 1964 and has followed them every seven years and has now reached their now 70s so this is I mean this is the boomer generation essentially very different life experiences they were chosen because they wanted to illustrate the class dividing Britain some poor some rich some privilege some very disadvantaged but I was really struck by how they haven't had costed lives at all at some

47:59of them have had extremely difficult rough lives but there's a kind of security around them which is unusual in historical terms this is the generation of people where you can expect to live this long and to have you know to have a life age 70 and how rare that is probably unique our generation I'm not quite but nearly that generation when bobo was writing in the 70s it was much more uncertain it was much more contingent the vulnerabilities were so great and that's coming again it's almost like there was this bit in between where though human life was diverse and human experiences were varied and terrible things happened to people there's a kind of cocoon of security weirdly if you watch 70 up it is odd around these different lives I'm not discounting the disadvantage of the people who had disadvantaged lives and reading Bova I almost felt 50 years ago is a better guide to what's coming than that brief period where it was protected it's just

49:00not protected anymore I don't think it's an accident she was campaigning for abortion at the same time as this book because it was one of those things like contraception antibiotics welfare vaccination allowed people to get out one of the reasons that older women are now a thing is because for the last 50 60 years in the West we've been treated as citizens allowed to have control over our own body there are people who tried to stop that there are people who tried to stop vaccination there are people who are taking away welfare and you're absolutely right that's the dystopia we're heading towards these things are not kind of one thing over here one thing over there they're all of a piece and the other thing about getting old in that situation you do realize exactly as you said is oh my god I was part of a generation that is going to be passing in all senses and the values that went with that and the not that they were great but the idea that you could comfortably expect not to die in childbirth or as a result of a backstreet abortion and therefore you would make it to your sixties and seventies or you wouldn't have five children to mourn by the time you were

50:0570 and therefore harbourgated and incapable of moving before yeah all those things so it's not just us the old people it's everything oh she says the thing about aging is the suddenly a point you don't know when it's happened but what seemed to have a sense of direction to it a kind of continuity to it goes and I feel living in aging societies there is a social dimension to that too the difficulty of thinking about the future the that that sense that the direction of travel has been lost in 70 up these are lives with it feels like there's a shared direction of travel for all of the that's going to turn out I think to be a historical anomaly it is there's one flesse from 1996 by Tony Morrison the Jefferson lecture where she talks about the future of the future and she's saying then we're losing the capacity to imagine the political future and so everything is now she says sure we'll have longer lives and healthier lives and she says very pointedly what are you going to do with those lives what are you going to what are we going to be thinking in those longer

51:08healthier lives and she says she has this line about because we're now taught to think of the future of our children not the children there's this sort of break that she thinks is happening in the 90s and I think she was right as you've just said it of course it's linked to a aging society but it's linked to other things as well losing the capacity to think about future time I think Jonathan White the political theorist calls it a temporal inertia happened at the end of the 20th century which is to say just after Beauvoir's book which is back down to that sense that she's talking about you know she's projecting what will happen what's happened between us has been an interval a reminder that there is a bonus episode to accompany this series available now on ppf plus it's the second part of my conversation with Sam Moin about gerontocracy in America and elsewhere and in the second part of our conversation we try and come up with some solutions what can be done about old people hoarding the money and the power to get that episode and all of our bonus episodes

52:15plus add free listening to new bonuses every month automatic sign up to our newsletter you know what to do click on the link in the show description go to our website ppfidears.com it costs five pp a month 50 pounds for the year we would love to have you join next time we're starting another short series that connects to some of the themes of this one I'm going to be talking to the history of ideas Duncan Bell about the history of the idea of transhumanism that is the idea that human beings can overcome their natural weaknesses including disease and death with the aid of science technology and machines it's a surprising history it is a sometimes ridiculous history it is also sometimes a terrifying history and it connects to what is going on in the world today do join us for that this has been past present future everyone's got a hard question about AI your job your kids where it's going and

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