Ancient Wisdom: I Want to Die with a Book in My Hands
We read differently in old age. After a lifetime of living, we have a different perspective on the things we read, often holding authors to a higher standard.
01.02.26 — Ancient Wisdom
Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our weekly series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. This week, we brought back the literary critic Joseph Epstein, 88, for a return engagement to explain why his reading habits have changed as he’s gotten older.
One often hears about those books people would like to have along if marooned alone on a desert island. The selection, at least among my fellow graybeards, doesn’t often contain many surprises: Homer, Dante, Michel de Montaigne, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, and a few other standbys are usually mentioned. Old age is a kind of desert island of its own. In old age one figures to have lost some friends and family to death and seen others of them lapse into ill health, perhaps even dementia. If one has arrived at old age with enough money to retire, reading, for some of us, becomes one’s main activity. That certainly includes me.
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries,” Immanuel Kant wrote. And so in a sense it is, but with the obvious qualification that it is a one-way conversation, the book speaking to you, not you to it. Kant himself of course had one of those finest minds, which may have limited his reading. I don’t, which makes my own prospects for reading material nearly endless.
But reading what? Or better, reading how? My sense is that one reads differently in old age than when younger. For one thing, some writers who once seemed vital, central, indispensable, no longer seem so. For another, with one’s time before departing the planet limited, one tends to have less patience. Then, too, after a lifetime of living, one’s experience has widened; and with any luck it has also deepened, and so one has a different perspective on the things one reads or has read, often holding them to a higher standard.
In a 1978 essay in The American Scholar called “On Reading Books: A Barbarian’s Cogitations,” a Harvard historian named Alexander Gerschenkron set out three criteria for a good book: 1. It should be intrinsically interesting; 2. it should be memorable; and 3. it should be rereadable. The writing of Ernest Hemingway, fascinating to a reader in his 20s, fails to meet these criteria in one’s 80s. The same is true of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who seems callow and at times pathetically snobbish, and also of that great windbag (as he now seems to me) Ralph Waldo Emerson. While at it, add to the list Henry David Thoreau, who does not seem worth reading past the age of 18.
I consider myself moderately well read. Nobody of course is entirely well read; only some have read more than others. The best-read person I have known was the classical scholar Arnaldo Dante Momigliano (a name one can dance to). I was once in his room at the faculty club at the University of Chicago where I saw a single book on his desk, a Dostoyevsky novel, in Russian. A few days later at the same club I was having breakfast with Leon Edel, who was beginning work on a book on the Bloomsbury Group, when Arnaldo joined us. The conversation soon turned to Bloomsbury, and if you didn’t know otherwise you would have thought that Arnaldo had just finished a book on Bloomsbury, that’s how knowledgeable he was on the subject.
I find that life is too short to read about politics in any detail, too short to read anything about Pakistan or Bolivia and 20 other countries I could name, too short to read about artificial intelligence.
Proust claimed that books have it over friends. “In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.”
I have read through Proust’s great novel, In Search of Lost Time, twice. If I thought time permitted, I would give it a third go, for on my second reading I discovered many new riches. As much as any book I can think of, it passed the Alexander Gerschenkron test: intrinsically interesting, memorable, rereadable. The novel also nicely fits Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic: “A book that has never stopped saying what it has to say.” Proust was still working on his novel as his death neared.
Once one hits 80 the phrase “Life’s too short” takes on a new reality. I find that life is too short to read about politics in any detail, too short to read anything about Pakistan or Bolivia and 20 other countries I could name, too short to read about artificial intelligence. I now also find less and less to read in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement; so, too, The Atlantic and Harper’s. I prefer reading books—those I should have read when younger, those that might awaken me to things I should have known long ago—and rereading those I failed to read carefully enough the first time round.
For example, I recently reread a reissue of Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection (1899), which I found disappointing in a way I did not remember when I first read it 30 or so years ago. I felt that in the novel Tolstoy had given up the role of novelist for that of critic of Russia’s military and court and prison systems, with the great artist in Tolstoy taking a back seat to the prophet.
I am also rereading Henry James’s The American Sceneand finding James, who wrote the book in his late, late style, not easygoing. Paragraphs can run two pages or more, sentences are splotched with eight or 10 semicolons, insights are not always easily come by—and I happen to be on record as a registered Jamesian. At times I feel as if I am reading in a foreign language, but of no known country.
It’s not all reruns.
I’m also reading a biography, Scipio Africanus, about the man who defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, giving Rome control over the Mediterranean. I have come to Roman history fairly late in life, and read everything I can find about it. Another book I am reading is Barbara Rosenwein’s Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age, an account of the way in which the elderly have been regarded over the centuries—a subject you might say in which I, at the age of 88, have a small but genuine personal interest.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes notes in one of his letters to Harold Laski that up to the age of 75 he finished every book he ever started, lest at the gates of heaven he be quizzed on the book he deserted. What gives this anecdote an odd twist is that Holmes was an agnostic. I am not, but am ready to desert a book I find disappointing, though this hasn’t happened very often to me, at least in recent years.
And then some kinds of books I have given up on before beginning them. Here, sadly, I have to adduce the contemporary novel. I once wrote an essay with the title “Educated by Novels,” and I still believe that at its best the novel is the genre with the highest truth content, surpassing both biography and history, for the novel is about that most fascinating of subjects, human nature. But something has happened to the form, which seems to have lost both its reach and its depth. I continue to read older novels—I not long ago immensely enjoyed Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932), and decided that Joseph, not Philip, was my Roth. I have read novels by Ian McEwan and John Banville, but they do not light my fire. Now that England is no longer a first-rank country, perhaps it can no longer produce first-rank novelists.
Fortunately, one can live quite well on the literary culture of the past. I find myself rereading, among others, George Eliot and Willa Cather, Shakespeare and Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal. A nice thing about the reading life is you are never out of business.
I used to say that, given a choice, I should prefer to die while watching a Chicago Cubs game on television. Now I find I should prefer to die while reading a serious and entertaining book. If this were to come about, my last words figure to be, “Damn, wish I could have finished the chapter.”
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Retired, having turned 80, and spurred by the Covid lockdown, this English major is finally reading all those great books I should have read or read more closely when young, and my experience reflects everything Epstein is writing about. I've followed him since subscribing to The American Scholar years ago because of his Aristides essays and he continues to confirm, in so many ways, my own views. I started my deep dive with the great Russian novelists ("The Brothers Karamazov" and "Anna Karenina"), Shakespeare's political trilogy ("Coriolanus," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra"), followed by Willa Cather's "My Antonia" and "The Death of the Archbishop." I recently read for the first time "Huckleberry Finn" and Homer's "The Odyssey," books most read when young. But I suspect I got more out of them from my present perspective than I would have in my teens. I've avoided so far "War and Peace" and Proust, partly because of their daunting length which would force me to forego other activities, but more likely it is because I know there is so much waiting for me there—a case of wanting to put off the best for last.
