Avoid romanticism and possessiveness: a clear-eyed view from the ‘high plateau’
Diana Athill stopped thinking of herself as a sexual being in her mid-70s, and “after a short period of shock at the fact, found it very restful”. She had become another sort of creature: an Old Woman! “It was like coming out on to a high plateau, into clear, fresh air, far above the antlike bustle going on down below me.” Now, the memories of men mix in companionably with everything else: a bluebell wood at dawn, Venice, the white beaches of the Caribbean and her grandmother’s kitchen garden. “When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view, it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But … now out it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs and the most satisfying achievements, to make a very old woman’s idle days pleasant instead of boring.”
Athill’s new book is a further instalment of news from that high plateau of old age which she has already written about in Somewhere Towards the End and elsewhere, and it is full of clear, fresh air and bright distance. The conditions of extreme age seem to agree with her assured and reasonable temperament; there must be some stoical endurance in the mix but it is kept decently out of sight, as if it would be bad form to be anything but buoyant, at the end of such a life. Since she last reported, she has moved into a home for older people, and it is characteristic that she refuses to describe this as a decision forced on her. On the contrary, she insists, it is one of the few important things she has consciously chosen or for herself – unlike her education or her career, not having married or had children. She had thought she would hate being in a home, but realised in her early 90s that the alternative meant relying on her friends for more help than it was fair to ask, and so made up her mind.
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