1) Joern Utzon died yesterday. He was 90.
He won the design competition for this building more than half his lifetime ago.
(Three different views - taken over the last 18 months.)




2) Claude Levi-Strauss had his 100th birthday this week. He did his major work in the 1930s. When I first heard of him in the late 1960s, I already thought of him as 'old.' A professor from the Sorbonne, commenting on my radio about his impact on the social sciences, also remarked on what a blast it is to get an email from 'claude levi-strauss at dot something.'

3) An American woman died at age 115. She was married in 1913 and widowed in 1939. However, they didn't mention that she did anything else except urge people to get more education and stay thin.

Time contracts as you get older. When I was studying history in school, I thought that 1939 was seriously ancient history. Nowadays I basically consider people born around then to be my contemporaries. After a while you begin to realize that even people like Joern Utzon and Claude Levi-Strauss are your contemporaries!

I just heard something amazing on the BBC tonight. Victor Hugo apparently said that 'the forties are the old age of youth and the fifties are the youth of old age'.

Now a team of researchers at the University of Warwick have done a multi-country study and proved it! Apparently it doesn't matter where you live or what your circumstances are, you go through a U-curve in life. As you approach the age of 44 you get more depressed and after 44 you get more cheerful. 44 is the statistically average nadir.

Many Vietnamese have told me that 49 is the trough (which in the western method of counting age is actually 48). They were trying to comfort me in my own darkest hour, but I think they were on to it too. On the other hand, I thought (and so far I still think) that my 30s were my best decade, but maybe I was just a late developer!

This also explains why so many young people on LJ are constantly complaining about being old ;)

I'm pretty sure that everyone on my flist is younger than I am. Given the average age of LJers, they are, however, bunched towards the upper end of the distribution and the large majority seem to be in their late 20s to mid 30s. Pretty much all of them mark each passing birthday by moaning about how old they're getting (the only one who doesn't is, like me, in his 50s).

I remember feeling much the same when I was turning 30ish. I'm no longer sure, but I guess I was about 28 when I began to notice what I then considered to be a certain decrepitness - maybe losing a bit of flexibility or maybe getting a wrinkle or something. Back then a woman's biological clock was deemed to have stopped by 30 - an acquaintance who had a baby at 35 was an 'old mother' and we all wondered how she could possibly cope at such an age. I know I had lots of grey hair by that age. So that's what aging feels like when you're 30ish. Physical things. Youth is physical.

After that it becomes a mental thing. You get used to the physical decline (while simultaneously trying to stave it off because, let's face it, it's a nuisance). But by the time you're my age you tend not to think of yourself as old. It was a woman in her 80s who first pointed this out to me. She said that she actually didn't feel any different from when she was 35. This is totally true and is something younger people should learn early. A frail body, a shaky voice and a slower response rate are evidence of physical not mental decline.

Another thing I heard much more recently was from a neuroscientist who pointed out that people's minds (as distinct from brains) go on developing and developing throughout their life. Your neurones, assuming they are not damaged by some physical illness like Alzheimers, keep on making more connections. I think this is probably why I can't stand reading LJs written by teenagers. They simply don't have enough neuronal connections. Once you have reached a certain level of maturity, however, you have enough connections to become interesting!

I'm not actually suggesting that aging necessarily makes you wiser, but you do build up a much more complex web of experience that you can draw on or choose to ignore as the case may be. My biggest regret, since I'm an academic, is that I never really trained my memory - I just took it for granted - so now, when students ask me for references, I know I've read something somewhere, but I have no idea where. I have to go and search for stuff, whereas my Vietnamese colleagues of similar age were forced to train their memories because they didn't have books they could go and look up when the memory neurones failed to retrieve something. Retraining your neuronal pathways is hard work and once you've got a busy career there's little time for it!

Basically I like getting older. This could be because I've still got plenty of physical mobility and I would guess that people become ready for death when the expanding mind is continually frustrated by inability to carry out intentions. Or when physical inability continually inhibits mind expansion.

I'm also wondering if there's a gender difference here. My inspirational sources - the old woman and the neuroscientist - are both women. A lot of the men I know (not all) are still hung up on physical stuff - chasing after young women, frantically playing games that are threatening to their aging hearts, etc. But then I only have to think about botox and facelifts to see what poor self image can do to aging women as well. The only reason I think it may be more of a male thing is that I don't actually know any women who go in for this stuff. But, maybe it's just a culture of body worship that does this.

Afterthought: the Vietnamese have a concept dep lao - 'oldly beautiful' - that refers more to behaviour than to physical appearance. Not a body worshipping culture.