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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
We only half-understand how meaning depends upon geography. We usually think of meaning in global terms, as having to do with the universals of truth, goodness, and beauty. But global meanings are anchored in the unselfconscious geography of everyday life, the “rhythmic functional patterns” by which we order time and space. Those patterns change over the lifetime of the individual, profoundly altering what life means to him.
1 The phrase is from Langer, Suzanne K., Feeling and form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner, 1953), 96Google Scholar, as quoted in Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 164.Google Scholar
2 The phrase is from Space and Place, 200Google Scholar. Tuan's, new book, The Good Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)Google Scholar, culminates in a chapter on aging “ideally considered,” and is consistent in method and general perspective with what is argued here. Its focus on ideals makes it less directly relevant than Space and Place. My general argument is similar to that made by Rowles, Graham, Prisoners of Space?: Exploring the Geographical Experience of Older People (Boulder: Westview Press, 1978)Google Scholar. Rowles's close attention to individual behaviour (and his careful recording of individual speech) is exemplary. However, I find his theoretical framework overly cumbersome.
3 Butler, Robert M., Why Survive? Being Old in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 12Google Scholar, says he coined the term. He describes the negative traits (“myths”), 6–11Google Scholar. On the term see also Gruman, Gerald J., “Cultural Origins of Present-Day ‘Age-Ism’: The Modernization of the Life-Cycle,” in Spicker, Stuart F. et al. , eds., Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, Inc., 1978), 359–87Google Scholar Histories include Fischer, David Hackett, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Achenbaum, Wilbert A., Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience Since 1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Graebner, William, A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1885–1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Haber, Carole, Beyond Sixty-five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Blythe, Ronald, The View in Winter (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), 8.Google Scholar
5 Tuan is, I think, the ablest (and least jargonish) spokesman for geography from the “inside.” I find Space and Place his most systematic work. Anne Buttimer ably argues the need for geography from the inside in “Home, Reach and the Sense of Place,” in Buttimer, and Seamon, David, eds., The Human Experience of Space and Place (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), 167–87Google Scholar. The distinction between inside and outside perspectives is important to Relph, E. C., Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited, 1976)Google Scholar. Korosec-Serfaty, Perla, “Experience and Use of Dwelling,” in Altman, Irvin and Werner, Carol M., eds., Home Environments (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), 6586CrossRefGoogle Scholar, traces the philosophic roots of the idea of geography from the inside to Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. Her article, in large part, is a critique of Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970)Google Scholar, trans. Maria Jolas, another principal source. Seamon, David, The Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), emphasizes Merleau-Ponty.Google Scholar
6 The illustration is my own, based upon the discussion of movements of a child in relation to its mother in Tuan, , Space and Place, 24.Google Scholar
7 See Tuan, , The Good Life, 107–108Google Scholar, for a brief statement on the role of empathy and of “empathetic imagination” in attempts by the self to understand the larger human community.
8 See especially Amos Rapoport, “Aging-Environment Theory: A Summary,” in Lawton, M. Powell et al. , eds., Aging and Environment: Theoretical Approaches (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1982), 132–49Google Scholar. See also Rowles, Graham and Ohta, Russell J., “Emergent Themes and New Directions: Reflection on Aging and Milieu Research,” in Rowles and Ohta, eds., Aging and Milieu: Environmental Perspectives on Growing Old, 231–39Google Scholar; and Warnes, , “Geographical Perspectives on Aging,” 24 (cited in headnote, above).Google Scholar
9 Bernice Neugarten distinguishes between young–old and old–old in “The Rise of the Young–Old,” in Gross, Ronald et al. , eds., The New Old: Struggling for Decent Aging (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1978), 47–49Google Scholar, which originally appeared in the New York Times, 18 01 1975Google Scholar. Rosow, Irving, Socialization to Old Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 27Google Scholar, makes it clear why, from a sociological perspective, passage from middle to old age is mysterious. That transition, Rosow says, is bereft of incentives and guidelines. It is an altogether informal socialization to a comprehensive status loss: “In general, old people must learn from their own experience and adapt by themselves” (27).
10 Tuan, , The Good Life, 146Google Scholar, talks of the illusory sense of immunity from unpleasant accident that goes with modern middle-class life. The bourgeois dedication to comfort is discussed on 56–66.
11 Tuan, , Space and Place, 131.Google Scholar
12 Beauvoir, Simone de, The Coming of Age, trans. O'Brian, Patrick (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 1972), 288–91Google Scholar. Beauvoir's language derives from Sartre (see 291).
13 Rosow, , Socialization to Old Age, 132Google Scholar, describes the slowing-down of work-related rewards in the fifth decade of life. Beauvoir, , 227–28Google Scholar, assembles data demonstrating prejudice by employers against hiring people older than 40.
14 On 137–41, Rosow describes the “role reversal” involved as authority shifts from an older to a younger generation.
15 It may be that being a woman is the best possible preparation for aging and being a man the worst. See sources cited in note 23. Rosow, , Social Integration of the Aged (New York: Free Press, 1967)Google Scholar, statistically describes a whole set of gender differences among the elderly: women have more local contacts than men (86); women who retire develop many more local contacts than do men who retire (97–98); the family bond, the one kind of bond that stays stable in later years, is so much the province of women that Rosow computes kin-support in terms of daughters only, ignoring sons (see 160).
16 Csikzentmihaly, Mihaly and Rochberg-Halton, Eugene, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 94–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The authors claim that the value of domestic objects changes with the age of the occupants from those that underscore individual differences to those that address questions of interconnectedness and belongingness. The book, throughout, emphasizes gender differences in “the meaning of things” which are like those here described in relation to everyday geography.
17 Tuan, , Space and Place, 60, 186–87.Google Scholar
18 Drawn from oral-historical accounts in Morrison, Joan and Zabusky, Charlotte Fox, eds., American Mosaic (New York: New American Library, 1980), 242, 147–48.Google Scholar
19 McCracken, James A., “The Company Tells Me I'm Too Old,” in Gross, 319Google Scholar. Reprinted from The Saturday Review, 7 Aug. The fact that one is forced to retire adds bitterness to the experience. For example, one individual, long and happily retired, is still vexed at the idea of mandatory retirement: “I don't think chronological age has anything to do with [usefulness]… I never quite settled that question in my mind” in Steward, Dana, ed., A Fine Age (Little Rock: August House, 1984), 55.Google Scholar
20 The phrase comes from Charles Lamb, “The Superannuated Man,” as quoted in Blythe, , The View in Winter, 26.Google Scholar
21 Rosow, , Socialization to Old Age, 124Google Scholar, remarks that society at large has a very slight stake in conformity among the elderly. He comments, 83, that a new widow is not so much socialized into her new role as treated with the same indifference as other solitary individuals.
22 Ibid., 146–48.
23 See especially Myerhoff, Barbara, Number Our Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), ch. 7Google Scholar, and Beauvoir, , 488–89Google Scholar. Myerhoff, , 267Google Scholar, describes the “expressive” domain of women with such adjectives as “particularized, concrete, embedded, and subjective.” Johnson, Sheila K., Idle Haven: Community Building Among the Working Class Retired (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 159Google Scholar, finds that among blue-collar retiree couples the wife is much more socially active than the husband, in large part because social activity has been her traditional domain. See also Livson, Florinc B., “Changing Sex Roles in the Social Environment of Later Life,”Google Scholar in Rowles, and Ohta, , Aging and Milieu, 133–52.Google Scholar
24 Women often must depend upon other women simply because men usually remarry and women usually do not. Tish Sommers, “The Compounding Impact of Age on Sex,” in Gross, , The New Old, 123–36Google Scholar, says that for ages 70–79, only 21% of the men are widowers, whereas 61% of the women are widows. The Sommers essay, original to the Gross book, makes a spirited review of the sex biases in aging.
25 Hochschild, Arlie R., The Unexpected Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar
26 Steward, , 69Google Scholar
27 Data on elderly migration is summarized in Achenbaum, Wilbert A., Old Age in the New Land, 93–94.Google Scholar
28 Golant, Stephen, A Place to Grow Old: The Meaning of Environment in Old Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 17–24Google Scholar, summarizes relevant data. An article in the Warnes book, on the housing of the elderly in Belfast, describes the general pattern in dense detail: see Compton, Paul A. and Murray, Russell C., “The Elderly in Northern Ireland with Special Reference to the City of Belfast,” 83–109Google Scholar. Rosow, Irving, Social Integration of the Aged, 251Google Scholar, points out that mobility for the elderly, as for everyone else, varies with means.
29 Beauvoir, , 466–69. The quotation is from 469.Google Scholar
30 Classic, Henry, Passing the Time in Ballymenoae: Culture and History in an Ulster Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Glassie is not focussing upon aging as such, nor upon habit. He is contrasting traditional to modern society (see especially 469–73). Still, his subjects are old, and they “pass the time” in part because they are marginal to the modernizing process. What unites his purpose to mine is the fact that they have invested passing the time with rich meaning, and so serve as models not only to the aging but to all of us, which is what Glassie has in mind.
31 Czikszentmihaly, and Rochberg-Halton, , The Meaning of Things, 164.Google Scholar
32 Beauvoir, , 469–70, citing Sartre.Google Scholar
33 Rowles, , Prisoners of Space?, 178Google Scholar, and “Growing Old ‘Inside’: Aging and Attachment to Place in an Appalachian Community,” in Datan, Nancy and Lohman, Nancy, eds., Transitions of Aging (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 162Google Scholar. Tuan eloquently describes the “quiet attachment” that develops over time between an individual and the world he can comfortably take for granted (Space and Place, 159).Google Scholar
34 Carp, Frances M., A future for the Aged: Victoria Plaza and Its Residents (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966).Google Scholar
35 Rowles, , Prisoners of Space?, 79, 81, 100.Google Scholar
36 See Johnson, Sheila K., Idle Haven, cited in note 23.Google Scholar
37 See Law, Christopher M. and Warnes, Anthony M., “The Destination Decision in Retirement Migration,” in Warnes, ed., 53–81 (about England)Google Scholar; Bohland, James E. and Treps, Lexa, “County Patterns of Elderly Migration in the United States,” in Warnes, ed., 139–58Google Scholar; Longino, , “American Retirement Communities and Residential Relocation,” in Warnes, ed., 239–62Google Scholar; Gober, Patricia and Zonn, Leo E., “Kin and Elderly Amenity Migration,” The Gerontologist, 23 (1983), 288–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Krout, John A., “Seasonal Migration of the Elderly,”Google ScholarThe Gerontologist, ibid., 295–99.
38 Tuan discusses middle-aged fantasy, Space and Place, 86. The authors of The Meaning of Things discovered that mid-career adults, asked what they would do if they could do anything they wanted, uniformly named travel as their first priority. The book goes on to talk about Tuan's kind of fantasy worlds (148–49).
39 Eva and Boaz Kahana, “Environmental Continuity, Futurity, and Adaptation of the Aged,” in Rowles, and Ohta, , Aging and Milieu, 220Google Scholar, divide the adventurous aged into four categories: the explorers, for whom any move is welcome; the helpers, who want to do for others; the fun-seekers; and the relatively disengaged comfort-seekers.
40 Blythe, , The View in Winter, 33–34.Google Scholar
41 Longino, , 241–42Google Scholar. A retirement community named Kimberly City has been created within commuting distance of the town (20 miles out). It is located on a mountain bluff in such a way so as to give each homeowner his own view of serpentine Table Lake. Sun City, Arizona, attracts the same population group, for many of the same reasons: family and friends are important, but the amenities, climate especially, is determinant. See Gober and Zonn, above cited, n. 37. I find Tuan's comments about the differences between rootedness and sense of place (Space and Place, 193–98Google Scholar) useful in understanding what place means to the amenities migrants.
42 Bohland and Treps (see n. 37) describe the evolution of retirement regions in the recent past (see especially the map on 151).
43 In this case Sun City, Arizona. (There are others.) It sits across the highway from an earlier retirement village called “Youngtown.” See Trillin, Calvin, “A Reporter at Large: Wake Up and Live,” New Yorker, 4 04 1964, 151Google Scholar. The notion that the Sun City residents are “outcasts” (170) informs Trillin's article.
44 Beauvoir, , 451–52, 376.Google Scholar
45 Steward, , ed., A Fine Age, collects oral histories as a means of characterising “creative aging.” Some of her subjects are natives, but most are late–age migrants. They are all involved in arts and crafts.Google Scholar
46 Steward, , 14–15Google Scholar. Tuan comments (Space and Place, 18Google Scholar): “Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience.”
47 Steward, , 76.Google Scholar
48 For example, a professional New York photographer retired to pinhole photography in Arkansas (50); another, a retired administrator, had always enjoyed art museums, but now learned to paint well enough to compete in exhibits (52).
49 Boerr, Harriet, Stones for Ibarra (New York: Penguin Books, 1984).Google Scholar
50 Eva, and Kahana, Boaz, “Environmental Continuity,” 213Google Scholar, comment that the aging who move voluntarily are likely to be buoyed up by the experience.
51 Kohn, Robert describes “Biomedical Aspects of Aging” in Van Tassel, David D., ed., Death and the Completion of Being (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 3–10Google Scholar. Butler, , Why Survive?, 174–224Google Scholar, discusses health needs among the elderly.
52 See Butler, , 22–36.Google Scholar
53 Beauvoir, , 466.Google Scholar
54 Butler supplies data on mental illness and suicide by age on 227–28.
55 Rosow, , Socialization to Old Age, 87.Google Scholar
56 Cowley, Malcolm, The View from 80 (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 3, 5.Google Scholar
57 Beauvoir, , 492.Google Scholar
58 Tuan, , The Good Life, 150.Google Scholar
59 Leon A. Pastalan suggests that aides working with the aged wear ear plugs, put chemicals on their finger tips, etc., to simulate the sensory deprivation that comes with age. See “Research in Environment and Aging: An Alternative to Theory,” in Lawton, , Aging and Environment, 127–28 (cited above, n. 8).Google Scholar
60 When time budgets are compared as between mid-career adults and those over 65, one discovers much more time within the latter group devoted to passive pursuits: watching television, listening to radio, reading, or “just resting” (Robson, Paul, “Patterns of Activity and Mobility Among the Elderly,” in Warnes, ed., 272–73Google Scholar. This is a study of English behaviour, but here again English patterns are similar to those in the United States).
61 Rowles, , Prisoners of Space?Google Scholar, does a very nice job of describing difficulties in what he calls the “negotiation” of the environment by the very old. This shows up best in his accounts of each of his five subjects, which includes a description of their daily rounds. Myerhoff describes how the world contracted for members of the Jewish centre she was studying once there was no one to drive an automobile. When those individuals became very old, religious services were relocated and rescheduled so as to accommodate the frailties of its participants (258). Myerhoff opens her book with a wonderful quotation from an old lady, having to do with getting about: “Every morning I wake up in pain. I wiggle my toes. Good. They still obey. I open my eyes. Good. I can see. Everything hurts but I get dressed. I walk down to the ocean. Good. It's still there. Now my day can start. About tomorrow you never know. After all, I'm eighty-nine. I can't live forever” (I).
62 Rosow, , Social Integration, 147–73Google Scholar, makes a detailed analysis of sources of help for the aged. For both middle-class and working-class individuals, dependence on neighbours and kin becomes increasingly important with time, with working-class people always more neighbour-dependent. Johnson's study of the mobile-home community makes out a pattern of reinforcement as between neighbour and kin, with kin taking precedence. It is very good on patterns of mutual surveillance.
63 Butler, , 393.Google Scholar
64 Dovey, Kimberly, “Home and Homelessness,”Google Scholar in Altman, and Werner, , eds., Home Environments (cited above, n. 5), 33–64, provides a lucid and succinct analysis of his topic.Google Scholar
65 Korosec-Serfaty, , “Experience and Use of the Dwelling,” in Altman and Werner, 76–80Google Scholar, conducts non-directed interviews with aged individuals whose homes have been burglarized, studying the ways in which violations of the home were seen by them as violations of the self.
66 Johnson, Malcolm, “That Was Your Life: A Biographical Approach in Later Life,” in Munnichs, J. M. A. and van der Heuvel, W. J. A., eds., Dependency or Interdependency in Old Age (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 156Google ScholarPubMed. Johnson's article is an eloquent protest against an overemphasis upon statistics and public policy in research on the elderly.
67 Butler, , 104.Google Scholar
68 As one statement of the idea, see Csikszentmihalyi, and Rochberg-Halton, , 101–02.Google Scholar
69 Rowles, , “The Surveillance Zone as Meaningful Space for the Aged,” The Gerontologist, 21 (1981), 304–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
70 Blythe, , 123–56Google Scholar. On 7, Blythe remarks that the real struggle of the elderly is to describe “who they are, and not just who and what they have been.” Malcolm Cowley exactly (and perhaps unintentionally) captures the ambiguity between now and then in the final sentence of his book. He hopes that the telling of one's story, for the very old, will allow them to say to the future, “‘I really was’ –or even, with greater self-confidence, ‘I was and am this’” (74).
71 Rowles, , Prisoners of Spacel, 61Google Scholar; Myerhoff, , 2Google Scholar; Eva Kahana, as quoted in Thomas Fox, “Fear Stalks the Elderly,” in Gross, , The New Old, 40Google Scholar. Jane Cunningham emphasizes the interplay between the condition of one's feet and “keeping going” in an unpublished paper on the geography of aging (see headnote).
72 Koch, Kenneth, I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry in a Nursing Home (New York: Random House, 1977), 199.Google Scholar
73 The Old Ones of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 16–36, especially 28Google Scholar; and 37–54, especially 53–54.
74 An elderly rural lady told Rowles how a television set could be a means of keeping an oar in: “I sit here [on a Sunday] and look out the window and watch [my friends] all go [to church], and then I turn the TV on and listen. It's the next best thing…. and then at noon, I watch them all come back.” Rowles, , “The Surveillance Zone,” 308Google Scholar. Unruh, David R., Invisible Lives: Social Worlds of the Aged (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983), emphasizes how the house–bound elderly can involve themselves at long-distance, by telephone or mail, in certain group activities (like, stamp-collecting).Google Scholar
75 Scott-Maxwell, Florida, The Measure of My Days (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983. Orig. 1968), 154, remarks, “I admit that it takes more courage than I had known to drink the lees of life.”Google Scholar
76 Rowles, , Prisoners of Space?, 154Google Scholar. This is a subtle but recurrent emphasis in the accounts I have read. For example, one woman says she now has “a deeper understanding of man's frailties and limitations.” She now knows that “[s]ome of the things I struggled hardest to get 1 could very well have done without.” (Francis, Polly, “Awakening,” in Gross, 191Google Scholar. Originally published in Perspectives on Aging, 01–02 1977Google Scholar. In Steward (61) a man says that with age you “know more things that don't work.” Cf. Beauvoir, 381, as she talks about the skills of the aged: “a greater skill in re-learning what was known, method in work, resistance to error, safeguards” (381).
77 Blythe, , 72.Google Scholar
78 Beauvoir, , 480–82, 487–88Google Scholar. Vesperi, Maria D., City of Green Benches: Growing Old in a New Downtown (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 50–59.Google Scholar
79 The phrasing is from Geri Berg and Sally Gadow, “Toward More Human Meanings of Aging,” in Spicker, , Aging and the Elderly (see above, n. 3), 85;–86Google Scholar. My discussion of kinds of memory is indebted to Beauvoir, , 363Google Scholar, who distinguishes among sensorimotor recall, involuntary (repressed) memory, and social memory (reminiscence).
80 Rowles, , Prisoners of Space?, 139–46.Google Scholar
81 Blythe, , 12, 41, 87–88.Google Scholar
82 The comparison is suggested by Tuan, , Space and Place, 128Google Scholar, who discusses music and contrasts it to “purposeful action.” Koch, , 141Google Scholar, speaking of reminiscence among nursing-home residents, remarks that “there seems to be a way in which a person is all the ages he has ever been.” The poetry printed in his book makes clear that the youthful years are dearest. Rowles, , Prisoners of Space?Google Scholar, discusses the phenomenon of childhood memories of the aged at great length, as “reflective” fantasy (see 202). His “Growing Old Inside” includes an account of rural landscape as remembered (164). Blythe, , 42–67Google Scholar, supplies his own oral-historical evidence of such memories. He talks of the memories as a return to “previous libidinal positions.” He claims that “[s]ome old people even manage to recover that delectable serial dreaming in which they indulged, half awake, half asleep, in the years approaching puberty….” (87).
83 Beauvoir, , 370–71.Google Scholar
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85 My favourite article on the subject is Richardson, John, “The Catch in the Late Picasso,” New York Review of Books, 19 07 1984, 21–28Google Scholar. A more general treatment is Woodward, Kathleen, “Master Sons of Meditation: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams,” in Spicker, ed., 181–202Google Scholar. The Spicker book and its companion volume edited by David Van Tassel have several other good articles on the subject. See Van Tassel, David D., ed., Aging, Death and the Completion of Being (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Beauvoir (492) says that “it is often at the very moment that the aged man, having become old, has doubts about the value of his entire work that he carries it to the highest point of perfection.” She claims this was the case with Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Verdi and Monet. Cowley speculates, throughout his short book, on the connections between aging and creativity.
86 Shepard, Paul, “Place and the Child” (unpublished paper delivered at the 1985 American Studies Association convention), 3–5.Google Scholar
87 Tuan, , The Good Life, 145–50.Google Scholar
88 Erikson is cited as an authority on the final stage of life in Hareven, Tamara, “The Last Stage: Historical Adulthood and Old Age,” in Van Tassel, ed., 185–86Google Scholar. The authors of The Meaning of Things also turn to Erikson (101), whose theory is indeed consistent with their very ambitious argument. The final life-stage is part of the schema described in Erikson, , Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963), ch. 7Google Scholar. The book was first published in 1950. A recent restatement of his characterization of the final stage appears in the Van Tassel volume (“Reflections on Dr. Borg's Life Cycle,” 29–67Google Scholar). See also Erikson, Erik and Erikson, Joan, “Introduction,” in Spicker, 1–8Google Scholar; Scott-Maxwell, , 120–23, 125Google Scholar. Cowley (7) suggests that there is an “identity crisis” attending old age, using Erikson's term but not citing him; Beauvoir, , 291Google Scholar, citing “psychiatrists,” speaks of an “identification crisis.”
89 Butler, Robert N., “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged,” Psychiatry, 26 (1963), 65–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, depends upon Erikson. In Why Survive?, Butler, 412Google Scholar, declares Erikson's theory “inadequate” (cf. comments, 400–01).
90 Myerhoff, , 221–22Google Scholar; Cowley, , 66–74Google Scholar. Prado, G. G., Rethinking How We Age: A New View of the Aging Mind (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986)Google Scholar, suggests (unconvincingly, I think) a kind of therapy based upon the need for story-telling. His philosophical argument for story-telling as basic to ordering experience is compelling.
91 Rowles, , Prisoners?, 111–20.Google Scholar
92 Tuan, , The Good Life, 141Google Scholar, making the same point, speaks of our “grip on the world” as depending upon the proper functioning of the body.
93 See Pearlin, Leonard I., “Discontinuities in the Study of Aging,”Google Scholar in Hareven, and Adams, , 66Google Scholar. The great trauma in relation to the daily round, Pearlin says, is loss of a spouse.
94 Blythe, , 207–08Google Scholar. Blythe is describing what Taun, , Space and Place, 145–46Google Scholar, calls the “quotidian” life.
95 Glassie, , 718.Google Scholar
96 Myerhoff, , 274–76Google Scholar. The story of Jacob Koved's battle with death (199–213) is an extreme version of life under control to the end.
97 Fuentes, Carlos, The Death of Artemio Cruz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), 59Google Scholar. See the entire remarkable passage, 55–59.
98 Beauvoir, , 364Google Scholar. The quotation is from Mauriac.
99 Howell, Sandra, “The Meaning of Place in Old Age,”Google Scholar in Rowles, and Ohta, , Aging and Milieu, 102–03Google Scholar. Tuan, , Space and Place, 140, makes the same point, although he is not talking specifically about old age.Google Scholar
100 See Cowley, , 56–57Google Scholar; Myerhoff, , 181Google Scholar; Gornick, Vivian, “For the Rest of Our Days, Things Can Only Get Worse,”Google Scholar in Gross, , The New Old, 32–33Google Scholar (reprinted from The Village Voice, 24 05 1976)Google Scholar. Blythe, , 12Google Scholar, makes the vegetable a cabbage. Blythe, , 130–39Google Scholar, spends some time describing an ancient individual who had entirely lost his memory: “For him it is like being outside himself. The centre of his personality with all its dates and faces and happenings has disappeared, or practically so….” In spite of which he has no problem finding his way about town.
101 Beland, Francois, “The Decision of Elderly Persons to Leave Their Homes,” The Gerontologist, 24 (1984), 183, lists these as “traditional” reasons for moving to institutionalized care.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
102 Tibbies, Lance, “Medical and Legal Aspects of Competency in Old Age,” in Spicker, 127–51. describes legal criteria of competence as at once unsophisticated and inflexible. Blythe tells the poignant story of a retired female academic: “She is one of those old people whose lives have been briskly and practically rearranged by others with the best intentions. After an absence of 50 years, she was returned to her old home. …[S]he is as much displaced by being brought back to her roots as if she had ended up… with a group of strangers” (192).Google Scholar
103 Longino, , “American Retirement Communities and Residential Relocation,” 242–46Google Scholar. Longino (249) speaks of “within-type moves” in describing very general patterns of migration (for instance from one SMSA to another), but the phrase applies nicely, and comprehensively, to his description of the patterns of migration to particular communities.
104 Beland, , 184Google Scholar, says that residents in senior housing, in Quebec anyway, tend to be in better shape than individuals in the same situation who decide to stay in place.
105 Butler, Robert, Why Survive?, ch. 9, especially 267.Google Scholar
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107 Through inflexibility of rules and authoritarian management, for example. Howell, , 105Google Scholar, has described a “world without place,” a final insult to any sense of self-worth, obviously having a nursing-home environment in mind. Tobin, , 196Google Scholar, claims that it is worse than that. He says that “[most] institutional elderly… reside in proprietary nursing homes that have been under investigation for patient abuse.”
108 Koch, , 5, 43, 91, 107Google Scholar. Koch argues eloquently that the proper object of an activity like his was the creation of poetry, not therapy. The idea was not so much that the students should feel good as that they should feel free. He describes his approach in detail (3–57). Mark Kaminsky uses a different approach to the same end, with impressive results, with the very elderly but outside the nursing home. See Kaminsky, “What's Outside You It Shines Out of You,” reprinted in Gross, 209–28 (excerpted from a book of the same title published by Horizon Press in New York).
109 Myerhoff's wonderful cast of characters, in Number Our Days, is exemplary in this respect. Jewish tradition helps keep them going. There are, of course, a few who do give up, as described by Cowley, , 15–16.Google Scholar
110 I here somewhat broaden Blythe's use of the word (on 104).
111 Blythe, , 136, 233.Google Scholar
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114 Beauvoir, , The Coming of Age, 466.Google Scholar
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116 Tuan, , Space and Place, ch. 2.Google Scholar
117 Butler, , Why Survive?, 406.Google Scholar
118 Tuan regularly contrasts Chinese to western culture, reminding us of the idiosyncracies and imbalances in our way of seeing things. See, for example, Space and Place, 190–98Google Scholar, discussing attitudes toward historical objects and landscape. David Lath describes the differences between aging in the west and aging in Japan. In Japan, he says, people are much more conscious of group identity and group experience. See Plath, , “Resistance at Forty-Eight: Old-Age Brinkmanship and Japanese Life,”Google Scholar in Hareven, and Adams, , Transitions, 109–25, especially 121–22Google Scholar. Ganschow, Thomas W., “The Aged in a Revolutionary Milieu: China,” in Spicker, Aging and the Elderly, 303–20Google Scholar, describes the wildly veering attitudes taken by Chinese revolutionaries toward the aged in their midst. Vesperi, City of Green Benches, studying St. Petersburg, Florida, suggests that there are fundamentally different patterns as between blacks and whites (see especially 76). In reviewing a particular case of suicide, she interestingly speculates about reasons important to an aged individual of a certain class and background, as against reasons important, say, to a present-day mental health professional (134–41).
119 For full citation see headnote.
120 Blythe, , 212.Google Scholar