Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

ISBN-13: 9780231175890 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 112 str.

Marc Aug?; Jody Gladding

Opis

"We are awash in time, savoring a few moments of it; we project ourselves into it, reinvent it, play with it; we take our time or let it slip away: it is the raw material of our imagination. Age, on the other hand, is the detailed account of the days that pass, the one-way view of the years whose total sum when set forth can stupefy us. Age wedges each of us between a date of birth that, at least in the West, we know for certain and an expiration date that, as a general rule, we would like to defer. Time is a freedom, age a constraint."

Marc Auge remembers his beloved childhood cat, who seemed to grow wise with age, though her essential nature remained unchanged. He considers our belief that objects mature, when it is our perception of them that evolves over time. He wonders why public demonstrations of affection between the elderly make the young so uncomfortable and why we torture ourselves with regret at what might have been. Time can be liberating, he finds; it is a resource we can squander or relish. Yet age is a burden, bound by our personal and cultural neuroses. With an ethnologist's understanding of construct and practice, Auge isolates age from the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he casts age as a physical marker and treats one's youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life's value.

Recenzje

"Augé looks at how people - himself included - confront their age at different moments in their lives; what it means to 'assume' one's age and how events mark our lives. There are in our time no writers who possess similar ease and command in turning autobiography into anthropology." - Tom Conley, Harvard University

O autorze

Marc Augé, geboren 1935, ist Hauptvertreter einer "Ethnologie des Nahen". Er lehrte Anthropologie an der Pariser École des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales, deren Präsident er viele Jahre war.