Book Report: Travels with Epicurus

4. Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: Meditations from a Greek Island on the Pleasures of Old Age (2012) (1/17/21)

Reading this short book is a bit like having a conversation with a favorite uncle about the meaning of life, in particular life as it starts to wind down. Klein was 73 when he wrote it, revisiting the Greek island of Hydra, a place he'd first lived as a young man, and one he'd visited many times over the intervening years. It is a quiet place (no cars), a place separate from the hustle of commerce and ambition, a good place for contemplation.

He has come here with a suitcase full of books, among them A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen, the book-length essay Time by Eva Hoffman, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga, and The Art of Happiness, or The Teachings of Epicurus. The seven chapters plus prologue and epilogue are divided into short chunks, pondering such topics as spirituality, time, authenticity, stoicism, play, and mindfulness.

I liked the book. Klein is examining, interrogating, his own life to some extent, though this isn't a memoir. He finds moments of clarity that somehow add up to who he is, and yet he recognizes that he is still in the process of becoming--and, too, that that process will end. He pans, rightly, the forever-young mentality that American culture pushes. It's a coming to terms with mortality, but also a celebration of life. I guess my take-away is nicely expressed on the penultimate page:

Maybe that Buddhist notion of mindfulness will lead to the most valuable way of living a good and authentic old age. Perhaps whatever we do, we must try to remain mindful that we are old: that this is the last stage of life in which we can be fully conscious, that our time in this stage is limited and constantly diminishing, and that we have extraordinary opportunities in this stage that we never had before and will never have again. Perhaps if we are as mindful as we possibly can be of where we are in life right now, the most fulfilling options of how to live these years will reveal themselves to us, not by rigorously following the prescriptions of the wise philosophers, yet by being ever mindful of their wisdom.
     By simply being aware of the old-age options that philosophers like Plato, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Sartre, and Erikson examined and commended to us, we can make authentic choices for how we want to conduct this period of our lives. We can try their ideas on for size, see how they fit with our considered values. This may be what it means to grow old philosophically.