Introduction
1: The Platonic Threshhold (Plato and Thomas Mann)
2: On Seeing the End (Aristotle and King Lear)
3: Narrative Unity of Lives (Epicureanism, the Narrative View, Saul
Bellow)
4: The Power of Choosing (Prudential Life Planning, Philip Larkin,
Stevie Smith)
5: Where Self-Interest Ends (Derek Parfit and Balzac)
6: The Bounded Life (Adorno's Metaphysics, Dickens, Beckett)
7: Now or Never (Bernard Williams, J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth)
8: Evolved Senescence (Evolutionary theory, Michael Ignatieff's
Scar Tissue)
Conclusion
Helen Small was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and studied at Victoria University of Wellington and at the University of Cambridge. She taught English Literature at the University of Bristol from 1993 to 1996, and since 1996 has been Fellow in English at Pembroke College, Oxford. From 2001 to 2004 she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, and was a Visiting Scholar at New York University. The Long Life was primarily written during that period.
Helen concludes that we will understand old age best when we view it not as a problem apart but always connected into larger philosophic and, I may add, moral considerations. She opened my eyes: I was blind and now I see. Peter H. Millard, Age and Aging a book philosophers, among others, should read, for it contains deftly handled engagements with some of the most formidable figures in their canon... But it also moves confidently among the classics of literature showing throughout how close reading is inseparable from hard thinking. Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement This is an ambitious, subtle and highly original study. The Scotsman The Long Life is an accessible, ground-breaking book and one likely to alter the way in which we talk about one of the great social concerns of our time - the growing numbers of those living to be old and the growing proportion of old to young. Helen Peacocke, The Oxford Times Small...deserves to feel good, for she has argued tirelessly, written an impressively researched book, and commanded the interest of sceptics more than twice her age. Frank Kermode, LRB
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