JOLLY DAYS

Michael Kinsley Gets Older

The heading in the New Yorker says “Reflections” and that is a good way to describe Michael Kinsley's musings about getting older. The article interlaces his experience with Parkinson's disease with the fact of aging and the effects on social status. Kinsley sees the slow discounting of the individual as we age — the way people look at the old as of another country. He is describing the United States — it is hard to know how relevant this is to other cultures. He is also reflecting on a particular value system in contemporary America, which is that of the careerist Yuppie, which he at first distances himself from and then implicitly identifies with.

In this perspective aging is a game in which you win by living longer — an extension of competitive capitalism. You don't win because of the putative intrinsic value of living longer, but because it yields status. This is such an odd, insulated view of the greater issue it might have made the entire article dismissible. But Kinsley is so sharp, his exposed nerves as to social interaction so sensitive, that it is worth following along, if not for his value system of longevity triumphalism, but for the details, sensibility and personal honesty. Here is Kinsley's description of his encounter with a 90 year old man:

Perhaps sensing some condescension in my praise [ the old man “didn't look 90” ], he then stuck out his chest and declared, “I used to be a judge.” And I started to resent this intruder on my morning and my pool. Did I now have to tell him it was marvellous that he used to be a judge? What was so marvellous about it? What was his point? But, even as he said this, a panicky realization of its absurd irrelevance seemed to pass across his face, and then a realization of its pathos. When he was a judge—if he had been a judge—he had not felt the need to accost strangers and tell them that he was a judge. And then he seemed to realize that he had overplayed his hand. He had left this stranger in the pool thinking the very thought he had wanted to dispel: the old fool is past it. And finally (I imagined, observing his face) came sadness: he had bungled a simple social interchange. So it must be true: he was past it.

Kinsley's observational acuity and sensitivity to social interaction is a novelistic gift. However, Kinsley's mischievousness noted in a previous post, can yield to a narrow, cranky nastiness. But the article for all its foundationalist faults does honestly deal with the falling away that is getting older in the United States.