Diana Athill’s Reflections on Aging and Life

Diana Athill died Wednesday at the age of 101. Athill was lauded for her work as an editor, working with a wide range of writers that included John Updike and Philip Roth, along with her writing as a memoirist. Here’s an excerpt adapted from Somewhere Towards the End (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), a book in which Athill reflects on aging and time, for which she won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the End Costa Book Award.

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One doesn’t necessarily have to end a book about being old with a whimper, but it is impossible to end it with a bang. There are no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving—and also more particular opposites such as a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success amount to smugness….

And that capaciousness of life, the variety within it which at first seems so impressive – what does that do after a while but remind you of its opposite, the tininess of a life even when seen against the scale of nothing bigger than human existence? Thought of in that light the unimportance of the individual is dizzying, so what have I been doing, thinking and tapping away at ‘I think’ and ‘I that’? I too, as well as my dear disapprovers, ask that question—though with a built-in expectation, I must admit, of justification.

Because after all, minuscule though every individual, every ‘self’, is, he/she/it is an object through which life is being expressed, and leaves some sort of contribution to the world. The majority of human beings leave their genes embodied in other human beings, other things they have made, everyone things they have done: they have taught or tortured, built or bombed, dug a garden or chopped down trees, to that our whole environment, cities, farmland, deserts – the lot! – is built of contributions, useful of detrimental, from the innumerable swarm of selfs preceding us, to which we ourselves are adding our grains of sand. To think our existence pointless, as atheists are supposed by some religious people to do, would there be absurd; instead, we should remember that it does make its almost invisible but real contribution, either to usefulness or harm, which is why we should try to conduct it properly…

What dies is not a life’s value, but the worn-out (or damaged) container of the self, together with the self-awareness of itself: away that goes into nothingness, with everyone else’s…. The difference between being and non-being is both so abrupt and so vast that it remains shocking even though it happens to every living thing that is, was, or ever will be. (What Henry James was thinking of when he called death ‘distinguishes’, when it is the commonest thing in life, I can’t imagine – though the poor old man was at his last gasp when he said it, so one ought not to carp.)

No doubt one likes the idea of ‘last words’ because they soften the shock. Given the physical nature of the act of dying, one has to suppose that most of the pithy ones are apocryphal, but still one likes to imagine oneself signing off in a memorable way, and a reason why I have sometimes been sorry that I don’t believe in God is that I shan’t, in fairness, be able to quote ‘Dieu me pardonnerai, c’est son metier’ [God will forgive me; it’s his job], words which have always made me laugh, and which, besides, are wonderfully sensible. As it is, what I would like to say is: ‘It’s all right. Don’t mind not knowing.’ And foolish though it may be, I have to confess that I still hope the occasion on which I have to say it does not come very soon.